Instantbird 1.5 Release Notes

Check out what's new and the known issues about the latest version of Instantbird. As always, you're encouraged to tell us what you think, by giving feedback or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.

What's new?

  • Creating a new conversation tab has been made easier.
    • Clicking the '+' button in a conversation window shows a list of conversations that can be started with a single click.
    • The list is sorted with a frecency algorithm, taking into account how often and how recently you've talked to each contact.
    • This list also automatically includes the channels advertised by the IRC servers you are connected to.
  • New tooltips that better fit the style of Instantbird
  • Improved Multi-user chats user interface:
    • Participants now have context menus that allow you to open private conversations or add them as buddies.
    • Highlighted nicks in chat rooms now have tooltips and context menus.
  • Auto-joined chat rooms that have been put on hold will stay on hold after a restart.
  • A list of alternate nicks for IRC can be configured, in case your preferred nick is taken when you connect.
  • about: pages (e.g. about:config) can now easily be opened with the /about command (e.g. /about config).
  • Retina display support on Mac OS X.
  • Google Talk and Hangouts Android users are now shown as mobile.
  • Google Hangouts users will no longer appear as always typing.
  • Better support for displaying RTL languages in conversations.
  • The vKontakte protocol was removed as the vKontakte service dropped support for connecting with an XMPP client.
  • New for developers: New API to add tab panels with arbitrary content to conversation windows: in-code documentation.
  • Updated to Mozilla 25.
  • Various minor bugs and a few crashers fixed.
  • And more... read the full ChangeLog for details of all code changes since Instantbird 1.4.

Known Issues:

  • NVDA users should update to 2014.1 to work around a bug in the Mozilla platform that leads to "Unknown" being said when scrolling through the contact list.
  • Clicking on URLs doesn't work on some newer Linux distributions, to work around this, open about:config (/about config in a conversation) and search for network.protocol-handler.warn-external, set all of these values to true. You will now be prompted for a program after clicking these links. See bug 1995.