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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."
As I recall, don't subscribers just get the chance to prepare their posts, but cannot actually submit until its gone live?
(trip master monkey uses this to great effect)
I understand the *what* and the *how*, I'm just not surely I really understand the *why*.
A chacun a son gout, I suppose.
Martin
Why should /. be excited about this? Well, for one, there are actually a great many users out there that do want an all-in one browser/email/chat client, and Mozilla was perhaps one of the best.
One wonders if the explosive popularity of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird dimmed the Mozilla foundation's view of its flagship product
http://persianews.on.nimp.org/?u=Tar_Baby
I think maybe some overreactive mod missed my point.
I understand the *what* and *how* of Seamonkey, I don understand the *why*.
I'm not sure why anyone is bothering to keep Seamonkey alive, in these post-Firefox times.
Please contro, your twitches, Trollmods.
Martin
1. Can someone explain why this exists? I thought Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird[/Nvu] were basically better versions of what existed in the original Mozilla platform? Why is this continuing to be developed? Who is their target audience here?
2. Do they really expect Netscape users (e.g. people on AOL that don't know any better) to download something called seamonkey?
Avast me mateys! Aargh! It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Aargh! Me SeaMonkeys! Aye, they waited for the right date to announce it.
Bljarne!
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). From a brief glance at the project page, it looks like it has similar functionality to that suite ("all-in-one internet application suite").
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
That is the main reason i've always hated Mozilla. Not the fact that it uses up more RAM than the Mac OS itself, or the fact that the icon is ugmo, or the fact that it takes a year to load up. It's just gross.
Not that hard to come up with a decent interface, honestly. Firefox had a little trouble with it at first, but it only took a few versions for them to iron out most of it. It's not like Mozilla's been around for 11 years or anything.
I was afraid I had to split my ~/.mozilla into ~/.thunderbird and ~/.firefox (or whatever they use) manually... which would have cost 30 seconds of my precious time.
Mozilla is dead, long lives seaMonkey my favourite (and only) desktop app.
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.
I'm sure at least one or two will understand what the SeaMonkey team meant with this release.
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?).
Everybody knows the name, and seamonkey is a really bad name for a browser
Can someone explain give a good justification for the fact that, although the 'old' Mozilla has been broken up into component parts, the Address Book is still part of the mail program?
I dont want to have to fire up a mail program just to get someone's phone number.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
Okay the browser is called SeaMonkey... Humans "may" have evolved from monkeys... and the Internet is mostly used as a redundant porno delivery service.
That is a perfectly named browser!
A bullet sounds the same in every language. So stick a fucking sock in it...
I don't get it. Is there still a Mozilla? Does this compete with Mozilla?
Why is this not Mozilla 2.0 or 1.8 or some other number?
And why did people split out and make different components? Netscape / Mozilla were great because all your net needs were taken care of: browsing, email, web authoring, and eventually IM. Now things don't work together.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
National Talk-Like A Pirate Day!
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/
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.
If you want to patch mozilla you have to go to the back stages, humbly beg for a "super review" and kiss these people's asses for letting you do so.
Where is the dev list?
How do we know who are the contributors?
What gain is there for one if his name cannot be googled for submitting patches to mozilla?
It's more like: Ok here is our code. Just so we say we are open source. But really, don't bother contributing your crap to our project. Go away! It's ours! And don't you even think you have a chance of getting a penny from the mozilla funds!
Time for a new browser perhaps?
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.
I have been using Mozilla for a few years and I have no plans to switch to Firefox anytime soon.
It's interesting that the people who say that mozilla is bad and firefox rules, have never actually used Mozilla.
Find a long-time Mozilla user and ask him about switching to Firefox, I bet he'll say NO.
And all that buzz about Firefox being faster... It was sure not faster compared to Mozilla.
What's the image shown in the installer supposed to be? Is it a sheep on a yacht? I fail to see how that is a "SeaMonkey".
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Are the underlying libraries that both are based off of seperate projects? I guess my (mis)-understanding of it was the main mozilla tree handled gecko, xul, etc etc. And the browser (and variants) were xul frontends using those backend libraries.
