SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha released

An anonymous reader writes "SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha was released last week. Users of the Mozilla Suite or Netscape should check it out - it contains numerous new features and bugfixes when compared to Mozilla 1.7, but offers the same basic look and feel. There are a few screenshots on the SeaMonkey blog showing off some of the features. For those who don't know, SeaMonkey is the continuation of the Mozilla Suite after the Mozilla Foundation ceased shipping new releases."

SeaMonkey 1.0? What an odd name

[gringer]

I would have preferred something like 2.0, because I've always associated SeaMonkey with the Mozilla Application Suite (which was up to 1.7.11, last time I checked [mozillazine.org]). From a brief glance at the project page, it looks like it has similar functionality to that suite ("all-in-one internet application suite").

Re:Why Seamonkey?

[drac]

Because some people like tight browser-mailer integration. For instance, some people like having a "send page by email" in a browser submenu. or being able to fire up a new mail message with a single hotkey while in the browser window.

Different folks, different preferences.

The point

[TuxPaper]

Wow, first two posts here are asking what' the point is.

The point is that it's a continuation of the Mozilla suite. Just because mozilla.org is too busy to handle the project, doesn't mean that a lot of developers don't want to code for it, nor does it mean that a lot of users don't want to use it.

Who's the target? Simple: People who have Mozilla 1.7.

Why? Same reason people use Mozilla 1.7.

Sure, Firefox is leet and is made by leet ex (and current) Mozilla developers, but it was not made as a replacement for Mozilla.

People who hate Firefox's simplistic options (or hate being uber-leet and going into about:config to change even the simplest config options) are the target. People who want a mail/news app bundled with their browser are a target. People who dislike the attitude of the leet Firefox developers when they first started up are targets.

Go ahead and troll rate me for calling Firefox users/developers leet if you want. I remember distictively when Firefox first came out, the users were bragging they were leet.

Much faster and lighter

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find it entertaning when people say "I run Firefox and Thunderbird because they're lighter".

When you're running both of those at the same time, they load up their own GREs and Geckos, thus are almost twice as heavy on RAM as the single Mozilla/SeaMonkey suite.

Add to that the huge memory leaks in Firefox (how can people advocate it so much when it has large flaws that we bash Microsoft for?).

Please keep the name "Mozilla"

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows the name, and seamonkey is a really bad name for a browser

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The interface is gross

[gowen]

Things shouldn't be 'themable'. Themable is BAD

And the "I'm-apparently-incapable-of-distinguishing-my-per sonal-preferences-from-universal-laws" meme claims another victim.

If you don't like themes, then you don't have use them. Please don't try and generalise them into a universal evil. It makes you look like a retard.

Re:Mozilla Suite

[kernelpanicked]

>>There might be a nice market amongst luddites and regressives, and those who think they are sticking it "to the man" by using something with such an aging and nasty interface.

Odd. The interface is exactly why I use Mozilla and not firefox. What genius moved the google search to an entirely new field when on Moz you can just type in the address bar and hit the down arrow? There is also the distinct lack of huge memory leaks which means Mozilla can run for a month or so at a time without a restart on my machine. It also appears (nope I haven't done benchmarks) to render pages much faster than F irefox.

Re:Much faster and lighter

[LiquidCoooled]

Firefox doesn't have memory leaks.

It has an ermmmmm integrated memory testing functionality suite built in.

However, in the real world, I do agree with you and the hole(s) should be fixed. Depending upon usage FF basic footprint can skyrocket (usually multiple large gallery pages makes this problem worse). A loss of just a few bytes per image is made much worse by pages with thousands of images.

Add to this addins created entirely out of script and it becomes sluggish on large pages.

HOWEVER, ff is 100x better than the alternative and however sluggish or much memory it uses, it still works.

Re:what's the point?

[caluml]

a/ I use every single day a browser, and email client, and, sometimes, have to compose simple HTML pages. I seldom use IRC, but when I need it, I use ChatZilla (no need to download and track yet another piece of code).

I'd, on the other hand, prefer to update only the IRC client when there is a flaw in the IRC client, rather than 4 packages. You know how long it takes to compile Firefox and Thunderbird?

Fair comment but..

