Instantbird is an instant messaging client that allows you to talk to your contacts on all major social networks through a single comfortable user interface. It allows you to add your accounts on all the supported networks, and it is capable of importing your contacts from them all automatically. You can set your online status to available, unavailable or offline, too.
When you run the program for the first time, you are automatically asked to add one of your accounts on any of the supported networks, which you can do easily via the program's wizard, which guides you step by step. Afterwards, you can add more of your accounts with the same simplicity. On the program's main window, you can select whether to show your offline contacts or only those who are available for a conversation. Besides, you can see your online status at all times.
To better the program's functionality, it also supports add-ons and extensions, which allow you to personalize Instantbird in many ways. You can download a large number of them freely from Instantbird's website, and install them on the program. There are add-ons to add emoticons to your messages, to sort your contacts by status, and to get a notification when a contact changes his status, just to mention a few. There are also some themes you can download and install to change the program's look and feel.
To sum up, Instantbird is a versatile program that will certainly be very helpful to any person talking to their contacts very frequently, especially if they belong to different social networks.
v1.2 [Aug 12, 2012]
- The log viewer shows conversations just like the conversation view, thanks to a new JSON-based log file format that stores meta-data along with the text of the conversation.
- Support for Bonjour has been added (requires the Bonjour Print Services on Windows or Avahi on Linux).
- Improved user interface for multi-user chats:
* Better tab completion, see our blog post for details.
* It is easier to tell who is active, as only nicknames of participants who have talked are coloured in the participant list.
- IRC enhancements:
* Channels are automatically rejoined after reconnects.
* Instantbird tracks the status of IRC contacts more precisely by using the WATCH or MONITOR commands, if they're supported.
* ChanServ messages are displayed in the channel they reference.
* No more noisy messages from NickServ interrupting you after a successful automatic identification on login.
- Passwords are now stored in the Mozilla password manager for improved security.
- As in Firefox and Thunderbird, it's possible to protect them with a master password.
- Easily create new accounts now that the account wizard offers a list of the most popular networks first and shows all supported networks on demand.
- Better system tray integration: you can now change the status directly from the icon's context menu.
- Quickly find where you left off in a conversation: The position of the first unread message is now marked visually (and you can quickly jump there by pressing Alt-PgUp/PgDn or swiping).
- Restoring long conversations will now show a progress bar instead of freezing the user interface until all the messages are loaded.
- Previously read ("context") messages are now distinguishable from new messages (when restoring from hold) in all default message styles. These styles now also respect the font setting from Preferences->Content.
- Keyboard navigation of conversations has been improved by allowing scrolling from an (empty) input textbox: just use the arrow keys, Page Up/Down, or Home/End! There are also new shortcuts for putting a conversation on hold (ESC) and opening the log viewer (Ctrl+Shift+H, like "History" on Firefox).
- Major accessibility improvements have been made to new messages, contact groups and contacts.
- For Add-on Developers:
* Control sound preferences more precisely: for example Advanced Sound Controls.
* Reorder the contact list: for example Sort By Status.
* It's now possible to easily add new protocols using JavaScript: for example VZnet Chats.
- Under the Hood:
* We now have our own extensible JavaScript implementations for:
+ Facebook Chat and Google Talk, based on our own XMPP protocol plugin (from Google Summer of Code 2011).
+ IRC
* Updated: Instantbird 1.2 is based Mozilla 14.0.1 which brings great new possibilities for add-on developers and uses libpurple 2.10.4.
* The license of most of the code was updated to the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0, official builds of Instantbird 1.2 are distributed under the GNU Public License 2.0 or later.
* We're using libqq-pidgin now for QQ since QQ is no longer included in libpurple.
* Platform changes forced us to drop support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP before Service Pack 2. Please upgrade to Windows XP SP2 or later.
