Supported networks

First and foremost, Instantbird is an instant messaging client with a wide variety of supported networks, including:

• AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
• Facebook Chat
• Google Talk
• Twitter
• Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger)
• XMPP (Jabber)
• Yahoo! Messenger

But also many others like: Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MySpaceIM, Netsoul, QQ, SIMPLE, Yahoo! JAPAN, and even more optionally available on the Instantbird Add-Ons website, such as Omegle and LJ Talk (LiveJournal).

Extensibility

We feel that a user should be able to make their instant messaging client their own: we feel Instantbird can be customized best by giving the user a simple and efficient user interface, and not attempting to include hundreds of bundled options, but allowing the user to customize via the powerful extensibility included in the Mozilla platform. All elements of Instantbird are customizable, from the message theme itself (we’ve built on the great message style format used in Adium) to the Instantbird theme, user interface and protocols. There are already over 250 add-ons available, here are some of our favorites:

• Colorize — change a buddy’s color in a private conversation based on their name
• Highlight — be notified of certain words in a chat as if they were your nickname
• Tab Complete — tab completion of nicknames and commands
• Reply to Nick — allows easy replying: double clicking a message in the chat inserts the sender’s name in the message input box
• Show Nick — colors the nicknames in messages in multi-user chats
• Vertical Tabs — too many conversations open? Move the tabs from horizontal to vertical!

Respecting users

As part of our belief in respecting our users, we give them an ad-free experience and respect their privacy by not collecting any information about them (Instantbird contacts our servers only when checking for updates, or in the unfortunate and uncommon event of a crash).

About us

The Instantbird team is a group of volunteers who are passionate about empowering instant messaging users by providing a stable, fun instant messenger. Read more about who we are and our core beliefs and values.

While Instantbird has received invaluable support from the Mozilla community at large, it hasn’t been funded in any way by the Mozilla Foundation. The company-quality infrastructure deployed to build and support Instantbird has been funded by the initial creators who strongly believe in the importance of this project. The increasingly fast growth of Instantbird’s user base leads us to believe the project could find some user-respecting revenue streams from which the project could become economically sustainable and empower the non-profit created for it to start hiring key contributors, following a model similar to what Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.

We’d like to thank all of our contributors and translators who have helped build Instantbird. In addition, we’d also like to thank our invaluable beta and nightly testers who provide timely bug reports and help track down regressions!

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to check out Instantbird, if you like it please share it with your friends; if you’re sharing it with your non-English-speaking friends, the website is now localized too! If you have questions feel free to contact us.

If you are writing about Instantbird and need a logo or are out of time to produce screenshots, we have image resources for you. If this is more convenient to you, this announcement is also available in a press release format.

Share Instantbird with your friends on twitter or Facebook!

The current system

Since the beginning of the Instantbird project, we have released versions numbered 0.x.y.z:

• 0. indicates that the initial goals of the project haven’t been reached yet.
• x is the major version number. For example, Instantbird 0.2 was a major version for which we made very significant changes.
• y is the minor version number, incremented when a release is very similar to the previous one, but with some new features. We released Instantbird 0.1.1, 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 which were minor new versions.
• z was used only for emergency bugfix releases. For example we released 0.1.2.1 a day after 0.1.2 because of a very common crash on Windows with some MSN accounts (not those we used during our testing of course). We also released Instantbird 0.1.3.1 when Instantbird 0.1.3 was no longer able to connect to the ICQ network.

This version numbering scheme made a lot of sense when the project was initially a “XUL UI for Pidgin” and the goal was to reach “feature parity” with Pidgin for Instantbird 1.0. We have, however, supported features that Pidgin doesn’t have for a long time, thus defining the completion of Instantbird 1.0 as a comparison with Pidgin doesn’t make sense any more. Actually, our roadmap has stated for a long time already that the 1.0 goal is a “Simple, usable and extensible user interface.”

In addition to the 0.x.y.z version number, we are using “aN” and “bN” suffixes for alpha and beta releases (0.3b1 for example), so the version number in itself has nothing to do with stability (actually, our testers report that even our nightly builds are stable!). 0.<something> only means that we haven’t reached our initial goals, not that the version isn’t stable.

Received feedback

While linux enthusiasts are used to have great software with a not-yet-1.0 version number, on Windows a 0.* version number was a bit misleading and we received mostly 2 kinds of feedback about the version number:

• “Wow, I can’t believe it’s so stable and featureful with such a low version number!” (user who has downloaded and tested it)
• “Oh, it looks cool, but with such a low version number, it’s a pre-alpha, it can’t be stable, I’ll give it a try when it reaches 1.0.”

Disappointing, isn’t it?

