Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 5.0

Last week saw the release of Mozilla’s latest Web browser, Firefox 5, while this week, e-mail lovers get treated to a fresh Thunderbird release, also versioned 5. “What happened to 4???” Great question, but one that’s easily answered. The ‘rapid release’ schedule that Mozilla created for Firefox and its back-end Gecko also applies to Thunderbird, and because Mozilla would rather keep its Gecko-based offerings at the same version, Thunderbird 4 was effectively skipped.

According to the release notes, Mozilla has implemented over 390 platform fixes to improve both stability and security, and as a result, the program should experience a faster start-up and response. After spending a couple of minutes with it, I can honestly say I already notice some of the speed improvements. I use IMAP for my e-mail, and juggling messages is usually slow, but with 5 I find things to be much smoother.

As mentioned earlier in a quick look at the beta, the setup process has been made easier. If you use a popular e-mail service with known settings, Thunderbird should handle most of the configuration by itself. I’m a Gmail user, and the setup process couldn’t have been much easier. I’d expect the same could be said for other leading services, such as Yahoo! and Hotmail.

To help make trouble-shooting easier, there’s a new page that lists all of the important information about your configuration, so that if you go to the forums for help, you should have all of what’s needed for a fix right at your fingertips.

The add-ons section has also experienced a major revamp. In lieu of a simple pop-up, the add-on page resides in its own tab, allowing you lots of room to search and browse. At the current time, it’s not quite clear how many of these add-ons is Thunderbird 5 compatible. The only one I tried, the mega-popular Lightning calendar manager, was not compatible.

There have been a multitude of other minor tweaks made, so I’d recommend hitting up the release notes page for more information. If the Thunderbird site isn’t updated to 5.0 by the time this is posted, you can grab the the install here. If you are running a bunch of add-ons in your TB 3, it’s highly recommended you wait to upgrade, since you likely won’t have them right away with 5.