Thunderbird 5 final Released

Its been barely two weeks since Firefox 5 was released and the hardworking Mozilla developers have now released a stable version of its popular mail client, Thunderbird.
Mozilla Thunderbird, for those who don’t know, is a very simple and easy to use mail client available free of cost across multiple platforms. It has been gaining popularity in the Linux fraternity due to its fast and responsive interface compared to the sluggish Novell Evolution. Ubuntu’s next release is proposed to have Thunderbird 5 as its default email client.

Mozilla has quetly pepped up Thunderbird’s version from 3 to 5 to keep the version numbers in sync with Firefox. Perhaps it is a strategy to increase acceptance amongst the windows users. Who knows!

The new release has a number of features including faster start-up times, a new add on manager, same as found on Firefox and a revised account creation wizard to improve email setup. This version of Thunderbird also uses the latest Mozilla Gecko 5 engine.

You can download firefox from the mozilla stable repository . To install, just copy and paste the following commands in an open terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

To install the lighning calendar client, use the following command

sudo apt-get install xul-ext-lightning

You may also use the Ubuntu software centre if you hate the terminal. However, thats a longer and cumbersome process.

If you don’t want to install ppas and want to wait, it will be available in Ubuntu repository soon.

Downloads for other platforms and languages can be found here