Mozilla issues final Thunderbird 3.1 release candidate

At the end of last week, Mozilla issued a second release candidate for version 3.1 of its open source Thunderbird email and news client, code named "Lanikai". According to the Mozilla developers, the latest development milestone is considered to be stable and it is expected to be the last release before the final version of Thunderbird 3.1 arrives "around mid-June".

Thunderbird 3.1 will be the next major release of the popular cross-platform email client and is based on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform. New features include the addition of a new quick filter toolbar and Saved Files Manager, and an updated migration assistant. Other notable changes include better Personas theme support, interface design changes and stability and memory improvements. Upgrading from version 2.x of Thunderbird has also been improved.

The second release candidate addresses several bugs, including a critical issue that caused it to crash on some Mac OS X systems. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes. Thunderbird 3.1 RC2 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. 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. The latest stable release is Thunderbird 3.0.4 from the end of March.

See also:

• Mozilla updates Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and older Firefox browsers, a report from The H.

(crve)