Mozilla fans rejoice!   Fans of Firefox, Thunderbird, and/or Songbird applications will be pleased to see that Mozilla has just entered into the instant messenger market with the release of beta version 0.1 of InstantBird, which is available for Windows, Apple, and Linux users.  This beta version still includes some bugs and some problems with Ubuntu versions of Linux, but seems to be pretty reliable.   The interface needs a lot of work as well, but I’m sure that will be improved once all of the features have been implemented.   It also includes Mozilla’s trademark add-ons, allowing users to build extensions for InstantBird.

For those that are interested in trying this out, it looks to pretty much be the equivalent of an early version of Pidgin.   It is based on the same code library as Pidgin (libpurple), and will serve as a multi-client chat program that connects to popular instant messenger services like Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger.

Mozilla’s future plans include attempting to compete with Pidgin by adding similar features, then add video and voice features.  Hopefully once voice is done, Skype compatibility will be included.