[Unski]

while I can understand that The Kitchen Sink suits you nicely, and offers a consistent Kitchen Sink across platforms, I do fear there is something of the luddite in these statements; Firefox is a backstep on Mozilla, and mostly an ego trip. Firefox is the first piece of OSS software that I both liked sufficiently enough to recommend it to my girlfriend, to my dad, to my mum, and also that has remained a favourite of two of the three listed. If by 'ego trip' you mean the necessary and useful refinement of the interface offered by Mozilla'a previous offerings (read: netscape, moz. suite) to something that is readily comprehended by non-geek users, I have to agree with you there. Indeed, may the collective ego of all firefox developers continue to expand and to do useful things like: - developing and refining platform agnostic windows, menus so that non-geeks never have to become aware of the fact that their browser is somehow not quite like Windows. - letting them clear History, Saved Form info, Passwords, Download history, Cookies, and Cache, all with one button. - letting them choose the download folder, so they're not prompted where to save every download My point really is only that, pehaps banally, there are different horses for different courses and that firefox, clearly, is something much better than the mere ego trips of developers. End users don't care about the politics of browser development. They don't care that, in fact, firefox is the bastard grandson of netscape, indeed, they are more likely to use it if they don't know that. The emerging profile of the firefox user is that of the IE/Win user who has got fed-up of spyware, and have become receptive, over a long time, to the fuss in the computer press about this other browser. And they damned well wouldn't be interested in the ugly bloat of The Kitchen Sink.

Re:what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the AC you are replying to.

> I'd, on the other hand, prefer to update only the IRC client when there is a flaw in the IRC client, rather than 4 packages.

I think you are actually fuelling my point. Let me reply to you in light of my original a/b/c/d

a/ I seldom use IRC. Do you expect me to track security release of my seldom used IRC client ? No. Do you think I track security vulnerabilities of my DiVX player or Inkscape ? No. Maybe I should, but the truth is that I don't.

b/ I don't like to upgrade. So, if one week there are 2 vulnerabilities in the browser, one in the IRC, and one in email, I just expect my internet suite to tell me to upgrade the suite. And, for the record, the suite is a single package, not 4 as you said.

c/ As I use 3 different platform, I would need to track three (probably different) IRC client. That's madness.

d/ Worse, what will I do if there is a security vulnerability in a popular FF extension (something you should agre that is not unheard of)

> You know how long it takes to compile Firefox and Thunderbird?

Yes. That's why I use an already build mozilla, and move to do other things with my life (and as I am a coder, so those other things involve _my_ code)

Source based component upgrade is the path to madness (well, it is cool and usefull, but for an end-user, it is madness). You newly build IRC client will need some upgraded version of libxml, which may have an incompatibility with the Nvu HTML composer. After a few upgrades, you end up in dependency hell. Your binaries starts to randomly segfault, and you end up re-installing the whole OS.

I (used to) download binaries for Windows/Mac OS X and do pk_add -r on freebsd (ie: I get binary packages). My broadband access is several Mbits (free.fr, I've lost track of how much they offer me), and I never get less than 200K bytes/s in download from popular sites.

So, basically, a mozilla suite upgrade is a two minutes download. I stopped building mozilla myself since roughly M18.

We're exactly opposite. I don't want to think aboud upgrading individual components. I want a stable featurefull production software. Even if it lags behind in term of bleeding edge. It is only a web browser/mail client/irc and page composer, after all. From my point of view, that's commodity software.

Firefox diversion of resources could have been much better used in improving mozilla. I am glad that the SeaMonkey project exist, and I will consider swicthing from FireFox to SeaMonkey if they offer me a stable no-brainer, multi-platform internet software.

Bloat?

[porneL]

Opera 8 manages to fit:
* browser
* mail
* newsgroups
* chat
* bittorrent client
* other smaller features (gestures, panels, SSR, slideshow...)
* ad banner everyone is scared of

in 3.7mb.

SeaMonkey is much bigger package, and any major difference is having WYSIWYG editor (which I wouldn't use for anything other than occasional HTML mail).

I think SeaMonkey could do better.

Re:The interface is gross

[pedestrian crossing]

I know most people don't care about this, but i really do, and it prevents me from using a lot of software. Mozilla's UI is hideous. It always has been. It doesn't look good on any platform that i've ever used it on

Sucks to be you.

Yet another Mac fanboy whining about the "hideous" interface, or the look of the widgets, or whatever insignificant little thing that makes your life unliveable with anything but the "perfect" Apple interface.

I guess I'm just dense, but doesn't this get down to the level of nitpicking after a while?

Is your life, and your current tool so perfect that something so minor as a less than perfect interface or widget or whatever ruins everything?

I question the intelligence of rejecting reasonably functional software just because the interface, or the look and feel, or the widgets aren't your idea of perfection. Seems like narrow-mindedness of the first order, especially regarding something as subjective as UI.

Baby, meet bathwater...

