Another addition to the way conversations are displayed in Thunderbird is the Gmail Conversation View add-on. This add-on ports the way Gmail displays conversations to the Thunderbird email client. Each individual email is drawn with a border so that the computer user can distinguish them on first glance. The colored vertical lines are not needed in this view mode.

Installation of the add-on is unfortunately complicated. This can be attributed to the early experimental stage of the add-on above anything else. Gmail Conversation View requires the installation of either the Compact Header or the Customize Header Toolbar add-on.

Another step that is necessary (after installation of two of the add-ons) is the manual customization of the header toolbar in Thunderbird. This is done by right-clicking the email header and selecting customize. It is now important to drag and drop the button of the add-on – which is called View Full conversation – to the other buttons that are displayed in the email header.

A click on that new button will from now on change the view of that email from the standard Thunderbird view to the Gmail view. Those changes are temporary for now and gone as soon as the user moves away from that email conversation.

The developer has plans to extend the functionality. One interesting option would be to enable the Gmail conversation view mode permanently for all email conversations. Gmail Conversation View is compatible with all Thunderbird 3 versions. The latest version of the add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

There is no word yet on what we can expect from this release, since it is a alpha release I would not advise to make the change immediately from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. Word is that not all plugins and add-ons are working in Thunderbird 3. If you cannot wait to make the switch make sure you backup all your data before doing so.

I will wait until a final version of Thunderbird 3 has been posted or a portable version of it. I do not want to risk losing all my mails even if I have a backup.

One of the official sites states the following:

In order to elicit feedback on new feature ideas, and get early and frequent feedback from the tester community, we will be releasing several alpha and beta releases of Thunderbird.

These releases are not for production use, but for developers and testers to give us early feedback. To emphasize this point, these alpha releases are called Shredder — they do not represent the final state of any Thunderbird release, can contain significant bugs, and should be handled with appropriate care

A link to the release notes was posted on the same page:

Shredder Alpha 1 is built on top of the Gecko 1.9 platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 10,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

The main goals of this release is to find out about possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform. While much has changed in the underlying code, there are few new features in this release. Notable changes include:

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown. Note that few add-ons are compatible with this early alpha at the time of release, as add-on developers need to upgrade them.)
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X’s system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry
• New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to our JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.
• There is a version of the DOM Inspector that works for Shredder Alpha 1, available from Mozilla Add-ons.
• There is a version of the Venkman debugger that works for Shredder Alpha 1.

The Rumbling Edge reports 850 changes in Thunderbird 3.0 alpha 1.