Thunderbird 5 leapfrogs into the world

Most savvy internet users know about Firefox. However Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundation‘s e-mail client, is fast becoming one of its best applications.

Recently Mozilla announced the release of a beta version of Thunderbird 5.0. Those in the know will notice that this new version has completely skipped version 4.0, a move that Mozilla says was done to get its e-mail client in line with its browser.

Firefox 5 has recently launched and presumably the plan is to keep Firefox and Thunderbird in sync in coming months. This could be great news for Thunderbird users as Mozilla has already committed to speeding up Firefox releases, which means Thunderbird could enjoy the same attention.

The new Thunderbird name is more than just playing with words, however. The latest beta release includes a number of changes that promise to improve what is already fairly full-featured e-mail client.

Among the changes are improvements to the interface, better troubleshooting and some positive changes to extensions on Firefox.

Tabs have been improved in this Thunderbird release which allows users to drag and re-order tabs as well as drag tabs from one open Thunderbird window to another window.

A more basic change to the interface is support for displaying the size next to the actual attachment. It’s a small but useful change that has long been missing.

The alignment between Firefox and Thunderbird extends to more than just names. The new add-on manager interface now more closely resembles that of the Firefox browser.

Mac users that are on older PowerPC-based systems will unfortunately be left out in the cold from now on. While there will be 32- and 64-bit versions for Mac, support for old PowerPC versions will be dropped from this release.

For users that are having problems with Thunderbird there is also a new troubleshooting page that will hopefully make it easier for users to solve any hiccups they encounter.

Grab the latest version of Thunderbird beta.