The final version of the desktop email client Thunderbird 5.0 has been released by Mozilla. The latest version of Thunderbird includes more than 390 improvements and performance enhancements that make Thunderbird more responsive, faster to start up and easier to use.
Mozilla decided to bump up the version of Mozilla Thunderbird to 5.0 from 3.1. Such a upgrade was meant to bring Thunderbird in line with the development status of Firefox, which has now reached version 5. Mozilla Thunderbird 5 promises to be a faster, more efficient and feature rich email client than its predecessor.
The latest version of Thunderbird has the following changes:
- More responsive and faster to start up and use
- Thunderbird is based on the new Mozilla Gecko 5 engine
- New Add-ons Manager
- Revised account creation wizard to improve email setup
- New Troubleshooting Information page
- Tabs can now be reordered and dragged to different windows
- Attachment sizes now displayed along with attachments
- Plugins can now be loaded in RSS feeds by default
- There are several theme fixes for Windows Vista and Windows 7
- Support for Mac 32/64 bit Universal builds (Thunderbird no longer supports PowerPC on Mac)
- Over 390 platform fixes that improve speed, performance, stability and security
With the streamlining of the release cycle with the Firefox browser come additional similarities. Thunderbird now sports the very same add-on manager that Mozilla added to the Firefox browser earlier. The big version jump from Thunderbird 3.1 to 5 will definitely render some addons incompatible, but it’s not a big problem, let’s wait!
The new version has not been publicly announced yet on the official Mozilla website, and Thunderbird users who are already running the program will not receive update notifications at this point in time.
On Ubuntu, you can install or upgrade to the latest version of ThunderBird by using ThunderBird Stable PPA
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install thunderbird
Try it now!