Arun's Blog

Mozilla Messaging team has released the first alpha of Thunderbird 3.0 codenamed Shredder. It's built on Gecko 1.9 platform. Here are some of the new features in Thunderbird 3.0, according to Mozilla Messaging.

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from community add-ons website. This feature is similar to the feature in Firefox 3.0. Note that only few add-ons are compatible with this early alpha at the time of release, as add-on developers need to upgrade them.
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X's system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.

Installing Shredder Alpha 1 will overwrite your existing installation of Thunderbird on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. For all systems, you won't lose any of your messages or address books, but some of your extensions and other add-ons might not work until updates for them are made available. You can download the alpha 1 from here.