I took the liberty of modifying your scripts so one can do the same thing for installing Thunderbird 1.5
The actual process is just slightly different, the differences are that the old Thunderbird uses ~/.mozilla-thunderbird while the new one uses ~/.thunderbird. This script will create a symlink, ~/.thunderbird, pointing to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird. Also, only one symlink is created in /usr/bin (mozilla-thunderbird). There's also some symlinking being done just within the thunderbird directory to fix the differences in filenames in Ubuntu (where it's named mozilla-thunderbird) and vanilla Thunderbird (where it's just named thunderbird).
Some things that you might want to consider for the firefox-scripts as well:
When testing my scripts, when restoring the old version, I got a lot of questions wether I wanted to remove the read-only files in ~/.mozilla-thundrbird when removing it - especially the extensions tended to be read-only. In my script, the removal of directories is therefore performed using "rm -rf" instead of just "rm -r" so you won't get any such questions. It may be that these files aren't normally read-only though, but they were in my case.
In addition, the verbose-switch to tar creates massive output due to all the filenames, so many messages from the script will get "lost" in the spam. My script therefore does not use -v when unpacking the archive.
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