Mozilla releases Thunderbird 5.0

After skipping a 4.0 release altogether, the Mozilla developers have announced the arrival of version 5.0 of Thunderbird, the open source news and email client. The major update is the project's first since it adopted the same, somewhat controversial, rapid release model that Firefox recently adopted. This sees releases every six weeks and version numbers being a single integer similar to Google's Chrome development process.

Thunderbird 5.0 is based on the same Gecko layout engine as Firefox 5 and includes a new Add-ons Manager and Extension management API. There are also updates to the user interface and a revised account creation wizard and a new troubleshooting information page to help users support and diagnose problems.

Thunderbird 5.0 on Mac OS X Other changes include support for displaying attachment sizes next to attachments and default plug-ins support in RSS feeds to allow Flash and other content to be played in RSS views. Tabs have been enhanced and are now able to be reordered and dragged between Thunderbird windows. Thunderbird now natively supports 32- and 64-bit Intel-based Mac OS X systems but Mac OS X systems with PowerPC (PPC) processors are no longer supported.

Further details about the release, including a full list of new features and changes, can be found in the release notes. Thunderbird 5.0 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's web site. Existing users can upgrade using the built-in update tool.

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.

See also:

• New version of Thunderbird now available, a Mozilla Developer Center news post.
• Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1, a report from The H.

(crve)