Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 available now

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Mozilla, Open Source

Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 available now

by Christina Warren May 14th 2008

The first alpha release of Thunderbird 3, the open source mail client built on the Gecko rendering engine (what Firefox and all other Mozilla products use), is now available as a developer preview. The Mozilla Messaging team has named this release "Shredder a1" to signify that this release is early, buggy and should NOT be used in a production environment. Mozilla is aiming this release at testers and developers and we don't recommend non-adventurous users taking the program out for a spin.

As the release notes point out, Shredder Alpha 1 is built on Gecko 1.9, the engine running Firefox 3.

Some other highlights:

New add-on manager that allows direct installation of Thunderbird add-ons and customizations
Mac OS X version is a native Cocoa application
Improved message searching

Again, be aware that this is a developer preview and is certainly not ready for prime time. We had issues getting IMAP or POP support working with any of our Google Apps accounts on the OS X version of Shredder Alpha 1 and the app was kind of crashy. Still, we were impressed with what we could see and look forward to future developments.

If you feel ready to give the newest alpha a try, you can download it for your platform of choice here.

[via Mozilla Links]

Tags: email, mozilla, thunderbird

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dagur said 7:39AM on 5-15-2008

I appreciate all the work that's being done under the hood but I'm still a little disappointed in the lack of new features.

Stuart Halliday said 4:00PM on 5-17-2008

Me too.

As yet it is still impossible to get Thunderbird to sort a folder to descending and threaded by default.

Every time I have to alter my TB set up I've got to put up with TB insisting to re-sort my 50 folders to Ascending!

Seemingly they 'forgot' to add sorting to the range of configurable options in Gecko despite people like myself submitting bug reports.

Christopher Sinclair said 1:34AM on 7-02-2008

I don't know if you genuinely are unable to find the solution for yourself or you are lazy. Anyway, if you would like to change the default sort order go to the advanced configuration settings, find mailnews.default and change the sort order from 1 to 2

Christopher Sinclair said 1:39AM on 7-02-2008

Also, why is there no option in the comments for people to link (their name) to their own websites? I am happy to comment to help people out, but it would be nice to also have the option of linking to my website without posting it in the actual comment.

http://blogger-off.com

*I know this comment has nothing to do with the story above. Feel free to delete it if you think it is irrelevant.

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