back to article Thunderbird 3 release has wings clipped

Mozilla has pushed back its development schedule for Thunderbird 3, the next version of its email client. A planned beta of the package will now be described as a third alpha build. The first beta of Thunderbird 3 was due to come out at the end of September. It would have been followed by a second in November and a release …

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  1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
    Coat

    Thunderbird 3, wings?

    Come on. Everybody knows that Thunderbird 3, being a space ship (and orange!), had no wings, just three atomic powered motors.

    It's got Fanderson written on the back. Thanks.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Pretty stable for alpha

    I've been running the alpha (it's called shredder which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence!) for a few weeks now on a Vista laptop I take with me travelling so I can check my personal mail.

    I have to say it's been pretty stable. I don't exactly push it with my use but I expected a lot more flaky than it seems to be.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Miss the hole did it?

    Or did the sliding door not pull back far enough?

    Mine's the one with FAB on the back

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have they

    Fixed the "Maxes out my CPU until I kill it with task manager whenever I try to view a plaintext email file" bug yet?

    Sort that one out, and we'll talk.

  5. Robert Grant

    Good idea

    Sounds like they're being sensible about release stuff. I'm just waiting for proper integration with Google Calendar and I'm happy :)

  6. Nick Ryan Silver badge
    Alert

    Arg!

    "Up to now the Thunderbird client has lived in Firefox's shadow, but Mozilla hopes to change that by energising developers and end users"

    Energising? Is El Reg going all Web 2.0 and marketing speak on us?

  7. Sebastien Mongrain
    Coat

    @Nick

    It's energising, with cattle prod energy.

  8. Yfrwlf
    Linux

    boring

    ...is what email is, much more so than browsing the web. That's probably the majority of the reason Thunderbird has been neglected.

    Browser: Display all kinds of possibly-hopefully entertaining media.

    Email client: Text.

    Maybe if it came pre-loaded with emails with pron attachments.

  9. Graham Marsden
    Thumb Up

    Kudos...

    ... to a software producer that actually realises its products still need work, instead of foisting off a buggy, insecure product onto the public and then patching it later...!

  10. Miladin Miladinoski
    Unhappy

    So when the hell are they going to release it?

    I hate when they prolong something for very long. Ugh.

  11. Moss Icely Spaceport
    Thumb Up

    Thunderbird is GO

    I'm a TB fan, sure beats that POS Outlook.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Thunderbird icons and look'n'feel

    Please, Mozilla, if it's not too late, can we lose the Fisher Price look of Tbird 2 for something a little less, well, designed-by-people-with-no-graphic-design-skills?

    It took me a long time to get past the naff icons, function-poor toolbar and chunky layout to find there's actually quite a decent email and Usenet client underneath.

    TB isn't going to achieve anything like the market penetration of FF until TB sorts out its immediate first impression problem and stops looking like a blunt-crayon ripoff of Outlook Express.

    Yes, it's superficial to judge a programme by its default LAF, but I do it, you do it, and everyone who has ever used a GUI does it.

    And yes I know there'll probably be an extension somewhere to make it look like Opera / World of Warcraft / Andy Warhol's baked beans cans, but I've got 10,000,000,001 better things to do with my life ...

    Paris, because she knows that looks are important ...

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