Today we have, for your emailing pleasure, a brand new Thunderbird release, Thunderbird 0.9. Scott, David, te QA team and others have put a lot of hard work into this release and it really shows.
If you're a Thunderbird user (or a Mozilla suite user) I think you're definitely going to enjoy this new release.
My favorite new feature is the "saved search folders" (formerly known as "virtual folders.") This feature allows you to perform a search on your messages and save that search as a folder. Every time you select that folder, you see the results of the search as if it was a discreet mailbox. I've replaced all of my IMAP folders and message filters with virtual folders. If you liked "message views" this really takes it to the next level.
You can also find a new "grouping" feature that's gonna make a lot of people happy I'm sure. To see how this one works, just sort your messages by any one of your sorts (I use date) and hit the letter "g" on your keyboard or use View -> Sort by -> Group by sort.
Thunderbird 0.9 kicks serious butt. Get it!
Also available today is our (hopefully) final testing release candidate for Firefox 1.0. If all goes well with this testing release, we'll be on schedule for a November 9 final release (that's next week!!!) We're well past the point of new features so there isn't a lot of flashy new work to test in this candidate build, but we do have some areas where we took bug fixes and we really could use your help making sure we didn't break anything.
You can find all the details over at Ben Goodger's Inside Firefox weblog.
The user agent string says rv:1.7.5 ... Did we just skip a number? ;-)
Good to see some new features! It seems to me saved search folders would be much more usefull if Thunderbird supported more than 5 labels (and multiple labels per email, a la Gmail or Outlook categories). Or am I missing something?
asa,
If I understand you correctly, you are now storing all of your e-mails in one giant inbox folder, and solely using Tb 0.9's virtual folders to organize your e-mails. Is that correct? If so, isn't that rather inefficient? How many e-mails are we talking about? How long does it take Tb to search through that many every time you click a folder? What if you want to log in to your IMAP server from a different client or through a web interface?
I'm curious. :) If you have time to explain in a little more detail, I'd appreciate it.
pity that the group feature doesn't work on search folders, otherwise great stuff!
Asa, If You Like This New Feature - Saved Searches - And Also Mention Message Views Could You Please Explain What's The Difference In Usage. Are There Any Functional Differences Or Was It Planned As Two UI Abstractions For The Same Thing In Order To Test Them In The Field And Then Drop One That'll Be Less Popular?
Thank You.
Asa, do you think https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259429 ("Software Update does not request proxy authentication and fails") should be a Firefox 1.0 blocker? IMHO, it's a big problem in corporate intranets! It seems to get overlooked in a huge pile of "blocking-aviary-1.0?" requests, though...
I notice that RC2 still uses the original Firefox logo instead of the revised, pointier-haired one shown on SpreadFirefox and other places. This is true in the program icon, the install wizard splash screen, and the about box logo. Also, the about box still displays the older tag line, "the browser, reloaded" instead of "take back the web."
Are there plans to update these elements before the release? Consistency would help strengthen the visual identity.
jhalderm, are you sure? It seems to be updated for me.
Oops, my mistake about the About box, but the Setup wizard graphic and program icon (on XP) still haven't been updated.