Next

We are about to release Instantbird 0.3. This is a major version of Instantbird, with more changes than any previous release. With the current changes in the Mozilla release cycle, we are very unlikely to ever release again a version containing so many changes at once (more details on how we will adapt to release much more frequently in the future in another post soon after the release). When releasing Instantbird 0.2, we hesitated between incrementing the major version number by only one (which is what we did), or skipping a few version numbers to go straight to 0.5, because we felt we were half way through on our goals of delivering a simple, easy to use, cross-platform, multi-protocol, extensible instant messaging application. After the fact, given the feedback related to the low version number that we received, we regretted that we didn’t go ahead and release it as Instantbird 0.5.

What we called Instantbird 0.3 up to now is most likely the last major release in which we change important things in every parts of the code base at once. We don’t feel that we’re only “half way through”, so this time we won’t have regrets: It’s going to be released as Instantbird 1.0. Tomorrow!

Tags

Grouped contacts

If several networks are usable to IM the same person, you will no longer be annoyed by seeing that person listed several times in your contact list. Just drag and drop one of these contacts onto another and Instantbird will know they are both ways to contact the same person.

During future conversations, if your contact suddenly starts talking to you from a different network, the conversation will continue in the same tab. A system message will be displayed in the conversation to unobtrusively notify you of this change.

If you want to start talking to a different account of your contact, you can do so easily with a click on the protocol icon at the top right of the conversation UI:

When starting a conversation from the contact list, Instantbird will automatically select the best way to reach your contact, based on availability information and your preference with regard to the various ways to contact this person. You can change this preference by expanding a contact (with the down arrow icon) and then using drag and drop to reorder the accounts.

Other noticable changes

• The contact list is now sorted: both tags and contacts inside a tag appear alphabetically sorted.
• Changes in the displayed information are smoothly animated, making them at the same time easier to understand and less interrupting.
• Closing the contact list window, which is not needed all the time, will no longer close Instantbird. On Windows and Linux it will be minimized to the system tray (this behavior can be customized in the Preference dialog); on Mac it can be easily reopened from the menubar.

1. How much time has passed between 2 messages?

That’s actually still an indirect answer to another question: has that person talking to me actually read what I said and thought about it before replying? Sometimes when receiving an answer that doesn’t seem to take into account what has just been said, it’s just that the message wasn’t read yet at the time the reply was written.

I believe having to read and compare mentally 2 timestamps to get that information is overly complicated and we can convey this information visually:

The vertical space between Bubbles is used to show how much time separates messages. If 2 people talked at the same second, their bubbles will almost touch each other. If there’s been a pause between the messages, there will be some space between the bubbles.

In order to not waste too much space when 2 messages are separated by a long time, I decided that the first few seconds would cause a much bigger increase of the space than the next seconds and minutes (for the readers who care about the details: it’s a logarithmic representation of the time).

This makes it easy to see a difference in time just after a message was received (the very few seconds that make the difference between a likely-read message and a most-likely-not-read-yet message), but makes it hard to evaluate time intervals of several minutes. To address that, when messages are separated by over 5 minutes, the exact time is displayed between the bubbles in gray text:

2. Is this message old?

This question is especially interesting when returning to the computer after being away, and having several conversations with new messages, to decide which one to answer to first. If a message has already been waiting there for an hour or so, the person has probably moved on already, and is most likely not actively waiting for your answer. However, if a message was sent only a few seconds or minutes ago, it’s reasonable to expect that the person is still at the other end and still remembers what was discussed.

To answer this question, my proposition is to make the space between the latest message and the text input box vary exactly like the space between 2 bubbles. Unlike the time between 2 bubbles which doesn’t change, the time between the last message and now changes continuously, so displaying this time requires an animation: messages will “scroll away” as they get old. If a message is older than 5 minutes, the time since it appeared will be written (omitting seconds, so that the text displayed doesn’t change continuously).

Just arrived message:

Message arrived a while ago:

3. When did I say that?

This question occurs occasionally when looking for something in the backlog (typically using the findbar). In this case, the time is actually the desired information, but seconds are irrelevant, so only the hour and minutes need to be displayed. For this case, I decided to display the time of the first message of a bubble when the bubbles is hovered:

4. What was the time of a specific message?

This rather rare question was already addressed with a little known feature of the existing bubble theme: when hovering a message, a tooltip appears showing a timestamp for that specific message.

5. When quoting messages (to paste in emails for example), I need the messages to have some time information associated with them in plain text!

While this is a valid concern, it’s out of the scope of the message theme design, as Instantbird 0.2 already supported a nice feature that we called “magic copy”: when a selection inside a conversation is copied into the clipboard, Instantbird will detect which messages are selected, and “prettyprint” them so that whatever message theme is currently in used doesn’t change the appearance of quoted messages.