Mozilla Sunbird


Mozilla Sunbird is a discontinued free and open-source, cross-platform calendar application that was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, Sun Microsystems and many volunteers. Mozilla Sunbird was described as "... a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language." Announced in July 2003, Sunbird was a standalone version of the Mozilla Calendar Project.
It was developed as a standalone version of the Lightning calendar and scheduling extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey mail clients. Development of Sunbird was ended with release 1.0 beta 1 to focus on development of Mozilla Lightning., the “latest development version” of Sunbird was still 1.0b1 from January 2010, and no later version has been announced. Unlike Lightning, Sunbird no longer receives updates to its time zone database.

Sun contributions

Sun Microsystems contributed significantly to the Lightning extension project to provide users with a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Office by combining OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird/Lightning. Sun's key focus areas in addition to general bug fixing were calendar views, team/collaboration features and support for the Sun Java System Calendar Server. Since both projects share the same code base, any contribution to one is a direct contribution to the other.

Trademark issues and Iceowl

Although it is released under a MPL, MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license, there are trademark restrictions in place on Mozilla Sunbird which prevent the distribution of modified versions with the Mozilla branding.
As a result, the Debian project created Iceowl, a virtually identical version without the branding restrictions.

Release history

Gecko versionSunbird versionRelease dateSignificant changes
1.80.2February 4, 2005
1.9October 11, 2006Calendar storage moved from flat.ICS files to SQLite
1.9February 19, 2007Time zones updated for DST change
1.8.1June 27, 2007Moved to Gecko 1.8.1 for added stability and includes support for Google Calendar via an extension.
1.8.1October 25, 2007Cleaner user interface and additional functionality
1.8.1April 4, 2008International time zones, experimental offline support and task mode
1.8.1September 23, 2008
  • Events spanning days now have a visual indicator indicating them as connected events.
  • When reloading a remote calendar a progress indicator is now shown.
  • The so-called "minimonth" has been given a visual overhaul.
  • The calendar views have been given a visual overhaul.
  • CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers has been improved.
1.9.1April 2, 2010
  • Multiple alarms can be defined for one event.
  • CalDAV support is improved.
    • 1.9.1June, 2010