Mozilla Releases First Thunderbird 5.0 ‘Rapid Release’ Beta

I’m oblivious to how it took me a full week to realize this, but last Thursday, Mozilla posted the first “rapid release” beta of its Thunderbird e-mail/messaging client. That’s right… “rapid release” isn’t just affecting the Firefox Web browser, but Thunderbird as well, which means its versioning scheme has also been accelerated. If it follows suit with Firefox, that means Thunderbird will be treated to four “major” version releases annually.

This first release is a bit odd, however, as Thunderbird 4.0 is being skipped, making this current beta 5.0b1. The reasoning for this is that both Firefox and Thunderbird are based on Mozilla’s “Gecko” engine, and one of the rules of the company’s versioning scheme is that the version of the product must match the Gecko version it is based on. As Gecko’s development branch is currently at 5.0, so are Firefox and Thunderbird.

There’s not a lot “new” per se with 5.0, but a load of improvements have been made. First, a revamped add-on and extension manager has been introduced, which looks good. When accessed, a new tab is opened and the add-on section is presented. Here, you can browse what extensions are installed, and of course go and search for new ones. This is the same area where themes and plugins are managed. This is a major improvement, in my opinion, over managing all of this in a small pop-up.

With 3.0, a far improved account creation tool was introduced, and for popular email services, it worked like a charm. In 5.0, that’s been revised to be even simpler. If Thunderbird recognizes the e-mail domain and can set things up without you, all you will need to do is type in your name, e-mail address, password, and then choose whether to use IMAP or POP3. After giving it a quick test, I can say that it’s never been easier to setup your e-mail in Thunderbird.

In addition to those improvements, others include the ability to move tabs around and even detach them, attachment sizes can be displayed next to the name, a new trouble-shooting page has been introduced, and so have new Mac 32/64-bit builds. PowerPC Mac users will be left in the dark going forward, as it seems no future Thunderbird version will support that platform.

You can download the beta below, but be warned, few extensions will work out of the box. If that concerns you, or you are looking for total stability, it’s recommended to wait until the final release.