Fresh off the press: Shredder alpha 1, the first alpha release of the next version of Thunderbird, is available for download!

As I mentioned previously, we’re going to be calling the alpha releases of Thunderbird Shredder, to make sure that people don’t get confused and download unstable releases thinking that they’re “the final thing”. That said, I’m quite pleased with where it seems Shredder a1 has landed from a quality point of view. It has very few feature changes, so don’t expect many changes from Thunderbird 2, but it is built on a quite substantially revised codebase (sharing much with Firefox 3), and therefore forms a great foundation for us to start making more substantive changes. There are some known problems, but many of us have been using nightlies for weeks with no permanent damage.

It’s been quite an education to go through even this “simple” release, starting with bug triage and driving through tree freezing, build engineering, QA, website updates, etc. Much of the release work was done by people who had never done it before, relying on the kind assistance of people who had. It wasn’t a perfect release, but I’m still quite proud of the entire team. I’d like to express my thanks to everyone involved, for their patience in this at-times stressful process. It’ll get easier and smoother each time, promise!

Now onto planning alpha 2…