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get off Thunderbird beta on a Mac

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by Stans

ron.harstad
ron.harstad
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macOS Big Sur 11.5.2. I've tried to help for 6-8 years now, using Thunderbird betas, now 95.0b.3, upgrading, and allowing reports to go to developers. The last couple upgrades are very frequently hanging, making me force quit Thunderbird; often hanging again when I restart Thunderbird. This can happen anywhere: I click on the icon to check for new messages, I am simply typing composing an outgoing email; I clear a folder of deleted emails...

I have found nothing on help pages that tells what to do to be able to replace the beta version with the latest regular version ON A MAC. I have tried to imitate the instructions for a Windows machine (which were hard to find), multiple times, without success.

macOS Big Sur 11.5.2. I've tried to help for 6-8 years now, using Thunderbird betas, now 95.0b.3, upgrading, and allowing reports to go to developers. The last couple upgrades are very frequently hanging, making me force quit Thunderbird; often hanging again when I restart Thunderbird. This can happen anywhere: I click on the icon to check for new messages, I am simply typing composing an outgoing email; I clear a folder of deleted emails... I have found nothing on help pages that tells what to do to be able to replace the beta version with the latest regular version ON A MAC. I have tried to imitate the instructions for a Windows machine (which were hard to find), multiple times, without success.

Modified by James

All Replies (3)

Stans
Stans
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Post the link to the instructions you're trying to imitate and what exactly you're doing on your end.

ron.harstad
ron.harstad Question owner
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That probably would have been a good idea. When it didn't work, I didn't keep track of the instructions list. It was, at any rate, far from clear what Mac instruction would be the equivalent of several of the Windows instructions.

Stans
Stans
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There's two ways that you could go about it:

A. Start from scratch with a new blank profile and the latest stable release. This is the cleanest option and ensures everything is as should be, avoiding a lot of head scratching trying to figure out what broke.

B. Retain your old/current profile that was used by TB beta and just downgrade it. This is a shortcut, and while it should work just fine in theory, things may not turn out so well in practice. It's worth a shot though, and will save you plenty of reconfiguration if it works out.

I doubt you would be asking if you wished to take option A, so here's what you would do:

1. Uninstall Thunderbird beta. I assume you know how to uninstall an app on your Mac. 2. Install latest stable TB. 3. Launch stable TB via the terminal, using the --allow-downgrade command-line option. You only need to do this once. Subsequent launches of TB should be done normally. This means you need to know the full path of TB's launcher. Typically, that would be

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin

so in Terminal, you would run:

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin --allow-downgrade

Modified by Stans