Catch a Glimpse of Mozilla’s E-Mail Future in Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1
It’s alive! Mozilla has released the first alpha version of its upcoming Thunderbird 3.0, the company’s next-generation e-mail application. We don’t suggest you rush out and download it unless you’re a true early adopter; this release isn’t stable and lacks many of the features planned for Thunderbird 3’s final release.
This alpha release is primarily intended to let Thunderbird fans know that the project is alive and well and the team is working hard on the next version of the open source e-mail client. It’s also the first product to emerge from the newest entity within the Mozilla organization, Mozilla Messaging. The company was spun off this past winter in order to give more attention to the Thunderbird project, which had long lived under the shadow of the much more successful Firefox browser.
The feature set looks promising. However, one the most anticipated features of Thunderbird 3 - integration with Lightning, an extension that adds calendar functionality - isn’t available yet.
The OS X version of Thunderbird 3 is now a native Cocoa app, meaning it can integrate with the Mac OS X address book, a much-requested feature. Unfortunately that functionality doesn’t appear to available by default yet either, but if you want to turn it on and test it out, Bryan Clark has posted some instructions.
The most interesting-looking feature that is part of this alpha release is the ability to open messages in tabs, which looks like a fantastic way to keep frequently needed messages easily at hand.
There are some other new enhancements, too, like a new add-ons manager similar to the one found in Firefox 3, and a much-improved search tool for finding text within messages.
Like the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3, the next version of Thunderbird will use the Gecko 1.9 engine, enabling it to take advantage of some of the memory and speed improvements coming in Firefox 3. The only downside is that Thunderbird 3 will require Windows 2000 or better. Sorry Win 98 holdouts, Thunderbird 3 isn’t in your future.
It does have a cool code-name, though: Shredder!
[via Mozilla Links]
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