Instantbird 0.3 alpha 2

Instantbird 0.3 is not yet finished. This release is the second preview of what we have been working on in the last few months. Don't hesitate to try it, play with it, and report bugs! If you want to follow our development effort more closely, you may also be interested in nightly builds.

Download

Instantbird runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

Please see the minimum system requirements needed to run Instantbird.

Language Version Windows Mac OS X Linux
English 0.3a2 Download Download Download

You can download addons for this version of Instantbird at addons.instantbird.org.

As Instantbird is an open source project, you can freely download the source code and modify it.

Alpha releases are not localized. If you want to download Instantbird in another language, you should download the current stable release.

What's new?

  • New features:
    • Contact merging: If you talk to the same person on multiple IM networks you can now combine the buddies from each network into a single contact. When opening a new chat the buddy that is online will be chosen automatically and the conversation window will automatically switch buddies if they switch to a different IM network.
    • Tags: Tags will be used to replace the groups in the buddy list. Tags can be hidden by clicking the "x" on the right side of the buddy list, all buddies from this tag will go into an "Other Contacts" tag automatically, which is shown at the bottom of the buddy list.
    • The buddy list can now be ...
      • closed on Mac without Instantbird quitting and reopened from the Dock.
      • minimized to tray on Windows and Linux. By default close (hitting the 'x') on the buddy list will minimize to tray, this can be changed in the preferences.
    • Lots of minor improvements, among them:
      • Unknown status is now differentiated from offline status with different icons.
      • Dark variant of the "Simple" skin.
      • Nicer animations.
      • ... (over 50 code changes since alpha 1, see ChangeLog since alpha 1).
  • New features already in Instantbird 0.3 alpha 1:
    • Twitter support: When the twitter account is connected, a timeline conversation automatically opens. If the conversation is closed by the user, it's reopened automatically when new messages arrive. The user should disconnect the account from the account manager to prevent new messages from being displayed.
      There's a "track" advanced option that allows to specify keywords to track. This is a comma separated list of keywords. Comma means OR, space inside a keyword means AND.
    • Under the hood: Protocol plugins can now be implemented in JavaScript.
  • Updated: Instantbird 0.3a2 is based on libpurple 2.7.11 and Mozilla 2.0.2pre which brings great new possibilities for add-on developers (restartless add-ons for example).
  • Improved stability: we used the crash reports that we got from the 0.2 and 0.3a1 releases and nightly builds to fix bugs that resulted in crashes.
  • And more... read the full ChangeLog for details.

Known issues

  • Sounds do not work when the buddy list is closed on Mac.
  • Commands do not work in protocol overrides (i.e. GTalk, Facebook).
  • Twitter dumps too much debug information to the error console.

Older versions

You can access the archives to download the older versions of Instantbird.