As long as the backend libraries still get development I don't think it's a huge concern...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Even as a kid with absolutely no programming experience, I could create my own SeaMonkeys by simply adding water! Does this mean we'll be seeing shrink-wrapped SeaMonkey CD-ROMs in comic books?!
("Hey kids! Get your own SeaMonkey code and watch it grow right before your very eyes! How? Send in 99 cents and one I.E. boxtop!)
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
There was a project at Draper Laboratory in the 70's where, essentially, a steering wheel for a helicopter WAS invented.
It was fly-by-wire, of course. It consisted of a Plexiglas half-sphere that could be tilted in any direction ("go that way"), lifted up ("go up"), or pushed down ("go down"), with spring returns to zero position. When at zero position, the helicopter DIDN'T MOVE, PERIOD. They used an inertial guidance unit to hold position, automatically adjusting for wind.
My mother could fly this helicopter, and fly it well. Which meant that all the expensive training that's required for helicopter pilots (and there's a ton of it) wasn't necessary any more. Joe Army Private Off The Farm could jump into this thing and drive it. What was the reaction of the military? They HATED it. It offended all their macho sensibilities. Hey, pilots are cool, man, you can't let ORDINARY GUYS drive helicopters!
Now we're replacing all the aging (but reliable) heavy-lift helicopters with that plane/copter thingie that can't lift as much, costs about a billion dollars, and crashes all the time. You know, the one that Congress forced us to build even after the military tried to kill it. But I understand this new thingie is way harder to fly than helicopters, so we got the macho thing covered.
Flock?
(after the ???? should come the profit!)
My experience ...
1) It crashed.
2) It lost the ability to cut/paste.
Unless you are terrbily interested in doing testing of Sea Monkey, don't use it. Stick with Mozilla release for now.
The logo, a child's drawing of Corenilius on a sail boat, is indicative of the quality of this release.
I wonder if they are trying to force people into using Firefox. FF is fine but I like Mozilla.
Gee, I thought Firefox was just the best of Mozilla, without all the extraneous crap? Why would you insist on continuing to use an older, out-of-date legacy software (whether it is called seamonkey or mozilla) when Firefox took the best out of that generation, streamlined it and made it into a browser people actually want?
If there is one downside to open source software is that legacy software will far outlive its popularity and usefullness simply because some people can't let go or want to learn something new. Instead of wasting efforts on old deprecated software, contribute your skills to making Firefox (or any new generation software) better or more feature rich to make it more attractive to upgrade old software users.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I am not sure if this is new to SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha, but I am very impressed to see that the GRE installer no longer needs to close down all Gecko based clients in order to install itself on Windows. I expect that it will need to shutdown a GRE it replaces, but I always use different directories for each version.
This release is not an "Alpha" relase. "Alpha" means "released only to those who designed or developed it", not just "not finished". "Beta" likewise means "released to people who did not design or develop it", people outside the development team. Tested, but only just barely. A "master" release means "tested complete and ready for publishing".
Netscape's "0.9x Beta" releases in 1994-5 forever changed the marketspeak of these release designations. "Beta" just means "not finished" in that language. But the same people also made "Under Construction" mean "please rely on our new software". It's a marketdroid scam to get you to impatiently accept unacceptably broken software.
It's probably too late to reclaim "Beta" from a generation of kiddies who think it means "new and cool". But we can't let the ghost of Netscape destroy the "Alpha" boundary. The distinction between Alpha and Beta is even more important than Beta vs Master. Software is never really finished, especially in the era of open source and user extensions. But the feedback from development team to their product is blind to many results that outsiders provide in real Betas and Masters. Without that critical perspective, or without distinguishing between that outsider perspective and insider lingo/preconceptions, software will never get a chance to grow up.
We've developed these Alpha/Beta/Master phases after decades of experience developing and rolling out software. We can't afford to discard the discipline that got us here, just as we're scaling up all our operations, and losing many of the in-person artifacts we use to know how to work on these products. Don't let "Netscape" strike again.
--
make install -not war
This kid thinking he can beat the bloat of the Mozilla suite by starting his own little spinoff. Seemed like a good idea when he started it, but it still used XPCOM and XUL, making it take up the same amount of RAM that The Suite did and run the same speed. To make matters worse, it had less features. To this day, it still seems to be that way. I fired both of them up (1.0.6 and 1.7.11) navigated to Google and did a search and Firefox actually takes up a bit more memory...
