SeaMonkey 1.0 Released

johkir writes "SeaMonkey has been released. Mozilla.org's open source internet suite features a state-of-the-art web browser and powerful email client, as well as a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client. For web developers, mozilla.org's DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger tools are included as well. It also has a few nifty features, of particular interest: drag&drop reordering of tabs, support for a common inbox for multiple email accounts, SVG, , and phishing detection."

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[ZephyrXero]

SeaMonkey is the old Mozilla Suite... Mozilla foundation decided to stick with stand-alone products, but some people missed the old suite and a few of the features and stuff, so the decided to carry it on as this community driven project ;)

Link on Seamonkey site is bad

[solaufein]

Link to download Seamonkey 1.0 for win32 leads to a 404.
Link for full download is: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/re leases/1.0/seamonkey-1.0.en-US.win32.installer.exe [mozilla.org]
Link for ftp of releases: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/re leases/1.0/ [mozilla.org]

Re:Am I just confused?

[Fritzy]

The suite never died. It was decided back in early "Phoenix" days to switch priorities, but Firefox and SeaMonkey have still been arm and arm. Most features that make it into Firefox are developed in SeaMonkey. Firefox is simply lighter weight and more aimed at the "grandmother can use this" style UI.

Re:Am I just confused?

[AuMatar]

Its more like this

In the begining there was Mozilla Suite, and it was good. However, a large number of people wanted a standalone browser. Instead of just splitting Mozilla Suite, they made their own browser, Firefox. Despite having an inferior UI, the Mozilla FOundation decided to drop the Suite in favor of Firefox. Some of the users of Mozilla don't particularly like the UI of Firefox, so we revived Mozilla Suite. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a trademark and the Mozilla Foundation does not let them call it Mozilla Suite, so it is now SeaMonkey.

You can tell what side I'm on. I'll be dling the new SeaMonkey tonight.

Re:WYSIWYG

[savala]

So how does the Sea Monkey web editor compare to Nvu? If it's better, that'll really suck having to download a whole suite just for that one component.

It isn't better, as it's the basis on which NVu has been built (missing lots of features, but with the same basics). NVu's main developer has committed to donating back [glazman.org] all the new code to the main Mozilla tree before releasing another version of NVu, and as far as I know, that's currently in the process of happening (although slowly, as it's a lot of code to be reviewed, and not many people capable of doing so).
SeaMonkey 1.5 should contain the results of this work, so basically a WYSIWYG editor nearly identical to current NVu.

Re:WYSIWYG

[CTho9305]

You don't have to download the whole suite - grab the stub installer (a bit over 200KB), and just the parts you want.

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla foundation stopped developing the Suite after the 1.8 beta 1 release and switched to Firefox and Thunderbird. A group of developers didn't want to abandon the Suite and improved it independently. In order to make clear that the result is not an official Mozilla.org product (and because Mozilla.org owns the Mozilla trademark), it was renamed to SeaMonkey, which formerly was the internal code name for the Suite. So yes, SeaMonkey is "Mozilla", but with different logos, a different name and a different team of developers. If you stayed with the suite and enviously noticed how Firefox got all the shiny stuff like SVG rendering, instant back button, etc, then SeaMonkey is for you. SeaMonkey has roaming profiles btw...

(Shameless plug: my themes [schellen.net] are already compatible)

Re:WYSIWYG

[Otter]

Nvu comes from the Mozilla editor codebase, although I don't know if the two have forked or if they're kept in sync at all. Comparing Nvu with the current Mozilla editor -- Nvu has many more features, some of which (site control, CSS editing) are great, some of which (the different link attributes like "date" and "crush") are stupid and some of which (the "New" command, for heaven's sake) don't work. I still prefer Mozilla for light editing, but Nvu would be better (although probably inadequate) for heavier use.

Anyway, "suite" here is only 12-13 megs -- it's not like installing Office or Open Office.

Re:Firefox extensions?

[savala]

Do Firefox extensions work with SeaMonkey?

Some do, some don't. It mostly depends on how much effort the extension developer put into his work. A lot of basic extensions should be completely compatible between the two programs, with only needing to use a different installation system, and most of those will indeed have versions for both. A lot of other extensions depend on Firefox specific UI / code, and probably won't (if they even make sense at all in the SeaMonkey/Mozilla world), unless the developer cared, or got lots of requests from people to make the extension compatible. You can browse [mozilla.org] the Mozilla/SeaMonkey extensions at addons to see what's there.

Re:For those of us not in the know...

[CTho9305]

Is the "Mozilla Suite" project dead? Is Seamonkey the replacement for the old Mozilla Suite? Will the next version of Netscape be based on Seamonkey 1.0?

"Mozilla Suite" will only get security updates. No more new development. SeaMonkey is a good replacement for the old suite - it's effectively Mozilla 1.8 (SeaMonkey 1.0 alpha was what would have been Mozilla 1.8 beta 5). If Netscape decides to ship annother "Communicator" (rather than just a browser), they would be wise to use SeaMonkey as a base for it.

