Mozilla squirts out Thunderbird 3
Offline world is still relevant, y'know
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Mozilla Messaging finally splashed Thunderbird 3 onto the interwebs yesterday.
The outfit’s free alternative to Microsoft’s Outlook was made available as a download for Windows, Mac and Linux users on Tuesday. It comes less than a week after Mozilla pushed out a second release candidate version of the email client, in a move to fix a memory-hogging bug in Thunderbird 3.
The latest iteration of Thunderbird comes with a number of much-needed improvements that include IMAP folder synchronisation, filtered search, tabbed email, and an overhaul to the mail client’s message archiving feature.
Mozilla Messaging, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of open source browser maker Mozilla, has additionally given Thunderbird’s setup wizard a makeover to improve the new account setup process.
Mozilla is also bigging up “better integration with Gmail” with the release of Thunderbird 3, which is based on the org’s Gecko 1.9.1 engine.
"Thunderbird 3 continues its history of giving users the most flexibility and control to get through their email faster and have it simply work the way they want it to plus many of the new features take the best of web mail and bring it to the desktop," said Mozilla Messaging boss David Ascher.
Which is kind of an interesting statement, given that Microsoft and Google are increasingly heading in the opposite direction by pushing for more email to be delivered in the cloud.
Mozilla has full release notes here and the client can be downloaded here. ®
COMMENTS
@AC 13:04
It's especially useful on a system booting multiple OSes - you can keep the mail store on a separate partition accessible by each OS, then have a copy of Thunderbird for each OS pointing at it.
I don't expect customers to be testing a final release
What I find laughable is software that is released as a final version when in actual fact it is of alpha or beta quality. It's not just Thunderbird that this applies to. There have been a few questionable releases of OpenSuse over the years (broken printing or CD mounting etc.) and of KDE. All software has bugs. However, when bugs are highly visible or quite detrimental to the most basic functionality then you do have to question the quality control process. Who is going to test the software? Well, as a professional developer and architect I don't expect my customers to be testing the software for me (to any extent) unless it is an agreed alpha or beta release trial. I expect developers and the QA dept to be responsible for that. Likewise I expect the Thunderbird team to ensure that moving from alpha to beta to RCs and to the final release has ironed out the showstopper bugs. Not being able to upgrade Thunderbird on Vista is a showstopper. If they'd tested this then they'd have eliminated it. If their test cases don't encompass doing an upgrade from version 2 directly then somebody isn't doing a decent job. Of course it's difficult, nay impossible, for test cases to cover every eventuality. But I'd have thought that upgrading from Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 to version 3 via the GUI menu on 64-bit Vista with mail folders not in the default location is a completely obvious test case to try out.
Thankfully version 3 works for me on OpenSuse 11.2 64-bit.
Perhaps
you should inform them that Thunderbird has this nifty feature that alerts you if you have forgotten an attachment.
Then you don't need to inform them again that they have forgotten an attachment, and so you wont get alerted to a "forgotten attachment"!
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