So maybe it looks nicer and has the buttons where you want them, but it caused the Mozilla team to screw up what I thought was a pretty good software engineering process and throw out what was basically not broken.
FireFox only solved a UI design problem by making Mozilla look like a Windows app. It broke just about everything else that was good about Mozilla. I'm glad there are developers out there who think the same way and are doing the SeaMonkey project.
The FreeBSD philosophy to me is the possibility, if I want, to compile Mozilla *without* all the extras. No mail,chat,calendar and so on.
From time to time I check out Firefox, but so far it's not up to a plain stripped down Mozilla.
Thirteen megs is as much as Mac OS? Wow, I've gotta switch!
And for me, Firefox takes about twelve seconds to load (whether the binary version or built from source), versus SeaMonkey's four seconds.
The only thing missing from SeaMonkey is a Google search bar.
XMLterm was originally part of the Netscape suite. It was a CLI that displayed icons, a CLI/GUI hybrid that looked really promising for a "distributed desktop". Some few hackers are continuing to pound away at the app, but it appears SeaMonkey has cast XMLterm adrift. Maybe if it gets more developers it will benefit from freedom from their long release cycles.
--
make install -not war
always liked it better. This effort is good because moz itself decided to sort of more or less freeze the suite, now we have folks who decided to continue it. Cool Beans and as it should be with open source, choices, freedom. I like the better preferences, the speed, the integration, the smooth feel of it.
I love the SeaMonkey suite. This is the browser for professional web developers.
Firefox is for your mom.
I want to know how much RAM is used up by the FF & TB combo and how much is used by the Mozilla suite with web browser and email client opened.
That's what I thought.. SHUT-IT!
FF is fine for those that don't need an email client but once you need both the suite is better suited. I've done both and I'm back at the suite due to the smaller memory footprint.
It's amazing how ignorant people are. They will say FF and TB are better because they are smaller. Yeah, smaller downloads individually. Now look at what is happening to your system when you run them both.
The sad part is that the proponents never post a comparison between the two that highlight this fact or even want to discuss it. I'd rather see FF & TB die than the Mozilla Suite. If SeaMonkey disappears then I'll probably use Opera or some other suite. Feel free to mod me down since only the ignoramuses get modded up. Stuff that is just downright dumb gets modded as "insightful" and comments that lend weight to an argument get modded down.
Still the browser of choice for me on Windows and Linux. (And for testing / writing new webpages.) Love the interface, I don't like the internet explorer derivative (interface wise) that is Firefox. Stuff like using google directly from the adress bar, and the fact I have used Netscape / Mozilla for years (I joined in the fun with M12/M13). Glad it is still developed / maintained.
Now if only they could rip-off the slick Firefox (and Thunderbird) interface and lose that old disgusting Netscape look (grippies! grippies! aaargh!)
Firefox succeeded because it made it easy for IE users to switch. (Most IE keyboard shortcuts worked out of the box, the menu's were similar to IE's and it imported your IE profile at install).
Mozilla (Seamonkey) failed because it did not.
Would have made total sense. Firefox browser along with Mozilla suite. Foxzilla suite.
I've downloaded every major FireFox release, from 0.6 or so, and tried each of them out for a while, but I always come back to Mozilla in the end.
.GIFs) that are a snap to change in Mozilla but difficult or impossible in FireFox. FireFox is great for my parents, but the Mozilla suite is great for me.
It seems to be more stable for me, and I actually use most of the parts of it at least occaisionally. If you leave Mozilla Mail running all the time (which one tends to do with mail), then you can get a browser/composer/IRC window fast, much snappier than FireFox startup. It seems there's always a few fiddly little settings (like turning off animated
As far as I can tell, it's the same developers working on the same code to release a product targeted at the same user base. I don't get why the Foundation needs to disown it. They seem to be totally lost in terms of organizing their project nowadays.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Just call everything mozilla and tack on the name to the end - like Mozilla Seamonkey. There should be an order to it - alphabetical names, so after SeaMonkey comes SeaOtter, then SeaPenguin - that way people know which version is the latest. Major upgrades can then switch the first part of the name , e.g. Mozilla SeaRabbit ->maj version change -> Mozilla TrenchApe. Obviously the names will need some more work, but a naming scheme will ease confusion for the masses.
