From the "It's About Time!" files:

One of the big things that Mozilla's Thunderbird has been missing for years is a calendar. It's usually the number one thing I hear about whenever anyone compares Thunderbird against Outlook.

That's where the Mozilla Lightning project is supposed to come in - providing a Calendar plugin (based on Mozilla Sunbird) for Thunderbird.

The only problem is that the project has seemingly been delayed, for years.

The last time I wrote about Lightning was nearly two years ago, when we were all expecting Lightning 1.0 to be released.

Guess what? After years of debate and delay, Lightning 1.0 is being released this month. September 27th to be precise.

"...some users and especially corporate users are cautious when they read beta and don't see that it has the same quality as all our other releases," Mozilla developer Philipp Kewisch wrote in a blog post. "Aside from that we also had trouble with uploading releases to addons.mozilla.org (they are automatically marked beta and require admin intervention to make them public for everyone) and we are constantly in need of new sub-version numbers."

Mozilla's Calendar efforts have lagged behind for years, so it's great to see this change. Sure, it's mostly a nomenclature change, but it is a significant one that will bring new life to Sunbird and Lightning.

It's a move that is looooooong overdue.