Category Archives: Downloads

Instantbird 0.2 beta 2 released in 4 languages!

Instantbird 0.2 beta 2 is now available in English, French, Polish and Russian. If you want to help with the translation for another language, contact us.

The new features of this second beta include a better handling of statuses, cool new default message and emoticon themes, a basic log viewer, actions on buddies from a buddy list context menu, and a lot more! Read the release notes for the details.

Windows users will be pleased to notice that this release is provided with an installer.

You can download the beta and read the release notes from here.

The development of Instantbird 0.2 is nearly finished and this beta will be the last one before the final 0.2 release which is expected to come relatively soon.

Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 and addons!

Today is a very special day for us. We have a double release to announce!

First, the long awaited add-ons website is now ready for you to use. You will already find a lot of extensions on it since we took care of uploading more than 200 of them. Think about browsing the experimental add-ons, a lot of them are still marked as such. The add-ons website is at this address: https://addons.instantbird.org/.

And last, but not least, Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 is now ready for you to try it! There’s a lot of new interesting stuff in this one. Here are some of them, read the release notes for more:

  • It is ready to be localized (and you can try an experimental French language pack),
  • Improved conversations: you can change conversation styles, smiley themes are now handled.
  • We implemented a ‘magic’ copy/paste feature that will allow you to have pretty quotes out of messages copied from Instantbird. Some bugs may still exist in this.
  • As usual, we took great care of stability issues, so Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 is already more stable than 0.1.3.1 at this point, so don’t hesitate to give it a try!

You can download the alpha and read the release notes from here.

Instantbird 0.1.3.1 released

We have just released a small update to Instantbird 0.1.3. This will fix the connection issue with ICQ that appeared a little more than two weeks ago (sorry it took so long!) and improve the stability. You can download this new 0.1.3.1 release from this page or just click on the ‘Check for updates’ menu to download only a small update file.

We are going to post a status update about the progress of the development of the 0.2 version soon.

Instantbird 0.1.3 released!

After a few months without any release, we are glad to announce the release of Instantbird 0.1.3! This should be the last minor release before Instantbird 0.2 on which the work has already started (we are currently working on localization stuff).

What’s new?

This version contains several new features, but is also a stability/bugfix release.

  • New features:
    • Proxy support: you can now use HTTP and Socks proxies.
    • Typing notifications: you can know when the person you are talking to is typing.
    • Automatic reconnection: when a non fatal connection error occurs (e.g. network failure), the account is automatically reconnected after a few seconds.
    • Idleness: servers are notified when you are idle so that your status is changed.
    • Better handling of chat rooms: the topic of the room and the list of participants are displayed, IRC commands work.
    • Findbar: it is now easy to search in a conversation, with a findbar similar to the Firefox one. A notable difference is that it searches backwards by default, so that the most recent matching messages are found first.
    • Universal build: the Mac binary now also works on PPC Macs.
  • Updated: Instantbird 0.1.3 is based on libpurple 2.5.2 and Mozilla 1.9.1b2.
  • Improved stability: we used the crash reports that we got from the 0.1.2 release and nightly builds to fix bugs that resulted in crashes.

You can download Instantbird 0.1.3 for Windows, Mac or Linux from this page. Of course you can also download the source code.

We look forward to get your feedback on this release. You can comment on this post or join us on IRC in #instantbird.

Nightly builds available

Nightly builds

We produce nightly builds of Instantbird every day with buildbot. These builds can be downloaded from our server at http://ftp.instantbird.com/instantbird/nightly/latest-trunk/. Please note that these builds are available for testing purpose only, and are totally untested before we put them online. Use them at your own risks. If you want to help us with testing, there is no need to download and install a new build from the server everyday, the application will automatically propose updates.

To ensure that users won’t confuse nightly unstable builds with releases, we use a different set of icons for the nightlies. The nightly icon is:

Nightly logo

What’s new?

It has already been a few months since the last release, so I guess it’s a good time for a quick status update.

Just after the 0.1.2 release, we switched from subversion to mercurial for the versioning of our source code. Our mercurial repository is publicly available at http://hg.instantbird.org/. At the same time, for the Mozilla code we use, we switched from the CVS trunk (1.9.0.x) to mozilla-central and we are now using a build system which is very similar to the comm-central one. In fact, it’s a copy of it with very small modifications. Thanks to the people who helped us for the transition and to the people who worked on the comm-central build system.

There are also some new features: There’s a findbar in the conversation window (Ctrl/Cmd + F to open it), commands (/me, /topic, etc…) work in conversations, the list of chat room participants is displayed (for example, in IRC channels), typing notifications work, idleness (becoming idle based on the inactivity time) works, status changes are displayed in conversations, it’s possible to force a check for update, …

We also spent time on code cleanup (debug logging for example) and stability improvements (taking into account the data from the crash reporting system).

What’s next?

We plan to do another minor release soon, and after that, for the 0.2 release, the focus will be on extensibility.

On a side note, this project has been public for one year, Instantbird 0.1 was released on October 18th, 2007. Even if we hoped to do more, it’s been a great year for the project!

Instantbird 0.1.2 released!

After a few months without any release, we are glad to announce the release of Instantbird 0.1.2!

What’s new?

This version is more a stability/bugfix release than a feature release.

  • Updated: Instantbird 0.1.2 is now based on libpurple 2.4.3 and Mozilla 1.9.0.1.
  • Improved stability: we fixed the outstanding bugs that resulted in crashes. We also turned on breakpad to get more data on crashes.
  • Detailed tooltips: the tooltips of the buddy list now contain detailed information.
  • Under the hood: On this release we spent a lot of time on the build system. Instantbird can now be built like any other Mozilla application. It doesn’t require to build dependencies separately any more. This results in smaller downloads (we package only the files that are really needed) and for developers it will now be easy to play with our code.

You can download Instantbird 0.1.2 for Windows, Linux or Mac from this page. Of course you can also download the source code.

We look forward to get your feedback on this release. You can comment on this post or join us on IRC in #instantbird.