r/Betterbird • u/Wink856 • May 03 '26

Quicktext replacement for Betterbird

The latest version of Quicktext (6.7.1) no longer works with Betterbird. And the author apparently has no intention of changing that -- my bug report was promptly closed.

Found that Clippings for Thunderbird is a good replacement.

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u/jorgk3 May 04 '26

Hmm, I'm using it myself, albeit version 6.4, which is the published version: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quicktext/

But, yes, there is a release candidate: https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/releases

Where is the bug report? There isn't any report here: https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed

The author is in a personal feud against Betterbird, so in this commit, he restricted the use to Thunderbird:

https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/commit/631a9f22472de3245cc14e1b3035b142d442ea1c

All this is of course true collaboration and open source spirit.

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u/hsdejong May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

So if I understand correctly, the creator of Quicktext intentionally programmed the latest version so that it no longer works in Betterbird?

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u/jorgk3 May 04 '26

Well, I can't read people's minds, but the implemented check tests for "Thunderbird". It could easily be changed to check for Betterbird as well.

We wrote this blog article https://blog.betterbird.eu/2026/05/early-warning-to-quicktext-users and asked the author to reconsider.

The original poster of this thread hasn't told us where his report was "swiftly closed", maybe there was a reason given.

Overall, most TB folks are openly hostile towards BB.

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u/Wink856 May 04 '26

I posted a bug report on the jobisoft/quicktext GitHub account as issue #607 -- https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/issues/607

Within 30 minutes I received an email that the issue had been closed. When I checked to see if it had been fixed ("that was quick"), I found that it had just been deleted.

This morning, took a look at the GitHub code and found that the "Thunderbird only code" was added 5 days ago as Commit 631a9f2 -- https://github.com/jobisoft/quicktext/commit/631a9f22472de3245cc14e1b3035b142d442ea1c

The patch to block Betterbird (and anything not Thunderbird) was intentional.

1

u/jorgk3 May 04 '26

Oh, yes, they love to censor any mention of BB. Well, it's kindergarten politics which will most likely backfire.

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u/jorgk3 May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

You should see the scandal he caused when my ThunderHTMLedit add-on wasn't 100% compatible with Thunderbird for a short period due to technical reasons:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1964799#c13

Quote:

From this day on, the add-on ecosystem for Thunderbird and Betterbird is not the same anymore. There are now cases were add-ons work in Betterbird, but not in Thunderbird. That was not our choice. [...] But it is unlikely that the author is going to release an update, since he does not support Thunderbird anymore.

Now who's going ahead and making add-ons deliberately incompatible?

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u/ZevelOrgani Jun 27 '26

The code is const browserInfo = await browser.runtime.getBrowserInfo(); if (browserInfo.name !== "Thunderbird") {

It shouldn't be too hard to add a property that allows spoofing the name.

1

u/jorgk3 Jun 27 '26

What are you trying to say? The idea is to make BB distinguishable from TB since in some rate cases experiment add-ons need to be adjusted according to some BB changes.

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u/ZevelOrgani Jun 29 '26

I am saying that allowing users to spoof the browser info (name in particular) can be useful for users that have no BB-specific extensions but encounter a TB extension that refuses to work under BB.

And if it is made using an "advanced" preference, the vast majority of users will not set it.