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.

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.