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."

Comments

what's the point?

[AWG]

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?

Re:what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Firefox" is only supposed to be better by the simple virtue that a few thousands of people said it was better. That diverted resources from Mozilla, and rendered FireFox better by slowing down Moz.

I never understood that. Firefox is a backstep on Mozilla, and mostly an ego trip.

I prefer Mozilla for the following reasons:

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).

b/ I don't like to upgrade. I have better things to do with my life. Not having to track a browser and an email client is godsend. Mozilla took care of most of my online needs (okay, it could have included some additional applications)

c/ I use three different platforms (Win 2K, Mac OS X and FreeBSD). Having the same software on all three was very handy, even if it is less great than the native software.

d/ I don't like to track plugins. Firefox is ridiculous in that area. It does very little out of the box, but is so configurable that it is a usability nightmare. You have to spend *hours* drilling into hundreds of extensions, trying them, restarting the browser, to get something that may fit your needs. Upgrade are painfull, as extensions often stop working, and, as the browser is now splitted into dozen of components, you cannot count on functionality beeing always present (extensions come and go). It is a waste of time.

To get a suitable replacement of the one-shot mozilla download, you have to get Firefox + a random number of ill-named extension + a separate email client + an HTML editor. This take more time, use more RAM, is less nicely integrated, and follow conflicting release schedules.

For me, mozilla = FreeBSD, while FireFox+Extension+Thunderbird+Nvu+... = Linux.

Both have their use. I just happend to prefer FreeBSD philosophy.

Re:what's the point?

[Tet]

I thought Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird[/Nvu] were basically better versions of what existed in the original Mozilla platform?

The simple answer is that they're not better versions. I was eager to switch to Firefox (or Phoenix and later Firebird as it was then), as I don't use anything from the suite other than the browser anyway. But when it surfaced, it turned out to be a poor substitute for the real thing. Mozilla was and continues to be a better browser. That's why I use it.

I'm sure that with the addition of various extensions, I could probably get Firefox up to the same level as Mozilla. But Mozilla does it all out of the box, and I don't have to go around hunting for addons, or spend ages customising it in about:config.

Re:what's the point?

[laffer1]

Yes, but if there is a flaw in the rendering engine you have to recompile firefox and thunderbird anyway. I actually prefer the user interface with firefox and that is the primary reason I use it. I use firefox in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I use thunderbird in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. The only platform that firefox and thunderbird suck on is Mac OS X. I think the code is less mature and often crashes on my ibook.

As a netscape user for most of my time on the internet, I was very sad when I learned the netscape suite was dying, but then I tried firefox and realized why it was great. I miss having my email client open all the time, but its nice to have the extra memory free. There's no point to leaving it open when i don't see the notifications anymore when new mail arrives.

Re:what's the point?

[Willeh]

I don't like to track plugins. Firefox is ridiculous in that area. It does very little out of the box, but is so configurable that it is a usability nightmare. You have to spend *hours* drilling into hundreds of extensions, trying them, restarting the browser, to get something that may fit your needs. Upgrade are painfull, as extensions often stop working, and, as the browser is now splitted into dozen of components, you cannot count on functionality beeing always present (extensions come and go). It is a waste of time.

You just summed up the main problem i have with Firefox. It's getting quite ridiculous with all the extensions just to get (imo) basic functionality. And god forbid you'd try to *gasp* upgrade the browser, since now all (or alot) of shit breaks.

This is not an anti firefox troll, i tried my very best to like it, but it's just not for me. If you want to spend hours tinkering with your browser, then that's cool. Firefox does have it's place though, the people i support use it without extensions and they seem happy.

Re:what's the point?

[xander2032]

That's the thing. They aren't "better" versions.

I'd like for someone to show me how Firefox and Thunderbird are "better" than Mozilla/SeaMonkey.

Things I've observed...

Mozilla and Firefox take the same amount of time to start, they render at the same speed as well, and in no way is Mozilla sluggish when compared to Firefox.

I have yet to see how Firefox has a "smaller footprint". On my system Firefox seems to use more memory when loading the exact same pages as Mozilla.

So if Firefox isn't faster, isn't "smaller", etc.. Then how is it better?

And I only use the suite as a browser. I don't use it for email, irc, etc... Although sometimes I will use Composer for a quick and dirty web page.

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!

Sure Mozilla doesn't have the customizable menus that Firefox does. but I've never found that to be an issue?