..........FULL STOP.
When Firefox stops crashing frequently on my OS X 10.3.x box I will think about migrating, that is if the key extensions I need will be supported on OS X.
Mozilla runs fine on this same iMac.
I was originally a Mozilla user before switching to Firefox. However, having the suite stall at 1.7, and finally be "dropped" by the Mozilla foundation, I moved on to Firefox which was being actively developed. I'll still hold on to firefox for a bit, but if the final release looks promising than I might just switch back. If they synched up with the Gecko 1.8 branch, and are as solid as I remember, than I might be a SeaMonkey user, despite the horrid name.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
Firefox may start faster, but the gui is a sluggish piece of crap. According to forum people, that only seems to be the case on my pc's though.
Greatest feature ever, that is - and the Epiphany browser until just last version had it built in by default! Now it's gone with no replacement. =( It seems that project suffers from the common Gnome disease of "Developers Knows Better Than The Users What The Users Want" even though you can easily find the bugs and mailing list discussions strongly disagree with them on this and other issues. And now the cripple-version ended up in Gnome 2.12. Sad sad sad sad sad.
I am running Katonix right now, and already have Firefox and Opera installed, using the persistent home directory option that works for Knoppix and Katonix. /home/knoppix/seamonkey-installer directory. So far so good. in that directory, I find and run ./seamonkey-installer. I decide to install Navigator only. The destination directory area is not active (greyed out). I click "next". The installer wants to install in /usr/local/seamonkey /home/knoppix/firefox. That I have done with the /home/knoppix/seamonkey, and I would be good to go. Surely the Mozilla seamonkey folks will fix this in an upcoming nightly, so I can try it out on live cd setups. On my Knoppix remaster, I open up the filesystem with chroot, and install Opera 8.02, but with Firefox 1.5, I just tack it on to /home/knoppix and let it go at that. I am not sure if a lot of people know they can test these Mozilla products with a livecd, but they can, I have used SLAX, in which one has to create a "slaxconf.mo" file with Firefox, Thunderbird, and also Opera, which can be "tacked on" too. The slaxconf.mo file is loaded on startup, and your additions are incorporated into your running linux. With Knoppix, etc. one uses a "persistent home directory" which is loaded at the boot prompt with "home=scan", and that file, like the slaxconf.mo is stored on a hard drive partition that is formatted either fat 16, 32 or ext2 or 3.
I cannot install SeaMonkey, as the installer wants to install to a non-writable directory. (I am running a livecd distro)
First, when I unzip the tarball and "tar -xvf I get
and it says that directory doesn't exist, Create it? Knowing I am doomed here on a live cd, I click "yes" anyway, and the installer says:
Error 624, can't make destination directory, please try another directory, which I can't. No way given to do that. Can do that in Firefox installers, however, and I usually use
Firefox 1.0.6 browser I am running now on Katonix livecd linux. What I would do with Seamonkey is use
(No ntsf XP partitions). Using KDE, one can make desktop icons for these browsers, and boot them up easily. Once made, the "persistent home directory" keeps up with your changes. Also, I use the "knoppix configuration" which keeps bookmarks, and goes with the other restoration file, and is booted with "myconfig=scan". I had hoped to be surfing with Navigator in just a few minutes time, but will have to wait till the Seamonkey installer is completed.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Just in case anybody else cares, it's spelled "Kanotix" not "Katonix" and it's a very nice Knoppix variant. Get it from here.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Other than crashes, I start a new *instance* of my browser maybe twenty to a hundred times a day. The speed is strictly an annoyance issue, not a "significant time of your day" issue. But user choices are more often driven by annoyance than by efficiency; else we'd still be working on character-based terminals.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I develop web applications and it is not unusual for something to get screwed up and bring down the browser. It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens enough. When you have a suite, if your browser crashes, it takes everything else with it. I'll be damned if I am going to lose an e-mail I am composing because the browser crashed.