Instantbird 1.3 released with Twitter and IRC improvements

Improvements to Twitter and IRC support are the highlights of the latest update to the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client. When using Twitter in Instantbird 1.3, the user's own description is now displayed above the timeline and can be easily edited. All users mentioned in a Tweet when replying are now included in the reply, making Instantbird work in the same way as the Twitter web site.

IRC users will find that long messages are now sent as multiple parts instead of being cut off when they exceed the limit. SASL authentication has also been added as this is required for some IP ranges or when using Tor and connecting to Freenode.

When mentioned in a chat, version 1.3 of Instantbird now highlights users' nicknames
Source: Instantbird The functionality of the "Show Nick" add-on has been integrated into Instantbird so that users' nicknames are now highlighted when mentioned in chat; this feature can be disabled if required. The new stable release also adds support for two Russian social networks (Odnoklassniki and VK (VKontakte)), fixes Twitter and XMPP connection issues, and includes various accessibility improvements.

Version 1.3 of Instantbird is based on Mozilla's 16.0.2 release of the platform used by Firefox and Thunderbird. The update also upgrades the libpurple library to version 2.10.4. The developers point out that version 1.3 will be the final release to include support for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and PowerPC-based Macs, as the next Mozilla platform update, 17, no longer supports them.

A detailed list of changes and improvements can be found in the release notes and in the change log. Version 1.3 of Instantbird is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's site. Instantbird is made available under the GPLv2, however, most of the source code is also licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

(crve)