I'm quite happy with Mozilla how it is.

Also... Mozilla is/was by no means a "failure". When Mozilla announced they were "dumping" Mozilla, they said that the number of users was in the "low millions".

I don't know about you, but an OSS app that has a few million users is a pretty good success!! And it definitely deserves to live on. Which is why the SeaMonkey project was started.

There's still a demand for Mozilla and quite a large user base.

I personally think Mozilla would have done just as well as Firefox if MoFo had put the same level of advertising into Mozilla as it did Firefox.

I've been a supporter of Mozilla for years now, and I continue to test SeaMonkey nightlies and submit bug reports.

But yes... They could have come up with a better name than SeaMonkey. ;) lol

Re:what's the point?

[Mr_Silver]

I don't like to track plugins. Firefox is ridiculous in that area. It does very little out of the box, but is so configurable that it is a usability nightmare. You have to spend *hours* drilling into hundreds of extensions, trying them, restarting the browser, to get something that may fit your needs. Upgrade are painfull, as extensions often stop working, and, as the browser is now splitted into dozen of components, you cannot count on functionality beeing always present (extensions come and go). It is a waste of time.

I've always maintained that it would be nice if 5-10 of the most popular plugins were made available during the installation phase rather than people having to get them manually everytime they rebuild. It's not like they don't already do this with the DOM inspector - which has zero use for the majority of people.

I'm sure there would be some contention over which ones to add, but i would consider anything that would appeal to the masses.

In addition, some of the really small and plainly obvious ones could actually be merged into the trunk. For example, it was always silly to make people install a 7kb extension to get tabs drag and droppable when people would expect this from the onset (thankfully, I'm told that 1.5 has this in).

To those who complain about download bloat and customisabilty, the obvious answer would be to make the installer download them during the installation process, therefore it wouldn't matter how big the extensions were, your installer size would only increase by a set size and you wouldn't have to have them if you didn't want.

Whilst we're at it, can some of the hidden settings be turned on? The ability to paste url's broken up over two lines into the address bar is brilliant so I'm unsure why it's off by default and then hidden.

Re:what's the point?

[CTho9305]

I personally strongly prefer SeaMonkey... there are a bunch of reasons. I've used it (well, the Mozilla suite) for a few years and am more used to it, and I see more eye-to-eye with other SeaMonkey developers.

Firefox is somewhat annoying to use, because lots of little things are just different (for example, if you type something in the URL bar, SeaMonkey will open it in a new tab if you hit ctrl+enter, while Firefox uses alt+enter; Firefox's download manager has annoying default behaviors; having a separate search bar instead of just searching from the URL bar means both your URL bar is smaller and you can see less of what you type when you search for something; find-as-you-type has a weird dialog in Firefox; many other things). If you haven't used SeaMonkey before, though, some of these won't be a problem for you. Another annoyance is that Firefox changes a lot between each release - the fact that the options window was redone basically from scratch between FF1.0 and FF1.5b means that a lot of things are in different places now. A nice thing about the suite is that since it's integrated, you don't have to set all your preferences twice (in the browser, and in the email client).

As a developer, I don't like some of the practices used in Firefox... for large patches, their philosophy seems more like "include the patch and let users (people who use the nightly builds) find bugs" whereas in SeaMonkey we do more up-front code review. When porting Firefox patches to SeaMonkey, I've had them be rejected because the code quality I copied wasn't good enough, so they had to be cleaned up. I really don't like the way the "lead Firefox developer" (Ben Goodger - in quotes because that title is really unfair to the other Firefox devs) seems to do his big patches... in the cases I've looked at, he checked in patches that either were entirely broken (when he rewrote the options dialog, it didn't work at all and was mostly invisible (see-through, I'm not kidding)), or full of bugs that a few minutes of testing would find (the info bar that alerts you to blocked popups, blocked extensions, missing plugins, etc. had a lot of bugs I came across when I ported it to SeaMonkey).

A lot of Firefox's popularity probably just comes from the fact that it's new and therefore "cool" or interesting, whereas the suite looks similar to Netscape 4. It seems that the new name "SeaMonkey" is actually generating a little interest though, which is kind of cool.

If you're into testing lots of extensions, Firefox makes it easier (specifically, uninstalling extensions in SeaMonkey is hard), but the thing about SeaMonkey is that I don't need extensions with it, so it isn't really a problem. I have one extension (FlashBlock) that I've used for years and never needed to uninstall... and I used autoscroll until recently (autoscroll will be integrated in SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta, so I don't need the extension any more).

