I’m excited to announce the release of Instantbird 0.3 beta, the first localized preview of what we have been working on for months, available in 10 locales (Czech, German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Slovak and Ukrainian)!

In addition to the cool features already introduced in the previous two alpha releases (among which the Twitter support, tags, contacts merging, …), this beta brings significant appearance changes with user icons, an updated tab style, the improved default message theme, Aero glass effects on Windows and more awesome new features!

As Instantbird 0.3 is almost finished and already localized, thanks to the great work of our localizers who were eager to share Instantbird with people speaking their language, this beta release is a great opportunity to give Instantbird a try, play with it, and report bugs!

Download Instantbird 0.3 beta now!

We look forward to receiving your feedback to help us make the final Instantbird 0.3 release (planned for this month!) a piece of software you will want to share with all your friends!

We are pleased to announce that Instantbird 0.3 alpha 2 has just been released.

This release contains the first visible changes on the road to making Instantbird 0.3 awesome:

• Contacts: If you talk to the same person on multiple IM networks you can now combine the buddies from each network into a single contact. Just drag and drop one onto the other and they will be merged!
• Tags: Tags have replaced groups in the buddy list. Even though our tag system isn’t fully implemented yet, there are already some new features. For example, a tag can be hidden by clicking the “x” on the right side of the buddy list, all buddies from this tag will then show in an “Other Contacts” tag automatically, which is shown at the bottom of the buddy list.
• Windows (and Linux) users will appreciate the minimize to system tray feature, for which we borrowed some code from the popular MinTrayR add-on. By default Instantbird will minimize to tray when the “x” is clicked, to quit the application choose “Quit” from the File menu or right click on the system tray icon and choose “Quit”. This behavior can be changed from the preferences window.
• On Mac it’s now possible to close the Contacts window without quitting the application. A click on the dock will reopen it.

This release also contains very significant invisible changes, including the ability to create JavaScript protocol plugins and the upgrade to the Mozilla 2.0 platform (which Firefox 4.0 is based on). Add-on developers will like this, especially because of the new ability to create restartless add-ons.

Download or learn more about Instantbird 0.3 alpha 2.

Instantbird 0.3 alpha 1 has just been released.

This release contains very significant changes, including the ability to create JavaScript protocol plugins and the upgrade to the Mozilla 2.0 platform. Most of the changes are not yet visible in the user interface, so we would not advise current users of the 0.2 version to update.

However, it includes basic support for Twitter and is already quite stable; so it will please early adopters and testers who don’t go as far as to use nightly builds (which update themselves everyday with the newest code). Add-on developers will also be interested, especially because of the new ability to create restartless add-ons.