Mozilla.org has made available Thunderbird 0.7 RC, a release candidate for the next milestone version of its standalone email software. The release includes many improvements, such as better performance and a bugfix for OS X users to address a sleep-related crash. Also, clicking its Dock icon will now automatically open a new mail viewer window if no other windows are open and Thunderbird is already running. From the release notes (found in the MozillaZine Forums):
- Talkback is a part of the the builds for all 3 platforms. Talkback is a tool that generates crash report data which helps us measure the stability of the product and figure out where crashes are happening.
- Thunderbird 0.7 bits use the new Extension Manager developed for Firefox. When installing a theme or extension, it must be written to the new EM APIs that Ben Goodger has document for Firefox or it will not install.
- Static builds for all platforms. Yielding a smaller disk size and a really nice performance win across the board. OS X bits also use pre-binding now giving yet another big performance boost.
- Windows installer uses 7-zip compression for a new download size of only 5.9MB (5.7 without talkback)! Woo Hoo!
- Multiple Identity UI for creating multiple identities for a given account.
- New inline vCard UI
- New profile manager including new profile manager UI.
- Signature gets styled in the compose window with the same styles used when you view a signature in the message window.
- Color quoting for message qutoes.
- OS X fix for Thunderbird locking up when coming out of sleep mode (top 0.6 issue)
- OS X: if no Thunderbird windows are open and you click on the system dock icon, we re-open the main mail window. (top 0.6 issue)
- LDAP fix for users using LDAP version 2 servers. In 0.6 you could not access these servers without manually changing some preferences. Now if we don’t detect version 3, we gracefully fall back and use version 2 (top 0.6 issue).
- The download more option in the spell checker dialog now takes you to a web page with various localized dictionaries.
- Junk mail fix where sometimes the junk mail filter would mark a message as junk but fail to move it to the Junk folder.
- Minor improvements to the junk mail algorithm.
- If you do a custom windows install with the windows installer you now see a screen which asks you if you want desktop/start bar/quick launch icons for the installation.
- Sorting is now supported in the news subscribe dialog.
- Opening a vCard attachment now opens the vCard internally in our addresss book UI instead of launching an external application.
- In the offline settings panel, some of the settings were not being saved (like the one for compacting a folder if it saves X KB”
- DOM Inspector is no longer part of the windows installer. It is still part of the full .zip build
- On Windows, Thunderbird properly handles mailto url clicks (from a browser or another app) that contain raw unencoded spaces.
- Continued IMAP improvements and bug fixes including a potential hang when reading imap over SSL.
- All of the 1.7 final bug fixes that weren’t in 1.7 RC1 (which 0.6 was based on)
Thunderbird 0.7 RC is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Download links can be found in the MozillaZine Forums post.