Anyone who tells you Firefox is faster is probably confused or buying into hype. Every recent test I've seen has SeaMonkey starting up faster (even without QuickLaunch, which makes it launch almost instantaneously - a feature Firefox doesn't have), and they use the exact same rendering engine, so pageload speeds are the same.

I'm not sure how they compare in memory use, but in my experience, the cache and webpages themselves tend to use significantly more RAM than the interface itself, so I wouldn't expect much difference. People like to say SeaMonkey is "bloated", but if you also use an email program, however, SeaMonkey is going to be a LOT smaller than Firefox+Thunderbird, because it shares a lot of data, while FF+TB duplicate a lot. A quick test showed Firefox alone was ~21MB at launch, and SeaMonkey ~22MB. Opening the mail client for SeaMonkey only bumped it up to ~28MB though, while Thunderbird is going to eat another 20MB or so for itself.

Re:Mozilla Suite

[minginqunt]

Well, given that Mozilla never achieved any significant market share, and Firefox took off because Moz moved away from monolithic preference-hell, the evidence seems to suggest you are wrong.

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.

But other than that? I dunno.

I would have thought the devs could have found better projects to turn their resources to.

Martin

The interface is gross

[lav-chan]

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.

Re:Why Seamonkey?

[n4t3]

Speaking as someone who administers a small company that has been standardized on first Netscape then the Mozilla suite for many years, it will take some time for me to learn whatever I will need to in order to replace the suite with the separate components of FF and TB. Then after all the machines are set up, (I'm assuming I will be able to find a way to push the install through Active Directory), I'll have to deal with the training issues: "where's this, where's that?". Then don't even start the discussion about plugins - there's folks in every building with some kind of plugin that will need to be set up (Web developer, enigmail, etc.) Although I'm excited about FF/TB, my personal experience with FF has been lackluster - mysterious crashes and such while the Mozilla suite has been rock solid (if a little slow).

Re:Mozilla Suite

[ooze]

1st: Firefox + Thundebird is about 2 times as ressource hungry as the mozilla suite alone, where you have all that functionality and much more
2nd: I'm running a Mozilla suite 1.8 alpha for about a year already at work. It's so much more stable than the Firefox I had at home for a while, where I had more hangups in the two weeks I was using it than I had with the Mozilla (Alpha!) in the whole year. Granted, Firefox is more stable than IE, but that isn't that much of an achievement. I don't see any bloat in the suite. I'm using it on my development machine at work, which isn't exactly packed, and have no problem with speed. The only time I have problems with speed is when I start the Visual Studio. That's the reason I almost never do that. I develop with emacs...considering that this was once the standard example for bloat it's sort of funny.
3rd: The suite has so many more features important to web developers, such as the integrated DOM Inspector etc...
4th: Much better intgration (naturally) of all basic internet usage tools
5th: It may be ugly in the standard themes, but there are countless themes available. And yes, even themes that make it look like Firefox.
6th: Speed? How often do you start up your browser a day? If the load time of your browser starts to eat significant time of your day, because you start it up so often, then you should maybe take a closer look on your work habits, since those seem to have more impact on your little time.

Re:The point

[Accipiter]

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

Uh... Yes it was.

ONCE and for all (not really)...

[enmane]

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.

Re:ONCE and for all (not really)...

[drew]

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.

Good for you. Meanwhile, I've done both, and stuck with Firefox and Thunderbird because I like the the way they work better. How much RAM do they use? I haven't the foggiest. Disk space? Not really sure... Does one load faster than the other? Not that I can tell. Maybe by a tenth of a second or two. But I wouldn't know which; my watch only has a second hand.

Personally, I don't see much need for better integration between my email and web browsing. As long as a new browser opens when I click a link in an email, and a new email message comes up when I click a mailto: link in my web browser, I'm happy.

That said, I would love to use Mozilla as my primary browser again if they can sort out some of their serious user interface shortcomings, because I do have some issues with Firefox, but last I checked (1.7.1?) they still had a long way to go to even match Firefox, much less surpass it.

And for the love of ${deity}, please come up with a better name. I don't care what it is- I'm assuming that there are good reasons that the "Mozilla" name has been dropped, but come on guys, you could have tried harder than that.