14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla managed to launch all of its 'ships' at the same time, Firefox 6, Thunderbird 6 and SeaMonkey 2.3 all landed on the same day. The latest update to Mozilla's popular desktop email client is based on the Gecko 6 layout engine, the one that powers Firefox 6, and comes with several fixes and improvements.
One thing in particular should be of interest to Linux users, the default email client check in Thunderbird 6 now works with some newer Linux distributions, so it should be easier to set up the Mozilla suite as the default email app.
Mozilla Thunderbird 6 comes with several interface tweaks, fixes and improvements. Of course, there are plenty of small updates that contribute to overall performance and stability included as well.
However, Linux specific changes aren't that many, the only notable one is the default email client check fix.
If you are curious, Mozilla Thunderbird 6 adds some fixes to importing emails from Microsoft Outlook. It also comes with several theme improvements in Windows 7 and adds support for Windows 7 jump lists.
Now that Mozilla Thunderbird 6 is out, work is underway to get Mozilla Thunderbird 7 into the beta channel and later as a stable release. As a sidenote, Mozilla Thunderbird has been selected as the default email client in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.
Speaking of Ubuntu, there's an easy way of getting the latest stable release before it's added to the official repositories, by using the Mozilla-supported PPA.
To add the PPA to your list of repositories as well as install the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 6, just follow these steps and run the following in a terminal.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird 6 for Linux is available for download here.
Here are download links for other operating systems:
Mozilla Thunderbird 6 for Windows is available for download here. Mozilla Thunderbird 6 for Mac OS X is available for download here.