Final Thunderbird 5 beta arrives for testing

The Mozilla Messaging development team has announced the release of a second public beta for version 5.0 of Thunderbird, the project's next major release. According to the Mozilla Releases Wiki, Thunderbird 5 Beta 2 will be the last development version before the final release on 28 June.

Compared to the 3.1.x branch, Thunderbird 5 will be a major update to the open source news and email client that is based on the same Gecko browser engine as Firefox 5. It includes a new Add-ons Manager and Extension management API, as well as a new troubleshooting information page to help support users and diagnose problems.

Thunderbird 5 Beta 2 on Mac OS X Other changes include updates to the user interface, support for displaying attachment sizes next to attachments, default plug-in support in RSS feeds and various enhancements to Tabs, which can now be reordered and dragged to different windows. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

Details about this latest beta can be found in the release notes. Thunderbird 5 Beta 2 is available to download in 44 languages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's Thunderbird Beta web page.

Thunderbird binaries are released under the Mozilla Thunderbird End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. The latest stable release of Thunderbird is version 3.1.11, a maintenance and security update from earlier this week.

See also:

• Mozilla releases Firefox 5, a report from The H.

(crve)