Mozilla has put the final release of Thunderbird 5.0, its email client software, up on its servers for downloading. 5.0 represents the app’s first major release in about 18 months. The free app (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has faster startup, tabs that can be reordered and dragged to different windows, attachment sizes are displayed along with the corresponding attachments, and support for Mac 32/64 bit Universal builds. The latter means that, unlike earlier releases, Thunderbird 5.0 will not run on PowerPC-based Macs.
The developers has moved quickly to make the final version available to users. The latest beta version was released only a few weeks ago. Its approach is part of a new fast-track program that brought Firefox 5 within just a few months of the last release.
Mozilla has skipped over “four” in naming its software versions. The last major release was 3.x. Mozilla chose to jump to 5.0 so that it would be numerically consistent with Firefox.
