Instantbird

For Instantbird 1.1, which will be released soon, we realized a weak spot in our API was the ability to control whether events should be shown to a user or cancelled under certain conditions.  This fits in as part of … Continue reading →

Weekly meetings are held every Monday at 4pm UTC (that’s 6pm for people in France, and 9am for people in San Francisco.) The first weekly status meeting, which everyone is encouraged to attend, was held on #instantbird (irc.mozilla.org) and flo, … Continue reading →

Following the release of Instantbird 1.0, we've received a variety of great feedback (if you haven't read some of our other posts: we love to receive feedback, although we might not always agree) via our contact email address, our IRC channel, our ... [More] bug tracker, Twitter and what ever other ways there are to communicate with us. We'd like to take some time to respond to some of the popular requests we've got (or at the very least, point you to the bug where you can follow any progress). File transfer support: something we definitely want, but we also want to give a good user experience. Unfortunately most protocols do not transfer files efficiently or quickly (and many times they break when behind firewalls, etc.), thus we wish to offer an alternative to using the protocol file transfer before providing support for it: see bug 9. Grouping buddies first by protocol then by group: this has been requested by multiple individuals, but we don't feel it would fit well into Instantbird. Instantbird is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that aims to integrate all of your accounts together (therefore it doesn't make sense to separate your accounts on the contact list). For example, is your "Friend" not your friend whether it's your MSN account, your AIM account or your Facebook account? Of course they still are! But perhaps you have different groups of friends on MSN than on AIM (maybe one is your online gaming buddies and one is your high school friends); well our suggestion is to move them to tags that make more sense (i.e. make an "Online Gaming Buddies" tag for all your MSN friends and a "School Friends" tag for all your AIM friends, in this example). When asking people why they want this, the response usually is "that's what <another IM client> does". Well, ok but we wish that you take more of a 'contact level view' of people: Combine your contacts that are the same person and group them according to how you know them. (You can even put them in multiple tags, if someone is your online gaming buddy AND from school!) If there's a usecase that we're not covering here, please let us know! (And don't forget that Instantbird is fully extensible, so you could certainly write an extension to display the contacts grouped first by protocol if you really need that feature.) Blocking buddies at the protocol level: unfortunately support for this isn't great depending on the protocol, but libpurple does support it. We have two bugs on file; one is to block individual users and another to block all buddies not on your buddy list, which might not be supported by all protocols. Blocking spam: although this is similar to blocking buddies, it's different in that you do not wish to block ALL people not on your buddy list, but of course you still want to ignore the obvious spam messages! See bug 288 and bug 887 for two ideas on how to implement this. Start with the operating system: many people expect an IM client to start with their operating system and although most operating systems provide a way to manually make a program start on boot, it would be convenient for Instantbird to provide an option to do this. This was requested in bug 376. Facebook "Not Authorized" error: we added the solution to the FAQ. Voice/video: we'd love to support voice/video too! But libpurple does not yet support voice/video on Windows or Mac, you can see bug 568 for some information on how we could support it in JavaScript protocols. OTR (off the record messaging): private messaging is something we believe is useful, but it needs to be convenient and transparent to the users (after authentication, of course!). Encrypted chat is not a trivial task, especially when the protocols don't support it, but there's a library (called Off the Record) which handles this for us, we have a bug about integrating it: bug 877. People want 64-bit Linux versions: we actually currently supply unsupported 64-bit builds, and there's a bug about making them official (bug 395). Instantbird interrupts you: if you receive a new IM window Instantbird rudely pops to the front, this is mostly noticeable when using another application as a fullscreen window (bug 926). Luckily for now, there's currently an easy workaround: keep a conversation window opened and minimized, so that a new conversation appears in a tab of the existing window instead of a new window. Being able to search/filter the contacts would be helpful: we agree! In fact we filed a bug about it: bug 631. System tray issues: Persist the tray icon: the system tray icon should stay visible even when the buddy list is restored, see bug 749. Single click to restore the tray icon: an extension was created to support this and by default the next version of