Mozilla Messaging has released the first alpha of Shredder email client (or better known as Thunderbird 3.0). This version of Thunderbird uses the same Gecko 1.9 engine, which powers Firefox 3. This means, you'll get the same performance improvements which were built into Firefox 3.

Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 features tabs for messages. Instead of opening messages in new Windows, Thunderbird 3.0 lets you open them in new tabs, just like Firefox. I find this really amazing because it will help me cut down the clutter and same some screen real estate.

You'll also notice a shiny new Add-on Manager, which resembles a lot like Firefox 3's Add-on manager. When first opened, it will show you the list of recommended add-ons. Breakpad crash reporter replaces the old crash reporter in this version. For Mac users, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application and can read data from Mac OS X's Address Book.

Lightning Calendar add-on was supposed to be integrated, but it hasn't been integrated in this release. Hopefully, we'll see Lightning in future versions of Thunderbird 3.0. At this point, we can't consider Thunderbird to be almost stable because many features are yet to be added and bugs are left to be weeded out.

Download Shredder Alpha 1 | Release Notes

[Via: Mozilla Links]