Mozilla has released version 2.0 of their Thunderbird email client. You can read about the new additions to Thunderbird on Mozilla’s website, and in-depth coverage should be available all over the web shortly. In the meantime, here are some first impressions:
- It’s pretty fast. I don’t have data to back it up, but after a cursory evaluation it seems faster than previous versions.
- It looks pretty good. The default theme has new icons and a few other touch ups. I thought the last version looked fine, but I guess they felt the need to tinker. It still looks like Thunderbird to me, which is nice. They appear to have borrowed the new junk mail icon from feedburner, and it looks out of place.
- They’ve added a tagging feature!
- The tagging feature is a rehash of the old label feature, and could use some more work. Now you can define your own tags (in addition to the 5 default ones that take their names from the old labels) and apply more than one to a single email. Unfortunately, it only shows one highlight color at a time, which is not ideal. I would like to have seen tagging implemented more like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, or like gmail’s label system.
All told, I’m pleased with the new version of Thunderbird, and I’m looking forward to testing the new features more extensively.