Mozilla goes into overdrive
Mozilla has recently gone on a release spree, with updated versions of three of its software.
Thunderbird’s eagerly awaited version 3 now sees a new beta update with the release of Thunderbird 3 Beta 3. Thunderbird is a popular email client by Mozilla which shares its codebase with Firefox and uses the same engine to render email messages. The new version brings a number of UI and functionality improvements:
- A new conversation view which aggregates all your messages into one view
- Multiple tab support for emails
- A new smart folders view for the folder pane which automatically groups related folders together (e.g. inboxes from multiple accounts)
- GMail integration, with better support for features such as archiving
- Per-folder column and sort settings are maintained
- A new improved account setup wizard
Get Thunderbird 3 from the Mozilla website here.
Seamonkey sees the release of its first beta version 2. For those who don’t know, Seamonkey is a continuation of the old Mozilla suite and comes with a browser, email application, IRC chat application and an HTML composer. Firefox is actually a spinoff of the browser component of the Mozilla suite. The new release incorporates the latest changes in Firefox 3.5.1. This means that Seamonkey now supports the new audio and video tags, and the TraceMonkey JavaScript JIT compilation engine. Other features in this version include:
- The same backend as Firefox’s
- A new addon manager
- Session restore options like those of Firefox
- Better History support with new database format
- A new download manager with support of cross-session download resuming
- Better support for RSS feeds with feed previewing and subscription options
- Customizable toolbars in the Mail and Newsgroups application
- Support for mail archiving in mail application
- Better integration with Windows Vista and Windows Search Indexer
Download the Seamonkey suite from here.
Another exciting release was that of Prism, a software by Mozilla which allows you to take your web applications out of the browser box and package them as applications. It brings native application-like features to web applications, such as:
-
Giving web apps their own window with access from the system tray along with menus of popular actions
- Associate links with web applications instead of desktop applications (such as mailto: links with a web email client)
- More stable web application performance
- Auto-run web applications
- Popup alerts
Prism is available as a stand-alone application and also as a Firefox plugin.