We are glad to announce the release of Instantbird 0.1.1.

This release is mostly a bug fix release. We’ve been impressed by the success of the 0.1 release and thought it would be nice to deliver a more stable version for the users we already have before making big changes for version 0.2.

The things we focused on for this release are:

• Improved stability: we fixed the outstanding bugs that resulted in crashes.
• Proper handling of non-ASCII characters. Instantbird now uses UTF-8 for all strings.
• Usability improvements. We fixed bugs that didn’t require much of our time and will significantly improve the user experience. For examples: aliases in the buddy list, linkification in the chat window, … We also removed some common annoyances in the UI.
• IRC Chats. In order to build a community, we thought it was critical to provide some way for users and testers to talk in a public place and not only send us private messages. There is now in the “File” menu a “Join Chat” item which will allow users and future contributors to join us in irc.mozilla.org#instantbird

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

We would like to thank the early testers and users of the 0.1 release who provided some great feedback and helped us make Instantbird better!