Windows 8 and Thunderbird first looks

Posted on September 15, 2011

I just wanted to post a quick follow up to my Firefox on Windows 8 post on how Thunderbird works with screenshots.

As with Firefox and other applications, as soon as you install Thunderbird it shows up as a Tile in the metro interface.

Clicking on it exits the tablet metro interface and goes into the old interface and launches Thunderbird.

One important thing is that if you click on a mailto: link in Internet Explorer it won’t launch the default mail client. Instead it prompts with this error:

Windows Internet Explorer
Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed.

Here’s a screenshot of that error message:

I assume once this registration problem is fixed it’ll launch the Desktop mode and then launch the email client. It would be nice to have a metro interface for Thunderbird as well.

Perhaps even a metro style compose email window application only for when a user is browsing in tablet full screen mode and they click to send an email with their default email client.


  • Bug 686836 - Launching default email client in Windows 8 results in error