December 9, 2009, 7:53 am
Mozilla Messaging announced on Tuesday the official release of Thunderbird 3, a major update of the popular open source mail client. The new version brings great improvements, including an impressive new search system and support for tabs in the user interface.
The Mozilla Foundation began forming the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary in 2007 with the aim of giving Thunderbird a chance to soar. The company brought in former ActiveState CTO David Ascher to direct the organization and set its technical agenda. After he took the reigns in early 2008, he began documenting his team’s vision for Thunderbird 3, an ambitious update that would modernize the mail client in much the same way that the Firefox 3 release renewed Mozilla’s browser. The roadmap included plans to adopt Gecko 1.9 so that Thunderbird could leverage important improvements that had been made to the underlying architecture of the Mozilla platform.