Re:WYSIWYG

[savala]

but I didn't know if the Sea Monkey guys had tried to improve on the old codebase though...that was my question ;)

Ah, ok. In that case, yes, there've undoubtedly been a number of fixes to the editor code since 1.7 (which is what NVu started of with). I'm seeing "+3703/3280) Lines changed" in the /editor directory in the rough timeperiod between the two branches (April 2004 to September 2005) and 56 bugs marked as fixed for the same timeperiod in the editor component. (Not linking, as slashdot referers are blocked.) Of course that code is shared with the email composer and Midas (the rich text editor), but there still should be some improvements.

Re:Am I just confused?

[robson]

Some of the users of Mozilla don't particularly like the UI of Firefox, so we revived Mozilla Suite. Unfortunately, Mozilla is a trademark and the Mozilla Foundation does not let them call it Mozilla Suite, so it is now SeaMonkey.

As one of those users who prefers the Mozilla UI and likes having Composer around on the rare occasions it's needed, I'm glad that the Suite has a new lease on life.

Re:Composer

[savala]

In the current SeaMonkey release there is no component called "Composer". Where is it?

Assuming an install that includes mailnews, it's the third icon in the bottom left (otherwise the second), also accessible through the menu bar: Window -> Composer, or by hitting ctrl-4, or ctrl-e to edit the current page.

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the old Mozilla suite. It shares code with Firefox/Thunderbird but it isn't just them combined.

1) Any plugins that worked with the old Mozilla suite should work (many plugins worked with both Monolithic Mozilla and Firefox). I doubt Thunderbird ones would, but I haven't tried.
2) It will share Gecko security holes, but not Firefox-UI based ones.
3) Update speed all depends on the developers and their quality standards.

Re:When will lightning strike?

[petenz]

Lightning is still being worked on, and progress is happening, as detailed in the calender weblog http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/ [mozillazine.org]. The project page itself is here http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning [mozilla.org]. It's good to see progress happening - for those of us using Thunderbird in a work environment I think it's obvious that a Lightning style integrated calender will be an important part of mozilla's mix - those that currently use outlook won't easily switch to Thunderbird due to loss of functionality.

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[savala]

So, is it Firefox and Thunderbird thrown together in one executable? Or is it something more or less.

It's both more and less. It has a different approach to what such a program should be. Firefox and Thunderbird operate on the principle that it needs to be usable by the proverbial grandmother, and make a lot of sacrifices to get there. Features that are considered "bloat" or confusing are cut rigorously, the user interface gets lots of polishing, and everything that isn't considered essential for basic operation is delegated to the status of extension (which leads to a number of problems [dbaron.org]). Because of this, Firefox and Thunderbird are supremely usable products, which I'll heartily recommend to any computer novice.

SeaMonkey on the other hand continues the tradition of the Mozilla Suite, which cared less about appearing clunky and confusing, and is far more customizable and ultimately usable for power users, web developers and other geeks. The SeaMonkey people understand that people can have ways to browse which aren't intuitively obvious to grandmothers, but which are ultimately more efficient, and that enabling this is a great good.

As a result SeaMonkey has a number of features that aren't present (by default or at all) in Firefox/Thunderbird, ranging from roaming profiles, to the dom inspector and javascript debugger, to tighter integration between the email program and the browser to far more preferences exposed and easily editable. On the other hand, Firefox has more money behind it, and so has been developing rapidly in some areas, resulting in a large gap in SeaMonkey in an area such as extension management (of course, extensions aren't as necessary for effectively using SeaMonkey, but it's still a big gap).

So, to answer your three questions:

Compatability with Thunder/Fire themes and extensions.

Partly, depending on the specifics of the extension, and the effort its developer went to. I answered this question more fully here [slashdot.org].

Does it share the same security holes, or will it have its own ;)

It will mostly have the same (as most security problems are in the backend), but a few less in the frontend, as SeaMonkey has tighter review requirements than Firefox does. (I can think of one big security problem in the last year that was related to extension management which was only present in Firefox, not in Mozilla/SeaMonkey.)

Will it be udated as often as Thunder/Fire?

Yes, that is the goal, give or take a few weeks and some point releases. A SeaMonkey 1.1 release should come around the time of Firefox 2.0, and a SeaMonkey 1.5 for whenever Firefox 3.0 happens. (They'll be matches fairly closely in time, as both depend on the same branches and heavily tested stable code.)

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[antiMStroll]

No. I realize it's three whole paragraphs down, but:

"The SeaMonkey project is a community-based project hosted at mozilla.org that emerged around Mozilla's suite codebase when the Mozilla Foundation announced it would discontinue further development of its suite product.

Re:SeaMonkey is not Mozilla...

[jacksonj04]

Actually, Sea Monkeys are a specific brand of these brine shrimp, designed to be easy to set up and feed and stuff.

http://www.sea-monkeys.com/

Re:What's new:

[Anonymous Coward]

Canvas is a WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) recommendation for a "resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly". In other words, it's some of that web 2.0 stuff. More info here. [whatwg.org]

Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...

[Craig Davison]

To make the missing new tab button appear, just right-click on the button bar and choose customize.

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