New version of Thunderbird 3.0 falls short of the beta

17th October 2008

Mozilla Messaging`s department, responsible for development of the new version of Thunderbird, has made an unexpected stroke, having renamed the almost ready first beta-version of the program back into the third alpha version.
One of the reasons for such renaming was fears of developers concerning a possible considerable number of negative responses. The beta release would attract much more mass media attention, rather than another alpha version. Thunderbird developers team assumes that many of responses by critics could be prejudiced. According to one of the program developers, they are not ready to it at the given stage.
As a result, the release of the program scheduled for January, has to be postponed. After Thunderbird 3.0 alpha version was released three months ago, it was planned to prepare the release of the first beta in September. After that the second beta-version could be released in November. Now the prepared version beta 1 is named alpha 3, and the beta 2 planned for November will be positioned as beta 1.