Instantbird will use single click on Linux and double click on Windows (see bug 870). Expand the system tray context menu to change the status: this would be helpful and would match what was added to the jumplists for Windows 7, see bug 750 about any work on this. We've heard that some protocols are having problems: QQ does not work: we've had reports of QQ not connecting (QQ was actually dropped from Pidgin and spun off into a separate project (libqq), which we intend to include. ICQ does not connect with default settings: we have begun to investigate this in bug 894, but it seems that SSL is broken for now. Twitter has a variety of issues and needs more work, including: retweeting and replying to messages, direct messaging and showing a list of who you follow and who follows you. A few suggestions to replace the libpurple MSN with msn-pecan: we actually have still not updated to the newest MSN code from libpurple 2.9.0 (as it was causing crashes for one of our developers), see bug 907 for the details. People want more protocols: IBM Lotus Sametime: we've actually added support for this in the nightly builds and it'll be included in the next version! Bonjour: this should be fairly easy to add on Mac, but Windows and Linux would require an extra library from Apple to support Bonjour. If you're interested in adding it, see bug 944. SIPE (Microsoft Office Communicator): one of our developers has started working on this in bug 976. Skype: supporting Skype is non-trivial and requires Skype to be running in the background, use of (the non-free) SkypeKit or reverse engineering the protocol, see bug 563 for some ideas. Lots of positive feedback! Including that Instantbird works great with screen readers! We've received TONS of other great feedback as well, this is just a summary of the popular feedback we've received. Please remember that one of the team's goals is to keep Instantbird as light as possible, and for that reason, we are trying to encourage the idea of creating add-ons for things that may not seem as a core necessity for the larger audience. Development of Instantbird 1.1 is already well underway. We have a tentative roadmap for it. We definitely plan to release faster than we used to do before Instantbird 1.0. Our current target date for the next release is the end of September! [Less]

This is a question people keep asking us. With some variations ("Why should I switch from Adium?"), or sometimes without the question mark ("There's nothing more than Pidgin"). We are not competing... I think people ask us this question because ... [More] they perceive us as competing with Pidgin/Adium/[insert the name of your favorite open source IM client]. But there's no good answer to that question, because we are not competing, here is why: we share values. We believe that instant messaging technologies should be freely accessible and open: people should not be locked in closed systems. we share a technology stand point: we think that to empower people to increasingly use the open IM technologies that we like, we need to offer people a tool that makes it easy to access both promising open technologies and legacy networks. we share code. Instantbird, like Adium, relies on libpurple, which is at the heart of Pidgin, to connect to legacy networks. We take this code, but we also give back: several changes made to libpurple to improve its reliability in Instantbird are now part of Pidgin. We are working together, and Instantbird developers are definitely part of the Pidgin developer community. ... but we offer an alternative I can easily understand why people think we compete though, as we do provide an alternative. I assume people who ask the previously mentioned question actually wanted the answer to another question: How is Instantbird different from Pidgin? Now, this is a question we can answer! I will actually provide several different answers: the first will satisfy technically oriented people, the others should be understandable by everybody. Most of my points compares Instantbird to Pidgin, but are still applicable when comparing Instantbird to other IM clients. Technical differences The biggest technical difference between Pidgin and Instantbird is that Pidgin uses GTK+ and Instantbird uses the Mozilla XUL platform to display its user interface. The Mozilla platform has advantages compared to GTK+: The Mozilla platform is well known for its awesome extensibility. Add-ons can modify almost anything that is part of the Instantbird user interface, and the skills required to build add-ons are similar to the skills required to create a website, as the technologies are basically the same: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, ... Instantbird add-ons are easy to install, some can even be installed without restarting the application! (To be fair, Pidgin also supports plugins, but writing them in C requires much more programming knowledge and to compile them for each platform. Pidgin also has Python (via D-Bus) and Perl scripting APIs, but I'm not sure they are actually usable on Windows.) While a GTK+ user interface is native on some Linux desktop operating systems (typically those based on Gnome or XFCE), a XUL user interface also acts native on Windows (we even included some