Thunderbird 9.0 Arrives, Via Mozilla's Rapid Release Cycle

by Sam Dean - Dec. 22, 2011Comments (0)

Mozilla has delivered the latest version 9.0 of its Thunderbird email and news client, a free and open source application that Windows, Mac and Linux users can take advantage of. You can get version 9.0 now, at this download site. Not everyone realizes that just as Mozilla has moved to a rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser, Thunderbird is being update much more rapidly than ever as well. Here are some of the enhancements in the latest version of Thunderbird.

As detailed in a post from Mozilla:

"The new Thunderbird, available in 51 different languages, is based on the Mozilla Gecko 9 engine and includes improvements to Personas, better keyboard support for handling attachments, several user interface enhancements, and a new opt-in system to send performance and usability data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Thunderbird."

In the past, some users have criticized Thunderbird for performance, but the Gecko 9 rendering engine should help with interface performance. Mozilla has also been working to fix a few security problems found in Thunderbird, and has reported success on that front. It's also worth looking into the many extensions you can use with Thunderbird, some of which we covered here.

Mozilla had making much noise about its Raindrop messaging experiment, which promised to offer dynamically flexible views for sifting email threads on all kinds of devices. A look at the Mozilla Labs page for Raindrop, though, shows that the project hasn't gone far. Thunderbird seems to remain the lynchpin of Mozilla's messaging strategy, and its presence as the default email engine in Ubuntu should bolster that focus.

You can find complete Release Notes for the latest version of Thunderbird here.