Mozilla Foundation has launched a new subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging. Read the company name guess that this is a new venture that expected to develop a series of messaging related products. And you’re right, as mentioned by Mozilla’s CEO David Ascher, this is a new Mozilla subsidiary that focused on the area of email and Internet communications, with aiming to develop a new cutting-edge Thunderbird 3. The outlined features included integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird), better search facilities, easier configuration, and many more.

I like the fact that Mozilla is putting its effort on developing another good Web product beside Firefox. While the Thunderbird version 3 has not been materialized, the expectation was high because now this upcoming online communication client is being backed by a new startup, with a bunch of talents working day and night on it. But I don’t think this product will generate a lot of buzz as it is not a new tool for open source lovers. If you’re an open source lover, you should heard of an open source organizer mash-up that combine email, calendar, scheduling features, instant messaging (IM) and others into one that called Spicebird.

via [Linux Magazine]

Mozilla is soon to release the newest version of its Sunbird and Lightning, i.e. version 0.3.1 RC1. I came across an interesting news from Mozilla Wiki that with the purpose of calling the user community in participate in the final stage of Sunbird and Lightning testing on February 9th to 10th 2007.

As stated on the Mozilla web page, Sunbird and Lightning are fairly the new applications, still under development of the project developers. Sunbird is designed as a cross-platform calendar whereas Lightning is served as a extension for use directly in Thunderbird, and with the objective in enable users to perform email-related calendaring tasks in an easy manner. Though I can understand both of these two applications share some of the same code, however I believe these two applications are developed independently from each other. Currently, the version that Sunbird and Lightning offered to the public download are version 0.3 respectively.

I wonder what is the actual plan for Mozilla with regard to the aforesaid applications. If they going to integrate Sunbird and Lightning to Thunderbird or SeaMonkey, there will be a strong and powerful all-in-one Internet suite one can realize on the web.

N.B. Mozilla has just released the SeaMonkey version 1.1 on January 18th 2007.