Fixing Mozilla Thunderbird Icon in Unity, Docky, GNOME Do and Indicator

Annoyed by the low-resolution icon that comes with Thunderbird in Ubuntu? At least it looks butt-ugly on Unity menu, Docky dock or GNOME Do dialog.

Of course you could just edit /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop and make its Icon property to point to a higher resolution one, but that’ll mess up the icon shown on the indicator (if you’re using the great Thunderbird indicator plugin).

For proper replacement download XPM version of the Thunderbird icon from Mozilla (right click the “Raw file” link and “Save link as” using thunderbird.xpm as the file name). And then execute few commands, which namely remove the crappy PNG icon and replace it with the XPM version.

sudo rm /usr/share/pixmaps/thunderbird.png
sudo mv ~/Downloads/thunderbird.xpm /usr/share/pixmaps/thunderbird.xpm
sudo chown root:root /usr/share/pixmaps/thunderbird.xpm

After that everything works as they’re supposed to and I see no ugly pixels!

Ham and Eggs