WilksNet

Mozilla is working on their updates to Firefox.  Fx 2.0.0.2 should be out by the end of the week if all goes well.  And they are also planning Fx 1.5.0.10.  I recommend that users upgrade to Firefox 2 to get the best experience possible.

Thunderbird 2 is on its way as well and I’ll keep you up to date on how that progress is going.

Firefox 3.0 with the new Gecko rendering engine should be out sometime late this year and hopefully we’ll see a huge leap in new features to distance itself from Firefox 2.  I think Mozilla really wants to distance Firefox from IE7 as well because they know they can take advantage of the fact that they can update and patch Firefox much faster than Microsoft can to IE.

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 2 as of this morning! Here’s a list of their current features:

• Message Tags: Create your own tags for organizing email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.
• Visual Theme:Thunderbird 2′s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability.
• Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.
• Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.
• Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.
• Improved Offline Management: Thunderbird (Linux and Windows) automatically adjusts the offline state based on current network connectivity.
• Improved New Mail Notification Alerts:New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message text.
• Folder Summary Popups: Mouse over a folder with new messages to see a summary of the new messages in that folder.
• Saved Search Folder Performance: Search results for saved search folders are now cached, improving folder loading performance.
• Find As You Type
• Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying folders to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.
• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.
• MacOS X Universal Binaries

I think it should be a good release. I’m going to be testing it out and seeing what I think pretty soon. Below is the link to the download page to check it out.

Thunderbird Beta 2 Download