Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 is now available for Beta testing

Feb 13, 2016 04:25 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, Mozilla has come out with the sixth point release of the stable 38.0 branch of its Thunderbird e-mail, news, and chat client, fixing a few minor issues reported by users since the 38.5.x series.

However, the new Mozilla Thunderbird 38.6.0 release is not the reason you're reading this article. What's even more important than that is the fact that Mozilla has pushed the first Beta release of the upcoming Thunderbird 45.0 client to the official channels for public testing, and we have managed, as usual, to get out hands on the preliminary release notes.

And while there were rumors that Mozilla was about to close the Thunderbird chapter forever, it seems to us like it will get even more cool features, especially for Linux-based operating systems, for which the long-anticipated GTK3 integration will become a dream come true.

So we took Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 Beta for a test drive on our Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, and as you can see from the screenshot attached on the right of the article, the GTK3 integration looks really great. The same goes for the one of Mozilla Firefox 45.0 Beta, which will also bring GTK3 integration.

But there's a little thing we want to tell you about. There's a known issue in the release notes for Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 Beta that says, "Linux builds use GTK3, but are not offered for update because GTK2 will be used in future Thunderbird 45 versions," which we hope Mozilla will solve before the final release gets out.

Upcoming features of Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0

Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 release highlights include support for editing the "From" field when composing an e-mail, the ability to copy the Address and Name fields from an e-mail that has been displayed from the header menu, support for printing single contacts via the context menu, and OAuth authentication support for Mail.ru.

Among other changes, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 promises to offer support for searching nicknames in the contacts sidebar and the AB quick search, as well as to let users drag and drop multiple attachments to their operating system's file folder. Also, Box.com attachment uploads should be functional again.

Installing Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 Beta in Ubuntu or Arch Linux

Those of you running either the Ubuntu or Arch Linux operating system can test the first Beta build of Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 email and news client right now. While Arch Linux users can find the builds in AUR (install the thunderbird-beta package), Ubuntu users need to add an official PPA by following the next instructions.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
Don't forget to close and reopen your Thunderbird client after the installation so that you can enjoy the new GTK3-powered version, and please try to keep in mind at all times that this is a pre-release version, which means that some of the functionality might not work as expected. But it sure looks great, and for us it's a keeper!