The Mozilla Foundation is developing an enhanced calendar extension for Thunderbird, its popular e-mail application.
According to a post on Mozillazine.org, “Lightning,” the enhanced calendar function, will offer “a set of user features that is much more competitive with Outlook, especially in enterprise usage.”
Sunbird has been available for a long time as an extension for both Thunderbird and the Firefox browser. It was derived from Mozilla suites integrated calendar function.
Lightning is not intended to replace Sunbird. Lightning, the Mozilla Calendar, and Sunbird (the current calendar plug-in for Thunderbird and Firefox), “will share large amounts of code,” the Mozillazine.org article says.
“While the current extension only aims for a loose integration with Thunderbird, Lightning aims to integrate into the main Thunderbird UI and user interaction model as tightly as possible,” the article states.
Version 0.1 of Lightning is expected to be released in November. The Lightening roadmap is available