Mozilla fires out the first Thunderbird 5 beta

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Mozilla has released the first beta of Thunderbird 5, its next generation email messaging client.

Mozzarella's popular open source Thunderbird email client has been slipped into the outfit's rapid release schedule, meaning that, as with the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird releases will be fast tracked, avoiding years of development time. Mozilla has said that it will skip version 4 altogether in order to align it with Gecko's versioning scheme.

Apart from Mozilla's decision to skip a major version number, Thunderbird 5 features a new addon manager and extension management API. Mozilla says that the user interface for the addon manager will change before the final release. For Mac users there will be 32-bit and 64-bit Universal binaries, however Thunderbird 5 will drop support for Mac systems running on PowerPC processors.

At present Thunderbird 5 looks similar to the tabbed interface found in Thunderbird 3. Mozilla says that there are interface tweaks such as being able to reorder tabs as with Firefox. Given that this is just the first beta, it's likely that more adjustments will be made before the final release.

As usual with such a major release, Mozilla warns that some plug-ins and addons might not work with Thunderbird 5. It suggests that users contact the add-on developer so that they can get things in order before Mozilla decides to release Thunderbird 5.

Mozilla's rapid release schedule has the Firefox 5 final release set for later this month. If Mozilla is pegging Thunderbird 5 with that, then its final version will also be frozen around 21 June, however the really final public release date might be a few weeks after that. µ