Mozilla Messaging announced today the first official alpha release of the next generation Thunderbird e-mail application. Although this release offers some improvements over its predecessor, it isn't intended for production use yet. We tested some of the new functionality to see how it is shaping up.

The Mozilla Foundation gently nudged Thunderbird out of the nest last year when it created the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary to manage ongoing development of the popular open source e-mail program. The goal was to give Thunderbird more autonomy and its own organizational structure so that it could continue growing. Shortly after its official launch, Mozilla Messaging began to formulate plans for Thunderbird 3.

This alpha is the first Thunderbird release to use Gecko 1.9, a new version of the rendering and layout engine that draws the HTML and XUL-based user interface in Mozilla software. Also used in Mozilla's Firefox 3 web browser, Gecko 1.9 offers many compelling advancements such as Cairo-based rendering, vastly improved SVG capabilities, JavaScript 1.8, and support for Cocoa widgets on Mac OS X. In addition to the benefits provided by adoption of Gecko 1.9, Shredder alpha 1 also has a handful of other minor features, like Mac OS X system address book integration, more accurate search functionality, and a new add-ons manager like the one in Firefox 3.

As Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher noted in a blog entry earlier this month, the goal of alpha 1 is primarily to expose regressions and bugs in the application that are introduced by the adoption of Gecko 1.9. Although the new version of Gecko represents an enormous change to the mail program's underlying infrastructure, the program still looks much the same on the surface. The name Shredder was adopted to indicate to users that its current state does not reflect what the final Thunderbird 3 experience will be like. This is similar to the way that Firefox uses "Minefield" branding on nightly builds.

"I'm quite pleased with where it seems Shredder a1 has landed from a quality point of view. It has very few feature changes, so don't expect many changes from Thunderbird 2, but it is built on a quite substantially revised codebase (sharing much with Firefox 3), and therefore forms a great foundation for us to start making more substantive changes," said Ascher in a blog entry. "It's been quite an education to go through even this 'simple' release, starting with bug triage and driving through tree freezing, build engineering, QA, website updates, etc. Much of the release work was done by people who had never done it before, relying on the kind assistance of people who had. It wasn't a perfect release, but I'm still quite proud of the entire team."

Although it is still much too early to draw any conclusions about Thunderbird 3 by testing the application, this first alpha release is a very promising indication that Mozilla Messaging is moving forward and making some progress. The developers are looking at a lot of very exciting ways to deliver a better user experience and we can look forward to seeing those improvements in future prereleases. For some examples, check out Mozilla Messaging interface designer Bryan Clark's thoughts about search improvements and autocompletion.

For those of you who are interested in contributing to Thunderbird, there are several ways to help out. In addition to writing code, testing the alpha, and reporting bugs, users can also help by contributing artwork. Users can help test alpha 1 by participating in the Thunderbird bug day that is scheduled for today.

Source: arstechnica

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