New Bird in the wild

My favourite email application have released an alpha of their latest version, Thunderbird 3. I’ve used Thunderbird for a few years now, one of the softwares that I deal with as part of my day job runs on an Access database back end and as we sometimes email the databases around we cant use Outlook as Outlook 2003 decides that you arent allowed to open it in case it is a virus (you know that makes sense for Microsoft to restrict one of their own file types). So myself along with most of my colleagues have moved away from Outlook to use Thunderbird.

Thunderbird 3 promises to have some interesting features added to the list.

• Tabbed messaging - similar to tabbed browsing. Allowing new messages to be opened in tabs rather than multiple screens. Users of the new version of Yahoo Mail will be quite familiar with this.

• Use of the Geko 1.9 rendering - same rendering engine as the soon to be fully released Firefox 3, its quicker and has a smaller memory footprint that it’s predecessors.

• Better support for Lightning the add on version of the Sunbird project. An add on I like personally but always appeared a little unstable in Thunderbird 2.

• Integration with the address book on Mac OS, definitely something I will find useful now I have multiple Macs to consider.

If you decide to download it and try it out, be warned that it is a very early release so you should expect crashes, conflicts and unexpected issues to pop up often. Not a test for the faint hearted me thinks.

With the initial bugs and issues the code name Shredder could well be a true description of what it will do to your Thunderbird profile. Lets just hope that the future development releases aren’t called Rocksteady, Bebop or Krang.

Posted by Andy May 2008

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