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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."
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!
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
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.
> A chacun a son gout, I suppose.
Excellent piece of music that. Shickele is an unsung genius...
> I understand the *what* and the *how*, I'm just not surely I
> really understand the *why*.
Presumably, so that people who prefer the suite can get the advantage of any recent Gecko rendering engine improvements. Duh.
Why would someone prefer the suite? Well, at first I preferred Navigator over Firefox because the Firefox extension management mechanism frankly sucks. (The existence of the extension mechanism is important, and the idea of leaving many features to extensions is not really the problem, but among other things there's no easy way to say "I want this extension, and this one, and this one, and this one, and that one" and have them all download and install as a batch. Then there's the trial-and-error uninstall-half / test / reinstall-half method you have to go through if one of your extensions is causing you trouble; the UI for this is abysmal, and reinstalling requires re-downloading, which is totally unacceptable for people on dialup.)
I did eventually switch from Navigator to Firefox, after the first major round of improvements to the extension mechanism (notably, extensions now persist when you install a new version of the browser; without that, I was sticking with Navigator just because it had some of the most important extensions built in). However, the browser is the only component that I use. I can easily see why someone who also uses the Mail/News component, for instance, might prefer the suite. Fundamentally, Navigator is still a quite usable browser, containing all of the most important feature innovations that Firefox has. It's not the latest and greatest thing that the Mozilla Foundation is excited about, but it's not exactly some crufty old twentieth-century browser with no features, either. Really it's pretty good, and still has its fans. It just hasn't garnered the mainstream attention that Firefox has.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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 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
>>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.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
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...
and reinstalling requires re-downloading,
Since when? Nobody told you to download AND install it the first time. You could've just downloaded it, put it in a place somewhere on your HD and install it afterwards.
Sig?
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
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.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
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.
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.
Yea, thats what bugs me the most about Firefox as well. If someone writes an extention to put that feature back into Firefox I might consider it, untill that time, the Mozilla Suite rules the day.
/greger
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.
I have been using Mozilla (browser+email) for a few years and I have no plans in switching to Firefox.
I just have no interest in Firefox, no new features, speed is the same.
And I know there are still users like me that will always use Mozilla/Seamonkey.
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!)
If someone writes an extention to put that feature back into Firefox I might consider it
about:config
keyword.URL=http://www.google.com/search?q=
Just type your search into the address bar and hit enter.
where there's fish, there's cats
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.
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.
That's not why Firefox took off. Firefox took off because it was actually advertised. Mozilla.org supported projects such as SpreadFirefox and an ad in the New York Times.
The Suite, on the other hand, they went to every effort to make sure people didn't use it. There was never any push to make people use it. The official stance of Mozilla.org was "The suite is a reference implementation for developers only. Only use it if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, use something based off it such as Netscape." The Mozilla.org site stressed that message heavily. Also, the download page for the suite was loaded with warnings "This may be extremely buggy and may do bad things to your computer. Use at your own risk." Let's not forget it was only a year or two ago at most that they took down the big warning about possible Y2K bugs on the download page. About the only thing more they could've done to scare people away from the Suite was to make you click on a picture from goatse.cx to download the installer.
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.
How about people who think it's just plain stupid that you have to install a bunch of extensions and go making lots of changes in about:config just to get FireFox usable?
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.
And here I thought Firefox was just the browser component of Mozilla without all the other useful components. Why would you insist on using a less-functional, cutesy program (whether it is called Pheonix, Firebird or Firefox) when Mozilla can do everything it can and a hell of a lot more?
If there is one upside to open source software is that legacy software will never die so long as some people actually want to use it and find it useful. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can go on improving existing, proven programs. Even then, features can be ported to those newer apps (say, oh I don't know, via Gecko).
(See, kids: there's more than one way to spin a discussion! Disclaimer: I use Firefox, but I still respect the SeaMonkey users' decision to keep using it.)
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
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.
I see this complaint a lot, and I have to ask, in the days of tabs, why are people opening and closing their browser all day long? Seems like a waste of time and effort to me.
I mean, do you also shut down your PC every time toy turn away for a minute or five? Do you turn off the engine of your car at a stoplight?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Arrow-up + enter is hardcoded into my spine by now.
You can't use : and some other special chars in the search string, killing stuff like site:.com. Not a valid URL, my ass!
It doesn't combine well with the drop down history. If I kinda remeber the URL of a page I previously visited, I'll start typing and if I'm lucky I get a match in the history, if not I'll try Google. With keyword search the history matching is deactivated.
/greger
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you click on an extension install at the mozilla site, doesn't firefox offer to install it? If so, what indication would a user have that they could both install in any other method than the touted web based one, and how would they know how to save vs install it?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
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 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, 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.