Re:Wherefore

[KhanReaper]

Aside from actual technical reasons, perhaps one can have philosophical reasons for using it over Firefox and Thunderbird. Consider the following excerpts from the Firefox team's development blog and the Firefox readme:

1.) The middle finger housed at this site [66.102.9.104] certainly implies the user and anyone who differs with the holy developers is wrong. Here, the customer is wrong, so it throws community accountability into question.

2.) Read lines 96 to 111 in the Firefox readme [mozilla.org], and tell me that the developers are not being arrogant. While I see the value in meritocracy, to an extent, I fail to see the value arrogance. Secondly, it fails to offer anyone in the community any standardized channel for getting the attention of the developers, were the individual to have something that actually warranted their attention.

- Begin Quote -

96 ian 1.7 Q6: So to whom do I send patches?
97 ian 1.6
98 We are not currently accepting any input. No UI specs, no bugs,
99 and definitely no patches. See Q3.
100 ian 1.9
101 Q7: How do I get involved?
102
103 You don't except by invitation. This is a meritocracy -- only
104 those gain the respect of those in the group can join the group. See
105 Q6.
106 ian 1.6
107 ian 1.10 Q8: I don't like the mozilla/browser process! This sucks! I'm
108 never going to contribute to Mozilla again!
109
110 Oh no, please, don't go, whatever shall we do without you.
111

- End Quote -


The software may technically be open source because I can fetch the source via CVS; but under the policies of its developers, it is unaccountable and closed to my submission. How discouraging.

This is off the topic, but my final complaint about Firefox and Thunderbird is merely technical. Before anyone claims that I am wrong due to the fact that the user can write extensions and thereby participate in the community, I would agree in this argument, but I believe that it overlooks something: Everyone raves about extensions as if they are the best solution to ending the bloat of the original software. That view is fine, but I beg to differ with tradeoff of how cheap and poorly integrated the majority of main extensions feel. I have yet to use an extension that feels integrated better than the numerous features included in the Seamonkey suite.

If my views are not sufficient here, consider taking a look at this large list of individuals who think otherwise: http://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:Reasons [mozilla.org].

Re:The point

[elrous0]

Uh... Yes it was.

Then where are its composer and integrated mail/newsgroups apps?

-Eric (who still uses Mozilla because of it's convenient composer functionality and it's better security than Firefox)

Re:what's the point?

[drew]

As for the UI. The default themes that ship with Mozilla/Seamonkey are just horrid! However, there are MANY third party themes that look great. I use the pinball theme here. Mozilla looks grea with it!

UI != themes

Re:what's the point?

[drew]

The only reason, and I do mean literally the only reason, that people use Firefox is because it looks like Internet Explorer, and people are afraid of change.

bzzt. wrong. I, and many other people, use Firefox because the User Interface is (or was) far, far superior. I don't care that it isn't any faster than Mozilla or doesn't use any less disk space, and I am fully aware of the differences (or lack thereof) between Firefox and the Mozilla suite, but I still use Firefox. It has nothing to do with Internet Explorer or fear of change, because I have never liked Internet Explorer, and when I have used it, it has always been begrudgingly.

Mozilla's usability was a nightmare when Phoenix was introduced, and Phoenix rapidly surpassed it. Only recently has Mozilla started to catch up again, and only because Firefox has changed very little (from a UI perspective) since version 0.9.something.

Re:The interface is gross

[Watts Martin]

Actually, he never said he was a "Mac fanboy," you just apparently made the assumption that only Mac people would complain about interfaces. What's worse, you made the assumption that the only complaints about UI design have to do with aesthetics. I'm sorry, but I complain about interface design much more frequently based on usability.

Based on your tone, you're preparing some comment about how only namby-pamby GUI users would ever care about that. But ask why people who have strong preferences for Emacs over Vim or vice-versa have such a preference. I can guarantee that "Emacs has a much prettier interface that matches my drapes nicely" is not going to come up very often. Now, ask why there are people who prefer NEdit, or BBEdit, or another full-featured GUI editor over both of those. I can guarantee that you for 99% of those people, it's because all of the functionality they need is wrapped up in an interface they find more intuitive, faster to learn, and faster to use.

UI "prettiness" is subjective, but a lot of usability principles aren't. NEdit will always be faster for a new user to learn than XEmacs. This isn't a slam on XEmacs or its functionality or on users who've become comfortable with it and have little reason to change, but NEdit is not less functional because it is easier to use.

And, yeah, Mac people tend to be more sensitive about UI design than some others. That may be because they're all nitpicky whiny bastards. Or, it may be because they've had twenty years of programs largely designed by people who put a lot of thought into how good interface design makes programs more intuitive and usable. Frankly, I wish free software developers would get down off their "the console is god" high horses and listen to the whining just a little more.