History of Mozilla Thunderbird
Originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix (the original name for Mozilla Firefox), the project failed to gain momentum. With the success of the latter, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.
Early beginnings: A simple email and news client
Significant work on Thunderbird restarted with the announcement that from version 1.5 onwards, the main Mozilla suite would be designed around separate applications using this new toolkit. This contrasts with the previous all-in-one approach, and will hopefully lead to more efficient and maintainable code, as well as allowing users to mix and match the Mozilla applications with alternatives.
The original Thunderbird logo was just a modified Firebird logo: with a simple shifting of hue value from red to blue. In 2004, together with the change of Firefox's visual identity by Jon Hicks, a more professional logo that is currently in use was introduced.
Release history
Parts of this table are based on the Thunderbird roadmap.
| Key: | ||
|---|---|---|
| Old Version | Current Version | Future Version |
| Gecko version | Version | Release date | Significant changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.5 | 0.1 | July 28 2003 | |
| 0.2 | September 3 2003 | ||
| 0.3 | October 15 2003 | ||
| 1.6 | 0.4 | December 5 2003 | |
| 0.5 | February 9 2004 | ||
| 1.7 | 0.6 | May 3 2004 | Pinstripe theme for Mac OS X, Windows installer, better junk mail handling, IMAP IDLE and LDAP version 3 support. |
| 0.7 | June 16 2004 | Smaller download size, improved IMAP support, updated extension and theme managers | |
| 0.7.1 | June 28 2004 | Bugfix release. | |
| 0.7.2 | July 8 2004 | Vulnerability patch (Windows only). | |
| 0.7.3 | August 4 2004 | Vulnerability patch. | |
| 0.8 | September 14 2004 | Improved Privacy Controls, Global Inbox, RSS/Atom Integration, Improved data migration. Improved spell checker support. | |
| 0.9 | November 3 2004 | More RSS integration. Favorite folders. Menu and dialog polish. Message list groups. Virtual folders. | |
| 1.0 RC1 | December 1 2004 | Bug fixing. Improved theme. Polish work. | |
| 1.0 | December 7 2004 | Official Version 1.0 release. | |
| 1.0.2 1 | March 21 2005 | Stability and security improvements. | |
| 1.0.5 2 | July 13 2005 | Vulnerability patch. | |
| 1.0.6 | July 19 2005 | Fix for extension API regression. | |
| 1.0.7 | September 29 2005 | Vulnerability patch and regression fix. | |
| 1.0.8 | April 21 2006 | Vulnerability patch and regression fix. End-of-life of 1.0.x product line. | |
| 1.8 | 1.1 Alpha 1 | June 2 2005 | Stability improvement and security fixes. |
| 1.1 Alpha 2 | July 15 2005 | The second alpha (intended for testers) for upcoming 1.5 release. | |
| 1.5 Beta 1 | September 9 2005 | New update system (binary patch). | |
| 1.5 Beta 2 | October 7 2005 | Improvements to automated update system, website rendering and performance. Several security fixes. | |
| 1.5 RC1 | November 5 2005 | First release candidate. | |
| 1.5 RC2 | December 21 2005 | Second release candidate. | |
| 1.5 | January 11 2006 | Official Version 1.5 release. Identical to 1.5 RC2. | |
| 1.5.0.2 | April 21 2006 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.4 3 | June 1 2006 | Native support for Intel-based Macintosh computers, aka universal binary. Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.5 | July 27 2006 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.7 4 | September 14 2006 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.8 | November 8 2006 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.9 | December 19 2006 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.5.0.10 | March 1 2007 | Stability improvement and security fixes. | |
| 1.8.1 | 2.0 Alpha 1 | July 28 2006 | Message Tags. Folder Views including favorite folders. Improved new mail notification alerts. New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. Find As You Type in the message pane. New combined and improved Add-ons manager for extensions and themes. Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions. |
| 2.0 Beta 1 | December 12 2006 | Improved theme. Session history navigation. Improved offline management. Folder summary popups. Improved performance in saved search folders. Improved filing tools. | |
| 2.0 Beta 2 | January 23 2007 | Feature complete beta | |
| 2.0 RC1 | March 2007 | Code freeze on March 6 | |
| 2.0 | First Quarter 2007 | Final Release | |
| 1.9 | 3.0 | Q1 2008? |
Note (1): Version 1.0.1 was planned but not shipped due to delay and discovery of issues that needed fixing in all three of Mozilla Foundation's products.
Note (2): There were no version 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 since the bugs/issues affected Firefox only.
Note (3): There was no version 1.5.0.3.
Note (4): There was no version 1.5.0.6.
Future development
On December 23 2004, the Project Lightning was announced for tightly integrating calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. Lightning is just a project name, but not a product name. Lightning 0.1 was released on March 14, 2006. The current version is 0.3, which was released on October 11, 2006.
Also on October 11, 2006, Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation announced that "future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program." The project is code-named Penelope. An unoffical Eudora/Penelope forum is accessible via web or newsreader.