Aero Glass effects for Windows 7) and Mac OS X where GTK may not fit as well. Thanks to the Mozilla accessibility effort, the XUL platform is very accessible and we have received a lot of enthusiastic feedback from users of assistive technologies who love Instantbird. Developing on top of Mozilla also has some (perceived) downsides: We need to ship the whole Mozilla toolkit, which makes us package megabytes of compiled code we didn't write. This means for example that the Instantbird installer for Windows weights 9.9MB. Some people (especially some Miranda fans) seem to think this is huge, but while I like to find ways to reduce the size of the installer we ship, I tend to think at this point it is mostly a non-issue. Just for comparison, the Pidgin installer weights 9.5MB without GTK, and 32.4MB with all its dependencies included. The Mozilla platform has the reputation of using more resources than other browsers/toolkits. The good news is, some bright people are currently making a huge effort to reduce the memory usage, so this will be mitigated in future releases. Plus the situation is not as bad as some people pretend it to be: the memory usage measurements we see in comments about Instantbird aren't that scary, some people start to complain when an application uses 40MB of memory. Hey come on, we are in 2011, new machines have been shipping with gigabytes of memory for years already... I heard from some Linux packagers that the Mozilla build system is not easy to work with for them. While there may be some pain points here, it doesn't really affect the end user. We make Instantbird for you! Some developers make their programs the best for themselves and share it with you, for free. These programs are the result of people's hard work which they offer you as a gift, and so these people deserve respect for that! Unfortunately, it is not unusual that if somehow the product doesn't work out for you, it's your problem, not theirs, and you are free: to fix it, to report the issue and hope someone will fix it, or to look for a greener pasture. Your comments are valued if they help developers make their program better for everybody, for example if it helps fixing bugs that lots of people suffer from. Your opinions and wishes may not be taken into account, however, unless you intend to actually start working on them: patches are welcome, not additional work (people are busy already). We work to make Instantbird the best for you. We look forward to gathering your feedback and acting upon it to make Instantbird even better, for you. We assume that when someone takes the trouble to come and talk with us to complain about something, there's a valid concern. Even when it's well hidden behind factually inexact assertions that we can't agree with. If people cannot express themselves clearly, there's a reason why they are confused, and if a confusion is common, we should find its cause and fix it. As this difference may be a bit theoretical, I'm going to give a concrete example in the next point: the way we deal with stability issues. Stability Crash reports Let's see what happens in the unfortunate event of the user being hit by a bug resulting in a crash of the application: If you are using Pidgin and want to help get the bug fixed, you need to get a backtrace (on Unix systems) or to have installed the debug symbols before the crash so that a crash report could be dumped to the disk (on Windows). Then you need to open a ticket on trac and give all the info you have. As this process may be a bit scary for most end-users, I'm afraid valuable feedback could get lost. If the same issue happens with Instantbird, first we apologize: Then all you have to do to send us the technical information about the crash is a single click in this crash reporter dialog. We collect all these crash reports and analyze them to improve the stability of the next version of Instantbird. Nightly testing In addition to collecting crash reports, another thing we do to maintain a high stability level for Instantbird is that we encourage early adopters to run with nightly builds of Instantbird which are updated almost daily with the very latest version of our source code. Therefore, if something we changed degrades the stability, we receive crash reports way before the defective change ends up in a release you may use. If some change feels a bit risky to us, we push it to our testers at least a week before releasing, or we delay it so that it gets appropriate testing before being included in the next release. Just as a comparison, Pidgin's currently in development code is tested only by developers and others people are discouraged from attempting to use it. Learn more about our stability efforts. Changing We keep seeing comments of people (who have not actually tried Instantbird) who think we should go improve Pidgin instead of "wasting time" on Instantbird. In the page of our website where we explain why we create Instantbird, we conclude: It's time to bring back innovation! To do this, we need to be able to change things easily. As Instantbird is still a young project, we can change fast. Pidgin on the other hand is already a mature project with policies about when it's acceptable to change APIs or when they are