July 21, 2009
Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 shipped!
After a lot of hard work by a lot people, we've shipped Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 to the world. There are quite a few changes since the previous version; we hope you'll like them! They include:
- Tab functionality has improved significantly.
- There's a summary view that displays in the message pane when more than one message is selected, and the user experience is evolving to allow for more intuitive work with whole threads at a time.
- Thunderbird now notices properly configured mailing lists and offers various ways to respond to mails that include them.
- The folder pane offers a Smart Folders mode which combines special mailboxes (e.g. Inbox) from multiple accounts together.
- Better Gmail special folder and archive integration across all languages
Some of the biggest work in this release has happened behind the scenes, however, and will mostly be visible to extension developers. A large tab and message list refactoring has cleaned up a lot of old cruft, and many things should be quite a bit easier going forward, though existing extensions will need to adapt. This is all in preparation for upcoming UI changes to support the new GloDa search engine.
Our developer documentation is starting to come together. We'd very much appreciate developers who find issues to edit and improve the wiki pages, even if it's just by pointing out the mistakes in parens and not wordsmithing the perfect replacement text. Adding new questions for us to answer to the HowTos page is also a great way to help.
Two additional changes bear more explanation:
Beta 3 also includes a new mail account setup wizard, which can be reached from File -> New -> Mail Account (Quick Setup). After a user enters their account information, Thunderbird attempts to fetch details about how mail at that domain should be configured from mozillamessaging.com. It's important to note that the domain name part of your email address is the only information sent to Mozilla Messaging's servers, and that Thunderbird very much abides by the Mozilla privacy policy. If Thunderbird doesn't find relevant details, it falls back to some heuristics, described here in more detail.
The compact header mode has been removed. Part of the rationale for this was to simplify code so that we can do a better job maintaining it, and part was to free up bandwidth for us to do more work on the remaining message header. It's already clear to us that the beta 3 state has user-experience issues around vertical space and configurability, among other things, but we'll be addressing those before we ship Thunderbird 3. See my earlier blog post for more details as well as a link to source code for a prototype extension.
As with any beta, it's a work in progress, so there will be some rough edges, but we hope you'll enjoy the next step on the road to Thunderbird 3 (we're already working on beta 4).
Thanks to everyone in the community who has been part of making this release happen!
Posted by dmose at 4:30 PM | Comments (26)
July 17, 2009
Thunderbird 3.0b3 build 1 localized builds complete
Thanks to the good work of the Thunderbird localization team as well as Gozer on the builds, the localization repacks for the first release candidate of 3.0b3 have been completed.
Please check out the build for your locale if you have the chance. We're particularly looking for folks who use POP to fetch their mail to give these builds a good once-over. That said, we'd very much appreciate all the testing help we can get.
If you do find bugs while testing, please mark them as blocking bug 489128. Thanks!
Assuming no show-stoppers are found, we hope to be able to release Thunderbird 3.0b3 on Tuesday, July 21st.
Posted by dmose at 3:08 PM | Comments (1)