Leslie Franke

Like Mozilla Firefox, much of the genius in Mozilla Thunderbird is in its extensibility. While the wide range of excellent extensions for Firefox usually receive all of the attention, Thunderbird has many excellent extensions to bring additional features to the email client. The extensions that you will find most useful depend largely on your needs but, in honor of Thunderbird 2 being released (see my review in this post), here are some of the more useful ones.

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Mozilla has just released version 2.0 of their Thunderbird email client. Thunderbird is a free, desktop email program that features a small footprint, customization, and some smart ways to stop junk mail. New features include an new look & feel, message tagging, improved and savable searches, and easy integration with web based email accounts such as Gmail.

You can read my review of Thunderbird 2 here. (more…)

Recently Mozilla released of a release candidate of their Thunderbird 2.0 email client. Thunderbird is a free, desktop email program that features a small footprint, customization, and some smart ways to stop junk mail. Several improvements and changes have been made to the latest version of Thunderbird that are worth mentioning including folder views, message tagging, and message alerts.

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One of the primary reason why Mozilla Firefox has grown in popularity is the extensibility it provides through the means of add-ons (extensions). With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Microsoft has provided the ability to create and use IE specific add-ons to enhance the browser’s functionality. Unlike almost all of Firefox’s add-ons, many IE7 add-ons, though, are not free. That being said, there are numerous free IE7 add-ons that can increase productivity and make the IE7 browsing experience more pleasurable.

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After years of development K-Meleon has been recently updated to version 1. K-Meleon is a Windows only web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine and is designed to be light, fast, and highly customisable. K-Meleon now has several new features including autocomplete in the URL bar, find bar, and new preference panels. It uses the same codebase as Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6.

There has been very little buzz about K-Meleon, it seems, even from the developers themselves as the K-Meleon website is not entirely updated to show the new version. I can remember using it when Firefox was still called Phoenix. K-Meleon is still a fast browser that is a good fit for users of older Windows operating sytems as it is less resource intensive. It can be download from here.

Mozilla has recently released a preview of its 2.0 Thunderbird email client. Like the upcoming new version of Mozilla Firefox, the changes in this Thunderbird release are not revolutionary but welcome improvements.

The first change revolves around a new tagging system to mark messages. This feature replaces Thunderbird’s current concept of labels. Thunderbird 2.0 allows you to mark messages with user-definable tags, the current rage on the web. You can define as many tags has you want and apply as many tags as you want to each message. A second new feature is several new folder views. Thunderbird 2.0 will add three new views: a view that only shows folders with unread messages, a view that shows recently accessed folders, and a view that shows your favorite folders.

Two changes were also made to Thunderbird that resemble features found in Firefox. Thunderbird now has a find-as-you-type search feature, though it only works on the contents of the currently displayed folder. Secondly, extensions and themes are now managed through one window called Add-ons.

One thing missing from this release of Thunderbird is tabbed browsing. I, at one time, tried a modified build of Thunderbird that included tabbed browsing. Like with Firefox, once you use tabbed browsing there is no going back. Hopefully we will see this soon in Thunderbird likewise.

Users have reported that Thunderbird runs faster both in startup and when retrieving messages. Additionally, it appears to be very stable. Remember though, this is pre-release software and you should make a backup of Thunderbird before installing this new version. Secondly, remember that most extensions built for Thunderbird 1.5 will not work in 2.0 preview releases without modifications.

I have updated the Mozilla Thunderbird Cheat Sheet to include a couple of suggestions that have been made. Available in the following formats:

• PDF format
• HTML format

Note: The location of the PDF has changed.