Mozilla has been taking a little longer than I expected to complete Thunderbird 2 which is in the Pre-Beta stage right now. It has been that way for nearly two-months and Firefox 2 has already been released. I thought that Mozilla would have tried to push version 2 out for both Thunderbird and Firefox at the same time but that doesn’t look like it will be happening. 
The Thunderbird 2 roadmap was just updated a week ago and says that it should be released the first quarter of 2007. That still gives them plenty of time to throw in some features that haven’t yet made the nightly builds and it looks as though one of the features will be tabbed emails:
- Tools for organizing and managing e-mail
- Custom Folder Pane Views such as favorites, unread and recently used.
- Message Tagging
- Tabbed Messages
- Be Informative
- New Mail Alert Improvements
- Folder Summary Popups
- Help Fight Junk Mail
- Improve the current Bayesian based algorithm
- Token Store Pruning / Aging
I have been using the nightly releases of Thunderbird for quite awhile now and they are remarkably stable. I like the new Mail Alert but tabbed messages will no doubt be my favorite feature when they release it.
I do hope that Mozilla plans to release some updates to both Firefox and Thunderbird soon for applying the partial updates for the programs in Windows Vista. I recently decided to re-enable the User Account Control (UAC) because there aren’t too many things that I do anymore to initiate the annoying prompts. So I figured for the sake of security I would give it another shot. However, in order for Firefox or Thunderbird to apply the nightly updates I have to be running the programs as an administrator. I don’t mind receiving the UAC prompt each time I am updating either program but right now there is no such prompt and the update silently fails. I’m sure Mozilla will be fixing this soon I just hope that it is before the business launch of Vista at the end of November.
Thanks to “Jack of all Trades” for the tip!
off-topic
Ryan, can tips can be exchanged for comments in the all-stars scoreboard?
something like every 3 tips give you 50 comments and an ipod. or just an ipod. whatever you feel is right
in the [tech.cybernetnews.com] couple of months ago you can find links to a couple of bugs which suppose to create the Tabbed Messages features. but at this time, they still do not contain any news about it, regarding the new roadmap.
hopefully that will change, for the better, soon.
Hmmm…I was thinking a new car for every 3 tips but if you just want an iPod.
I never thought about incorporating the All-Star thing for tips but I definitely think it should. I’ll try and think up some scheme so that I can combine the comments/tips total to get an All-Star total. Great idea…thanks!
i’m also eagerly awaiting the release of t-bird 2.0.
i use gmail for almost everything, but i still initiate official work email using thunderbird.
I feel Mozilla has been neglecting Thunderbird in favor of Firefox. They see Firefox as their flagship app, and they want to ride it till they reach the masses. This also reflects on the development community’s preference to work on Firefox. They are the ones doing the actual coding, after all. Firefox is great but Mozilla should not abandon their other products in its wake. The browser wars may be bigger than the e-mail client wars, but that doesn’t make e-mail clients less important.
I hope Thunderbird 2 new mail notifier will be interactive like the one is with Outlook.
You know, a link to the road map would have been nice…
[mozilla.org]