Mozilla Messaging has released the first alpha of Shredder email client (or better known as Thunderbird 3.0). This version of Thunderbird uses the same Gecko 1.9 engine, which powers Firefox 3. This means, you’ll get the same performance improvements which were built into Firefox 3.
Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 features tabs for messages. Instead of opening messages in new Windows, Thunderbird 3.0 lets you open them in new tabs, just like Firefox. I find this really amazing because it will help me cut down the clutter and same some screen real estate.
You’ll also notice a shiny new Add-on Manager, which resembles a lot like Firefox 3’s Add-on manager. When first opened, it will show you the list of recommended add-ons. Breakpad crash reporter replaces the old crash reporter in this version. For Mac users, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application and can read data from Mac OS X’s Address Book.
Lightning Calendar add-on was supposed to be integrated, but it hasn’t been integrated in this release. Hopefully, we’ll see Lightning in future versions of Thunderbird 3.0. At this point, we can’t consider Thunderbird to be almost stable because many features are yet to be added and bugs are left to be weeded out.
Download Shredder Alpha 1 | Release Notes
[Via: Mozilla Links]
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wrote, on May 15th, 2008
For some reason it crashes for me. I think its something to do with my system though.
wrote, on May 16th, 2008
Gecko in Linux is a nightmare. Believe me. Its kinda slow. Webkit-based Konqueror is better.
wrote, on May 17th, 2008
Am a huge fan of Firefox and Thunderbird. Am going to upgrade asap!
wrote, on June 14th, 2008
I haven’t used Thunderbird yet… what advantages over Outlook does it have?
wrote, on August 1st, 2008
At this stage Thunderbird is somewhere between Outlook and Outlook Express. For the average Outlook Express user Thunderbird offers few advantages “out of the box”, but by installing some of the numerous add-ons (e.g. the Lightning add-on for calendaring) it can become much more powerful than OE.
Thanks to the add-ons TB can come close to Outlook in terms of the “list” of features, although most of these features would not be as powerful as in Outlook.
The greatest disadvantages compared to Outlook at this time would be the lack of groupware functionality as supported by the Exchange server for Outlook and device sync (although there are free as well as commercial add-ons addressing the latter issue).
But hey, it’s free and seems that now some good development work is taking place!
wrote, on August 22nd, 2008
Extensions development documentation needs to be enhanced much more! I was doing Address Book add-ons for MS Outlook several years ago already, but still have troubles with easy samples to follow for Thunderbird.