Thunderbird 3 will be released later (no definitive date yet)

Three days ago, I informed you that Thunderbird 3 beta1 had been renamed to Shredder alpha3. So yesterday we had a Thunderbird drivers meeting to discuss what this all means for the next pre-release (beta1) and the overall release planning.

The outcome of that discussion was, that the earlier plan of releasing a first TB3 release candidate into the wild at the end of January or early February can no longer be kept. There are basically two reasons for this:

• Firefox 3.1 has been postponed to Mid-February 2009 and we don't want to release TB3 in the middle of THe Fx31 release frenzy


• We're not as far along with feature work than anticipated

What this means for our localizers is, that we will release Thunderbird 3 no earlier than four weeks after Firefox 3.1 is shipped (so probably around the middle or the end of March 2009). The reason for this is that

• we don't want to release during a time, when all of Mozilla Corporation's resources (build engineering, IT, etc.) are focussed on Firefox exclusively


• we want to give localizers enough time to complete their localization work for Thunderbird and not make them choose between localizing Thunderbird 3 or localizing Firefox 3.1

I can't give you an exact date for our planned release date however, as that is still being discussed. Hopefully we will know more after our first beta release is out of the door.