frozen: it's basically impossible to change an API in Pidgin until a new major version is released (so after the Pidgin 2.0.0 release, the API changes have to wait until Pidgin 3.0.0 comes out to be included: currently Pidgin 2.0.0 was released over four years ago!). This is a good thing to ensure the plugins stay compatible, but it slows down the changes to the application. Different feature sets This is my last point even though most people would expect to see it first. Instantbird and Pidgin have different feature sets. On one hand, Pidgin has some features that Instantbird doesn't have. Some that we will have in the future. Some that we don't want to have. I'm not going to give a full list here because I don't actually have a list of all Pidgin features to compare and check what we have and what we don't have. We are neither trying to copy Pidgin nor to directly compete against it, so such a list would be irrelevant anyway. On the other hand, Instantbird has some features that Pidgin doesn't have (message themes, automatic updates, inline search, ...) and even some unique features (for two examples, see my blog posts introducing Time Bubbles and Magic copy). Conclusion So, should you switch to Instantbird? If I were you, I would. But I'm not you. Deciding which IM client you use is your choice, based on your taste, your needs, your feelings. It's your decision, really! If you like what you currently have and see nothing you like in what Instantbird offers, just keep using what you like. If you love Instantbird, then, obviously you should use it. If you are in the middle and like Instantbird but for some reason can't use it because something you really need is missing or doesn't work, please tell us about it, we are eager to receive your feedback! And maybe there's already an add-on to customize Instantbird to do what you wanted that we can point you to. In any case, we are not going to try to force you to switch from Pidgin or whatever IM client you may be using right now to Instantbird. We respect your freedom, we respect your choices, we love you! [Less]

Servers load Instantbird 1.0 has been very quickly downloaded over ten thousand of times. In fact, it happened so fast (especially immediately after we have been featured on lifehacker) that our server couldn't handle the load. We have very quickly ... [More] been able to mirror our main website on another server, which allowed people to keep discovering and downloading Instantbird 1.0, but we had to close the add-ons website for a while as the load it couldn't handle was also putting down other services that we really needed to keep online, especially our bug database. We have tried to re-open the add-ons website at a quieter time, but the server was unresponsive again within half an hour. This morning we tried to improve the website's performance by adding some caching mechanism and reopened again (at a time when most Americans are asleep) for a try. Again it fall down. Some people very kindly offered help and proposed to host the website on their server, but it's difficult to trust someone we barely know to host a website that requires our SSL certificate. As the add-ons website had been closed for almost 2 days already (sorry for the inconvenience!) and extensibility is a key differentiator of Instantbird compared to other similar IM clients, we decided that this situation couldn't last any longer and we solved the problem by throwing money at it: we ordered a beefier server (Quad Core CPU, 16GB of RAM) and migrated the add-ons website to it as quickly as we could. The website reopened this afternoon, and our testing confirmed that the new server can easily handle the load, even with more visitors than we had when the previous server stopped responding. It's ready for a lot more people coming! Don't hesitate to tell your friends to try Instantbird . Feedback We have received a massive amount of feedback since the release. Most was positive or extremely positive. We received lots of encouragements. We even received some love letters! Some of the feedback showed there was some confusion, for example about how we are different from Pidgin (which we will be the subject of another post to clarify things). We also received constructive criticism, good bug reports. The most common request is an easy way to retweet or to reply to a tweet. We will work on that soon . Tab completion of nick names is also commonly requested, but even though it's clear we need to have this by default in the future, we can usually satisfy the reporter by pointing to the great (restartless!) Tab Complete add-on. Updates As no alarming issue has been reported in Instantbird 1.0 which is already widely used, we have decided to turn on major updates from Instantbird 0.2 to Instantbird 1.0. Users of Instantbird 0.2 will be offered an update shortly with an update prompt looking like this: Users of our 0.3pre nightly builds will be offered an update to a nightly build numbered 1.1a1pre in the new few days. Conclusion All in all, it's been a great release and the last few days have been exciting (even though they were also exhausting). We look forward to continue hearing your feedback (and to actually act upon it!). Don't hesitate to share Instantbird with your friends. Our servers are ready! [Less]

