Thunderbird 3.0 to begin ascent next month
Found on Ars Technica on Tuesday, 04 March 2008
The Thunderbird development community aims to release the first alpha of Thunderbird 3 next month.
Thunderbird 3 will use Gecko 1.9, a new version of the rendering engine that serves as the foundation for the Mozilla platform. Gecko 1.9, which has also been instrumental in the making of Firefox 3, offers a number of very significant improvements, including a new Cairo-based rendering backend and support for JavaScript 1.8.
Ascher believes that a better out-of-the-box experience and support for calendaring are the two killer features that will make Thunderbird a success.
Actually, I think that stuffing more and more into Thunderbird will turn it into a bloated system. It supports plugins, so the developers should concentrate on the core and stamp out bugs. If you want HTML rendering and Javascript or Calendaring, install a plugin. But no, better blow it up.