Thunderbird 1.5 RC2 released
Saturday, December 24th, 2005Thunderbird 1.5 RC2 via Forever Geek
The second release candidate of the Mozilla Thunderbird browser has been pushed out, and I imagine that it can’t be long before 1.5 becomes the stable version based on the release pattern for Firefox. The update process this time was much smoother, and I think the Mozilla team really have been working on this. It’s a feature that gets mentioned quite often, but it’s only in recent releases of Firefox and Thunderbird that I’ve actually seen it work properly.
You can find a summarised list of the new features in the release notes, although one in particular that I like is:
Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
Like all the best ideas, this is such a simple concept, but I imagine an extremely useful one for anyone with a large address book or who sends lots of emails. Unfortunately it’s probably not something most people will notice, so I imagine the feature will be considered useful but whoever added it won’t really get the credit they deserve, which is a shame.
Anyway, if you’re following the 1.5 release you should be able to update your copy of Thunderbird by simply going to Help->Check for updates and allowing the update manager to take it from there. If you’re still using the 1.0.x series you might want to wait a while until the stable version of 1.5 is released and most of the bugs have been ironed out, although personally I’ve not noticed any show stopping problems and I’d recommend an upgrade to 1.5 RC2 for most people.