Next-generation Mozilla Thunderbird in Alpha 1, called 'Shredder'

A developer preview release of Mozilla's next version of the Thunderbird e-mail client has been made available to the developer and tester community.

Shredder Alpha 1 is built upon Mozilla's layout engine Gecko 1.9, which is the same platform upon which Firefox 3 (currently in Beta 5) is built.

As is typical with alpha versions, practically nothing can be guaranteed, and release notes for Shredder Alpha 1 state that "some of the features...are highly experimental and will likely change before the final release. They may come with crashes and bugs and may potentially cause data loss in profiles (configuration data, preferences, downloaded mail)."

This early version includes a new Add-ons Manager, which can be used to download and install Thunderbird Add-ons, address book support for OS X's system Address Book, and a new crash reporter, among other items.

Shredder Alpha 1 can be also downloaded here, and supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003, OS X 10.4 and up, and Linux kernel 2.2.14 or higher, with different distributions calling for different requirements.