What Is a Mozilla Shredder?
Mozilla originally gave preview releases of Thunderbird 3 the name "Shredder" as a codename. As of July 2010, Thunderbird 3 is the latest official release of Mozilla's popular email client.
Other People Are Reading
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Testing Mozilla
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Mozilla's Thunderbird and Firefox applications have what are called "nightlies," which are nightly releases of preview versions of the software that anyone can download, use and file bug reports on if they find problems with it.
New Features
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Thunderbird nightlies are popular with people who want to use potentially new features, give feedback on those features and have input into how the final release of the software functions.
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Open Source
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While most companies only release nightly builds to people within the organization to test, Mozilla is an open-source organization and so allows anyone to download and test Shredder for free. In turn, those users provide valuable feedback to help improve the product. In recent years, some major corporations such as Microsoft have begun to release test versions of their software to the general public to achieve the same effect.
User Beware
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"Shredder" is meant to indicate to users that they should not use Thunderbird nightlies as their only email client in case the software has bugs that result in the destruction--or shredding--of emails.
Other Features
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Shredder has add-ons that add to the functionality of the software and make testing the software even more unpredictable. Most notable of these add-ons is Lightning, which adds calendar, scheduling and task functionality to Thunderbird. Mozilla may incorporate Lightning as an integrated part of Thunderbird in a future release.
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References
- Various Developers; IRC Thunderbird Development Team; irc://moznet (irc.mozilla.org)
- David Ascher: Lightning-in-Thunderbird Status Update
- Photo Credit blades image by Clivia from Fotolia.com
