14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta of the upcoming Mozilla Thunderbird 5.0, the first version to be released under the new speedier development cycle at Mozilla, has been made available last week. The final build is coming and Mozilla urges add-on developers to make sure that their creations are compatible with the new email suite.
"With the Thunderbird 5 Beta release, we’ve enabled the 5.* maximum version in the AMO Developer tools. Thunderbird 5 Beta is now API frozen, so if you haven’t already done so, please make sure your add-on is compatible. We expect it to be released near the end of the month," Mozilla's Mark Banner wrote.
"For add-ons, the most significant change in Thunderbird 5 is the new Add-on Manager that was incorporated into Firefox 4. There is documentation and further information on developer.mozilla.org," he added.
After releasing Firefox 4.0, a massive update that took almost one and a half years to complete, Mozilla decided that this approach was done for, it will be switching to a rapid release cycle, like Google Chrome, which would see a new version of the browser land every six weeks.
This also affected Thunderbird which is switching to a similar schedule and has even jumped one version number to be on par with Firefox.
However, for add-on developers, the rapid release cycle would be a pain to keep up with, so Mozilla decided to start updating compatibility for add-ons automatically for Firefox, except in cases where it was clear that the extensions would not be compatible.
This lifted the burden from the developers quite a lot, but this move hasn't been made for Thunderbird yet. Mozilla developers are working on implementing the same approach for the email suite, but haven't gotten quite there yet.
It may not happen in time for Thunderbird 5.0, which is why Mozilla is asking developers to make sure they're ready for the upcoming release, only a couple of weeks away now.