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
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.
Wow! Thanks for the link.
Hey, moderators. Mod parent up. This is actually news for nerds.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
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.
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.
Too bad I have no modpoints ... I totally agree with the parent post.
The search interface was for me too the reason why I switched back to Mozilla (and I use the browser only, nothing else) after having given Firefox a try.
Maybe it's possible to configure Mozilla's original behaviour in Firefox with about:config, but why not implement it like Mozilla in the first place?
So many times a day I type some words in the URL field (and I want the whole width of the field), hit Tab+Return and I have the Google results.
When I observe an MSIE user, loading google.com first, I almost can't believe it.
I love Mozilla as a browser, and the search interface is a brilliant thing for it's simplicity!
Maybe you're unfamiliar with FF's Quick Searches. They're in your bookmarks.
The standard google search through the address bar is by using "g " and hit Enter. You can use any Google search string: "g wiki site:wikipedia.org" + Enter works just like you'd expect.
And you can do this with any search you want. Wikipedia and Dictionary.com are built in already, and you can add whatever you want. I have TorrentSpy.com's search, for example. "ts " + Enter. Works like a charm. You can change the codes to whatever you want if you're unhappy with the default keywords (such as "g", "wp", and "dict") in your bookmarks.
Sorry, /. code messed up my reply.
Google search in address bar: "g [search criteria]" + Enter.
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.
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.
How about people who think it's just plain stupid that you have to install a bunch of extensions and go making lots of changes in about:config just to get FireFox usable?
Oh you ain't joking there, bucko.
Firefox out of the box is a fricking mess. For just ONE example, tabbed browsing is broken, plain and simple, without at least two extensions.
I'm sorry... I understand the "philosophy" of a "back to basics" browser with only the bare essentials. I grok that. Really. I do.
But this is part of Firefox's core functionality (tabbed browsing, that is), and if you're going to make it that way, it should WORK CORRECTLY without having to resort to one or more extensions to make it behave in a consistent, sane manner.
You know what my biggest bitch is about Firefox though?
It's a petty one, but it's legit.
Back on their 0.8 release, it allowed you to hot-switch themes, but it was buggy, and caused goofy things to happen to your toolbars if you didn't restart the whole browser after switching themes.
Their response to that? Rather than fix the buggy theme-switching, they just force a restart of the browser.
What a copout.
I mean come ON, guys... even Opera can manage switching themes without having to restart the browser, and up until very recently, Opera was a flaky POS on most of my machines.
I want to love Firefox. I really do. But they make it so hard.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
because firefox can't sit by my systray without 3rd party stuff to open faster. because i like having one address bar that can be a url or with a flick of the down arrow, search google instead (yeah, i know firefox has a search bar next to teh address bar, and that's exaclty what i don't like). it's cleaner, more mature, and i've been using since it was version ~0.94. i am used to it, i like it...neh, i love it. because i am not some smoe that has to like a browser just because everyone else is using it. because i tried firefox and it just didn't feel right. or maybe, just because...
so the *why* might be because of people like me that like mozilla instead of firefox.
I know what you mean. I used to read the old mozdev newsgroups, and ... arrogant is the kind and gentle description. I vividly recall the huge argument over whether the context menu, when invoked with the pointer over an image, should include the "Back" option. By actual count, newsgroup sentiment ran 700+ for, and only 2 against. But the developer in charge of that area didn't like the "clutter" on the context menu, and HE never used "Back, so "Back" was by-damn NOT going to be available over images, and if the overwhelming majority of lusers didn't like it, tough shit.
My sincere hope is that coders with this attitude all went down the Firefox path, leaving Mozilla/Seamonkey to developers who actually give a shit what the users want. We'll see.....
Personally, I dislike Mozilla and only use it when a site won't speak to my preferred ancient Netscape -- but I found that I *hate* Firefox. There were just too many things that weren't available or didn't work, and did so in some way that was much more annoying than Mozilla at its worst. And on my poor old P3-550 with a mere gig of RAM, Moz is sluggish and refuses to gracefully multitask its own windows (this is actually what I dislike MOST about it -- it behaves like it was never intended for use on dialup, nor by anyone who routinely uses more than one window at a time), but FF is downright painful.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I agree, I don't understand that they don't tell you how to do that, just as they tell you when you want to install Thunderbird extensions (since obviously these don't work in Firefox - most of them at least).
But, you can always right-click and choose "save link as...".
Sig?
Great... Another example for getting modded down for telling the truth...
;P
Okay. My next design will also come in form of a firefox-ui-rewrite. You wanted it that way!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.