Mozilla Patches Thunderbird, Puts Mozilla Suite To Sleep

Mozilla Corp. late Friday unveiled security fixes for its Thunderbird e-mail client to match patches rolled out for the Firefox browser a week before.

At the same time, the Mountain View, Calif. company also patched the Mozilla browser suite, then said the 1.7.13 version was the last it would produce, putting an end to Mozilla's development of an Internet suite that traces its roots back a dozen years to the original Netscape.

Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 repairs 15 vulnerabilities, two marked "critical" by Mozilla, one of which was also patched in Firefox 1.5.0.2 on April 14. An older edition of Thunderbird, version 1.0.8, was also patched to plug 17 security holes.

Mozilla also updated its same-named suite, which includes a browser, e-mail client, newsgroup reader, IRC client, and HTML editor, to version 1.7.13 by fixing 20 flaws, 12 of them critical.

Version 1.7.13 of the suite will be the final version from Mozilla, as per its "sunset" announcement a week ago when it said it would close the books on Mozilla, Firefox 1.0.x, and Thunderbird 1.0.x.The end of the Mozilla suite puts a bookmark on the longest-running Internet suite, one that traces its genealogy to 1994, when Netscape Navigator was first released in beta (under the name Mosaic), through1996-97's Netscape Communicator suite, and into the 1998 decision to take Netscape open-source.

However, while Mozilla Corp. is ending development of the suite, an independent open-source group, dubbed "SeaMonkey," continues to work on an Internet application suite. SeaMonkey released its latest version, 1.0.1, on April 13.

Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 and 1.0.8 can be downloaded from the Mozilla Corp. site, while Mozilla 1.7.13 is available from the Mozilla Foundation.