The Instantbird team is pleased to announce a polished Instantbird 1.0, released today in 11 locales. Instantbird is an extremely easy to use and highly extensible instant messaging client that aims to respect its users! Building on the ... [More] experience available via open-source software, Instantbird is able to harness the power of Pidgin (via its libpurple protocol library) and of Mozilla's Firefox technology, to provide access to a wide variety of instant messaging networks, while providing an easy (and well known) extension platform. Although Instantbird is fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), we strive to present a native look-and-feel to the user interface. Get Instantbird 1.0 now! Supported networks First and foremost, Instantbird is an instant messaging client with a wide variety of supported networks, including: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) Facebook Chat Google Talk Twitter Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger) XMPP (Jabber) Yahoo! Messenger But also many others like: Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MySpaceIM, Netsoul, QQ, SIMPLE, Yahoo! JAPAN, and even more optionally available on the Instantbird Add-Ons website, such as Omegle and LJ Talk (LiveJournal). Extensibility We feel that a user should be able to make their instant messaging client their own: we feel Instantbird can be customized best by giving the user a simple and efficient user interface, and not attempting to include hundreds of bundled options, but allowing the user to customize via the powerful extensibility included in the Mozilla platform. All elements of Instantbird are customizable, from the message theme itself (we've built on the great message style format used in Adium) to the Instantbird theme, user interface and protocols. There are already over 250 add-ons available, here are some of our favorites: Colorize -- change a buddy's color in a private conversation based on their name Highlight -- be notified of certain words in a chat as if they were your nickname Tab Complete -- tab compeletion of nicknames and commands Reply to Nick -- allows easy replying: double clicking a message in the chat inserts the sender's name in the message input box Show Nick -- colors the nicknames in messages in multi-user chats Vertical Tabs -- too many conversations open? Move the tabs from horizontal to vertical! Respecting users As part of our belief in respecting our users, we give them an ad-free experience and respect their privacy by not collecting any information about them (Instantbird contacts our servers only when checking for updates, or in the unfortunate and uncommon event of a crash). About us The Instantbird team is a group of volunteers who are passionate about empowering instant messaging users by providing a stable, fun instant messenger. Read more about who we are and our core beliefs and values. While Instantbird has received invaluable support from the Mozilla community at large, it hasn't been funded in any way by the Mozilla Foundation. The company-quality infrastructure deployed to build and support Instantbird has been funded by the initial creators who strongly believe in the importance of this project. The increasingly fast growth of Instantbird's user base leads us to believe the project could find some user-respecting revenue streams from which the project could become economically sustainable and empower the non-profit created for it to start hiring key contributors, following a model similar to what Mozilla has been doing with Firefox. We'd like to thank all of our contributors and translators who have helped build Instantbird. In addition, we'd also like to thank our invaluable beta and nightly testers who provide timely bug reports and help track down regressions! Thanks for reading! Thanks for taking the time to check out Instantbird, if you like it please share it with your friends; if you're sharing it with your non-English-speaking friends, the website is now localized too! If you have questions feel free to contact us. If you are writing about Instantbird and need a logo or are out of time to produce screenshots, we have image resources for you. If this is more convenient to you, this announcement is also available in a press release format. Share Instantbird with your friends on twitter or Facebook! [Less]

The current system Since the beginning of the Instantbird project, we have released versions numbered 0.x.y.z: 0. indicates that the initial goals of the project haven't been reached yet. x is the major version number. For example, Instantbird ... [More] 0.2 was a major version for which we made very significant changes. y is the minor version number, incremented when a release is very similar to the previous one, but with some new features. We released Instantbird 0.1.1, 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 which were minor new versions. z was used only for emergency bugfix releases. For example we released 0.1.2.1 a day after 0.1.2 because of a very common crash on Windows with some MSN accounts (not those we used during our testing of course). We also released Instantbird 0.1.3.1 when Instantbird 0.1.3 was no longer able to connect to the ICQ network. This version numbering scheme made a lot of sense when the project was initially a "XUL UI for Pidgin" and the goal was to reach "feature parity" with Pidgin for Instantbird 1.0. We have, however, supported features that Pidgin doesn't have for a long time, thus defining the completion of Instantbird 1.0 as a comparison with Pidgin doesn't make sense any more. Actually, our roadmap has stated for a long time already that the 1.0 goal is a "Simple, usable and extensible user interface." In addition to the 0.x.y.z version number, we are using "aN" and "bN" suffixes for alpha and beta releases (0.3b1 for example), so the version number in itself has nothing to do with stability (actually, our testers report that even our nightly builds are stable!). 0.<something> only means that we haven't reached our initial goals, not that the version isn't stable. Received feedback While linux enthusiasts are used to have great software with a not-yet-1.0 version number, on Windows a 0.* version number was a bit misleading and we received mostly 2 kinds of feedback about the version number: "Wow, I can't believe it's so stable and featureful with such a low version number!" (user who has downloaded and tested it) "Oh, it looks cool, but with such a low version number, it's a pre-alpha, it can't be stable, I'll give it a try when it reaches 1.0." Disappointing, isn't it? Next We are about to release Instantbird 0.3. This is a major version of Instantbird, with more changes than any previous release. With the current changes in the Mozilla release cycle, we are very unlikely to ever release again a version containing so many changes at once (more details on how we will adapt to release much more frequently in the future in another post soon after the release). When releasing Instantbird 0.2, we hesitated between incrementing the major version number by only one (which is what we did), or skipping a few version numbers to go straight to 0.5, because we felt we were half way through on our goals of delivering a simple, easy to use, cross-platform, multi-protocol, extensible instant messaging application. After the fact, given the feedback related to the low version number that we received, we regretted that we didn't go ahead and release it as Instantbird 0.5. What we called Instantbird 0.3 up to now is most likely the last major release in which we change important things in every parts of the code base at once. We don't feel that we're only "half way through", so this time we won't have regrets: It's going to be released as Instantbird 1.0. Tomorrow! [Less]

Another very visible change between Instantbird 0.2 and 0.3 is the possibility to set a user icon and a display name. You will see a place holder icon at the top of the buddy list, just click it (this will open a file picker) to set an icon. The ... [More] icon will be automatically resized and converted to fit the various size and format requirements of the IM networks you use. Similarly, click the "Display name" place holder to edit it. This name will be visible in your contacts' buddy lists (unfortunately this currently works only for MSN). Here you go, your friends will now easily recognize you: Conversation windows have also been changed to display your contacts' icons and some more information (display name, status message, ...): I can already hear some comments about how much space this new information bar takes (or wastes) in all conversation windows. Yes, this takes a lot of space, we know. People tend to use big or very big windows for chatting (sometimes even full screen!) but if you like the ability to chat in small windows, don't worry, we love you too! Just resize the window and this information bar will shrink to ensure you still see the actual content of the conversation: And for very small conversation windows, the bar will completely disappear, leaving only the strictly necessary user interface: [Less]

The contact list was identified as a weak area of Instantbird 0.2. It has been dramatically improved for Instantbird 0.3 which we plan to release next week. Tags Goodbye groups Like most IM clients, Instantbird 0.2 had each contact placed in a ... [More] group, leading users to organize contacts a bit like files are placed in folders on the disk. While this seems ok at first, placing contacts inside groups doesn't work well when thinking of the contact as a person. Don't you have a friend (group 'friend') who is also a coworker (group 'colleagues')? For this reason, with Instantbird 0.3 we replaced the notion of "Groups" with the notion of "Tags" throughout the user interface. While groups used to be containers for your contacts (it was possible to move a contact from one group into another), tags are additional data attached to the contact (you can add or remove tags on a contact, but no longer 'move' a contact) and thus a single contact can have multiple tags. To change the tags attached to a contact, use the "Tags..." context menu item of the contact; it shows a list of the existing tags with a check mark next to the tags attached to the selected contact. Checking/unchecking a tag in this list will attach/detach a tag from the contact. Hidden tags It's pretty common when using several accounts