How to open the profile manager on macOS after the update

tl;dr

Since the release of Mozilla Thunderbird version 128, nicknamed “Nebula”, the CLI command to open the profile manger on macOS has changed as the binary was renamed.

It is now as follows:

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

Context

Thunderbird has long supported having multiple profiles on the same machine, similar to its brother Firefox. Even allowing opening multiple at the same time.

Most users never find the feature, as it is either buried in the troubleshooting pages of the application or behind terminal CLI command flags, most never venture to.

Opening the profile manager is documented in the Mozilla knowledge base and is straightforward if you follow the steps to the letter: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-thunderbird-profiles

The CLI command for the terminal has long been the following:

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

Thunderbird "Nebula"

Source: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/07/welcome-to-thunderbird-128-nebula/

Version 128 of Thunderbird introduces a multitude of things:

• the Rust programming languages in parts of the program to increase performance and stability
• interface changes to better usability
• the introduction of a monthly release channel: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/thunderbird-128-nebula-faq

In the past, the development team would only have enough manpower to have a new release roughly every year. With more resources, the team is adding a "Release" update channel which will receive updates every for weak, following the example of Firefox.

The annual release cycle will be named "Extended Support Release (ESR)", each version receiving about 15 months of security updates after the first release.

Opening the profile manager with Thunderbird 128

With all of these changes under the hood, there are some unexpected surprises here and there as well.

I found one with accessing the profile manager.

The binary seems to have been renamed from thunderbird-bin to just thunderbird, making the new full path: /Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird

With the CLI flat -P the full CLI command looks like this:

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

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