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Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep
Well that was cleverly written :)
But tabbed email sounds interesting. It makes text editors, web browsers and many other apps so much better and makes so much sense for email application that I'm thinking why didn't Thunderbird have it before.
One thing I would surely like to see in email clients however - the gmail like threaded conversation view. It's just so much better and nicer to use, but still many email applications tend to have the plain-list-of-messages view.
because hell just froze over. First we get Chrome for Linux, then Thunderbird 3. What next, Duke Nukem Forever?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've been using Thunderbird 3 in beta for the last few months on an ubuntu system. TB 3 doesn't look dramatically different than TB 2, but the performance difference is *enormous*. TB 2 would crash frequently, it would periodically use all resources while it did heaven knows what, and Gmail IMAP was a disaster.
TB 3 is responsive, hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software. My hat is off to the Thunderbird team.
Every single time I see this discussion, someone pipes up to say "but thunderbird DOES do threads!".
That it does. And that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand.
Conversation view as provided by gmail gives you a single page for each entire conversation AND it inserts your replies online as appropriate.
There's several other features that make conversation view work so well, but you'll have to actually try gmail to understand what we are talking about.
One of the early releases I downloaded had the amusing "feature" of downloading every message in the background - not just headers, full messages, with attachments. According to the bug report, this was intentional, so that your folders would be accessible without being connected to the network, but it never seemed to know where to stop. It was *constantly* and repeatedly downloading messages, and ate 40 some-odd gigs before I noticed it and went back to 2.
--riney
I have been a Thunderbird user for as long as it's been around (and before it was "Thunderbird"), and I thought I would be one forever. Even once I started using Gmail for my personal email, I thought I'd need Thunderbird for my work stuff. But, you know, the university started offering hosted Gmail, and I decided to try it... and, months later, I don't miss T-bird at all.
Thing is, I was one of the hold-outs. While quite a few staff and faculty here are still on desktop email, almost all of our students have preferred web mail for quite a few years now - even when the only web-based option was that gosh-awful "Webpine" (Hey! Here's a great idea! Let's use our awful, counter-intuitive, ugly Pine command line program as a design template for a new web-based email client!). So I wonder for how much longer any desktop email programs will even be considered relevant.
#DeleteChrome
That seems quite an important extension - any idea when (or if) it will be supported by TB3?
To me, it seems like an error of judgement to mainstream release a new version when key addons have not been satisfactorily updated. For the likes of Lightening, it isn't just eye-candy... and, for many, I suspect, breaking existing (addon) functionality will be unacceptable.
That said, I'm looking forward to 'conversation' view - and I've craved an improved address book for years... though what I saw when I last took a peek at the Beta wasn't much better than in TB2.
You should try one of these:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/
I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.
Lightning isn't ready yet, it's 1.0 release is lagging behind TB 3.0. You can use the current nightly builds and they should work with Thunderbird 3. They're marked as Lightning 1.0B1pre. You can grab a nightly here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html#nightly
They said they're basically at 1.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate status and hope to have the official 1.0 Beta 1 release out within a couple weeks, at least according to the Mozilla Calendar blog. Details are in the Mozilla Calendar Blog (currently offline):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/
We're going to stick with recommending Thunderbird 2.0 for a little bit on PortableApps.com because Lightning isn't ready, and it is (arguably) the most important Thunderbird extension. And recommending nightlies to regular users is a bad idea.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc