Thunderbird 6 Beta Released, New Logos Upcoming

Mozilla has released the first beta version of the upcoming Thunderbird 6 email desktop client. As you may know, Mozilla has moved Firefox to a rapid release process some time ago. This basically meant an accelerated development process with new versions of the browser every 18 weeks. Soon thereafter, the developers decided to move Thunderbird to that very same release process. This is why Thunderbird 5 has been released less than a month ago.

The first beta of Thunderbird 6 is not introducing new groundbreaking features into the email client. Most notable change in this release is support for Windows 7 jumplists, which are accessible via a right click on the Thunderbird icon on the Windows 7 taskbar.

There are only options to write a new message or to open the address bar. A list of the latest emails would be handy for instance.

Other changes mentioned on the announcement page are Microsoft Outlook importing fixes, working default mail client checks on newer Linux distributions and other unmentioned fixes. Again, nothing to get to excited about. Still, users who want to download the latest beta version can do so right now from the official beta release page. The Thunderbird 6 beta release is available in all languages and for all supported operating systems.

With the rapid release process in motion, it should not take longer than one and a half month before the final version of Thunderbird 6 is released by Mozilla Messaging.

In related news. Designer Sean Martell has published new concept logos for the Nightly and Aurora channels of the email client.

The names are not entirely correct though. You may know that Mozilla has decided to use different names for the Thunderbird Nightly, Aurora and Beta releases. The two logos that you see above might make they way into for the Daily and Earlybird channels. Well done and nicely looking, what do you think? (via)

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday July 21, 2011 -
Tags:Email, email client, thunderbird, thunderbird beta, windows software

Responses so far:

1. Lil_ndn says:

   July 21, 2011 at 12:23 am

   Hey Martin,

   Thanks for the heads up on T’bird 6.0 beta…The “right now” link is not a direct link to 6.0 down load page, however. Here’s where I found it:

   https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2011/07/20/thunderbird-beta-channel-new-update-available-2/

   Thanks for all the info and updates, you’re my official “go to” guy / site.
   Ride Safe Ride Free / FTW (Freedom Thru Wisdom)

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     July 21, 2011 at 12:51 am

     Upsa you are right. Guess they have not updated the page yet. The release is already available on the fot and mirror servers. And thanks for the compliment :)

     Reply
2. Frustrated says:

   July 21, 2011 at 12:31 am

   I hope TB 6 does not have the idotic Aero toolbar with no way of disabling it like TB 5 is. I re3verted back to 3.1.11 of TB

   Reply
3. RC says:

   July 21, 2011 at 4:57 pm

   they should really fix the mess that is TB5 default theme.

   Reply
4. Downgrade says:

   July 22, 2011 at 3:17 pm

   This beta was terrible!

   Reply
5. Gerhardt says:

   August 7, 2011 at 5:59 pm

   I still use Thunderbird 2.24 because I’m not satisfied with the GUI and the handling of the emails of the successor versions.

   Reply
6. Rogarema says:

   August 7, 2011 at 6:07 pm

   In my opinion, Thunderbird is an excellent open source email client that stands up to any comparison with competitive products. It’ god also for tone of emails, my emails from 2010 are 1.23 GByte. And he works!

   Reply