As mentioned earlier, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 has been released and I would recommend the product to anyone. A word of caution when installing the new version of Thunderbird if you have an existing version on your system. Nasty things can happen, as has been documented on the MozillaZine Forum, if you just to an install of the new version into the same directory as the old one.

Below are the simple steps I took to succesfully upgrade to Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.

1. Ran a backup of my Thunderbird Profile. You can find the folder location for your operating system here.

2. Uninstalled my previous version of Thunderbird.

3. Installed a clean version of Thunderbird 1.5

This procedure is simple to do but is a complete lack of communication on the part of Mozilla. If you read way down into the release notes you will find a line that says, “Prior to installing Thunderbird 1.5, please ensure that the directory you’ve chosen to install into is clean and doesn’t contain any previous Thunderbird installations.” It is not part of the Windows instructions on the release page on how to install Thunderbird nor is any warning mentioned if you just do a download of Thunderbird from the product’s page (as most users will do).

Hopefully, with the new software update tool that automatically downloads updates in the background, this problem will not occur again. Never the less it is little things like this that could prevent Thunderbird from reaching the critical masses.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.