of different protocols on a multi-protocol client for the first time to have contacts scattered around in lots of meaningless tags. These contacts are typically those that have never been moved before and are still in whatever the default group of the various previous clients were. As moving each of these contacts out of these meaningless groups is not really an interesting task, and sometimes is even impossible (if the server doesn't allow us to move it), we have designed a more efficient way to forget the annoyance caused by the pointless resulting tags: when hovering a tag in the contact list, you will see an [x] icon. Clicking it will hide the tag (after showing an explanation the first time). It's possible to manage the list of visible tags (to unhide a tag) from the "Visible tags..." context menu item. Contacts which haven't been associated with a visible tag will be displayed in a special "Other Contacts" tag, always at the bottom of the contact list. Grouped contacts If several networks are usable to IM the same person, you will no longer be annoyed by seeing that person listed several times in your contact list. Just drag and drop one of these contacts onto another and Instantbird will know they are both ways to contact the same person. During future conversations, if your contact suddenly starts talking to you from a different network, the conversation will continue in the same tab. A system message will be displayed in the conversation to unobtrusively notify you of this change. If you want to start talking to a different account of your contact, you can do so easily with a click on the protocol icon at the top right of the conversation UI: When starting a conversation from the contact list, Instantbird will automatically select the best way to reach your contact, based on availability information and your preference with regard to the various ways to contact this person. You can change this preference by expanding a contact (with the down arrow icon) and then using drag and drop to reorder the accounts. Other noticable changes The contact list is now sorted: both tags and contacts inside a tag appear alphabetically sorted. Changes in the displayed information are smoothly animated, making them at the same time easier to understand and less interrupting. Closing the contact list window, which is not needed all the time, will no longer close Instantbird. On Windows and Linux it will be minimized to the system tray (this behavior can be customized in the Preference dialog); on Mac it can be easily reopened from the menubar. [Less]

The surprise and enthusiasm of a few people about the "magic copy" feature I mentioned briefly at the end of my previous post introducing time bubbles reminded me that we forgot to introduce this feature when it landed for Instantbird 0.2 as part of ... [More] our implementation of the Adium message theme system. We decided to use this theme system because it seemed nice overall and was already used by a few other clients as well. However there was something we really didn't like: using a customized message theme could make copied data from the conversation really hard to read, to the point that it would be unsuitable for sending a quote via email. As this may not be very clear yet, let me give an example: This is the text we get when copying the selection to the clipboard and pasting it. This is without our "magic copy" feature of course. I should also note that the Bubbles theme used for this screenshot is not the worst in this regards. I've seen in the description of some themes (not designed for Instantbird) that they were "clipboard friendly", which indicates the theme author took this problem into account and probably had to make some trade-offs between the visual appearance and the usability of copied conversations. As we were not satisfied with this situation (which either makes copying from the conversation poorly usable or restricts theme authors' creativity), we developed a different system that instead of serializing the selected HTML attempts to detect which messages are selected, and to "prettyprint" them based on what Instantbird knows about the message, rather than what is visible and selected. This is the result: If only a part of a single message was selected, the username and timestamp won't be added to the copied strings, it will behave like a normal text copy: As we detect which messages are selected and even know if each message was fully selected or only in part, we can nicely add an ellipsis when a message was cut: This even works when using multiple-selections (press Ctrl on Windows/Linux, and Command on Mac to do this): A few technical details: the template used to serialize copied messages is both localizable and customizable from about:config, it's also possible to completely turn off this feature in case it ever causes some trouble (look for the messenger.conversations.selections.* family of preferences in about:config). This feature has been turned on by default in Instantbird for over a year and nobody complained about it. Actually, it's one of the features that is barely noticed because it just works, but it is something that is really missed if using another IM client after using Instantbird for a while. [Less]