Thunderbird 7 ships -- with several annoying bugs

Mozilla has updated its popular email tool, Thunderbird, to version 7. Thunderbird 7.0 Final follows Firefox 7 out of the door, while Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.4, its all-in-one suite, comprising functionality from Firefox and Thunderbird, has also been released, incorporating the improvements in Firefox 7 into its own build.

Unlike its better-known sibling, Thunderbird 7 features few noticeable changes over previous releases, with highlights including the fact it’s based on the Mozilla Gecko 7 engine, various user interface tweaks, fixes to attachment handling and unspecified platform improvements to the Address Book. Version 7 also promises improved security, speed, performance and stability through various security and platform fixes.

Thunderbird 7 also claims to add a new feature allowing you to print a summary of selected email messages. On the surface this appears to be an incorrect assumption, as selecting more than one message in Thunderbird 6 and selecting File > Print results in a summary being printed.

We did some digging, and discovered the behavior in Thunderbird 6 was reported as a bug. It seems Thunderbird 7 simply reverts the default behavior to that of Thunderbird 5, whereby selecting multiple messages and choosing Print results in each message being printed separately. In fact, we’re left confused as to how the print summary feature can now be enabled, despite many hours digging around Thunderbird and the web.

Thunderbird 7 also ships with one acknowledged bug. The release notes state, “If you are unable to view content for your RSS feeds in the Wide View Layout, you may need to disable the Lightning Calendar add-on if you have it installed or switch to Classic View and restart Thunderbird.”

Thunderbird 7.0 Final is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows, Mac and Linux. Also available from Mozilla are Firefox 7.0 Final and SeaMonkey 2.4.