Mozilla Thunderbird Gets Tabs

December 8, 2005 · 8 comments

A future version of Mozilla’s email client, Thunderbird, will receive tabs as reported by ZD Net. You can check out this new feature in Thunderbird 1.6 Alpha 1 available from Myk Melez, a Thunderbird developer. Tabs work much the same way as they do in Firefox and can even be dragged and dropped. I think this is a much needed feature for Thunderbird and I can’t wait to see its final release.

Thunderbird 1.6 Alpha 1 tabs

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Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Tabulation
May 20, 2008 at 12:14 pm

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1 titanium_geek December 9, 2005 at 8:05 am

Now that firefox is starting to be serious competition in the browser market, it’s time thunderbird started to grow up and prove itself to be really useful.

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2 George December 9, 2005 at 9:36 am

Hmm, I’m not entirely convinced tabs will prove as useful in Thunderbird as they did in Firefox. A significant quantity of the tabs’ functionality is already contained in the Inbox contents/subject titles dialog.

They’d be better served by moving to an Outlook 2003 implementation of Left pane – Inbox subject titles; Right pane – Specific email view (as opposed to the Top pane; Bottom pane implementation that Thunderbird and previous versions of Outlook use), imo. That change proved massively beneficial, I feel.

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3 Matt Brett December 9, 2005 at 10:02 am

I tried this out earlier this morning but it wasn’t working properly for me. When I opened a message in a new tab, it replaced previously opened tabs with the same message. So I would end up with multiple, duplicate tabs.

Hopefully he can make this into an extension. I don’t see myself going back and re-downloading full packages for every version that’s released. I certainly don’t have a problem updating an extension, though.

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4 Paul Stamatiou December 9, 2005 at 10:16 am

Matt: I know what you are talking about… one tab is sort of the preview tab and whatever email is currently selected is opened there. It’s kind of annoying.

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5 oneighturbo December 9, 2005 at 2:43 pm

i could of sworn i read that this wasnt going to be released… ill look through my reader, might have bene slashdot

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6 oneighturbo December 9, 2005 at 2:45 pm
7 jay December 13, 2005 at 1:38 am

I tried the tabs, and found them useless after a couple days. Open the email and send it to trash. The tab stays. Close the email, the tab stays. The result is a mess IMHO. Plus, you need to show the message pane to use the tabs. I’d hoped to be able to show the vertical layout only, open the messages in a new window, and have tabs appear at the top of the vertical display. No such luck.

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