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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.
Everybody knows the name, and seamonkey is a really bad name for a browser
>>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
Firefox doesn't have memory leaks.
It has an ermmmmm integrated memory testing functionality suite built in.
However, in the real world, I do agree with you and the hole(s) should be fixed. Depending upon usage FF basic footprint can skyrocket (usually multiple large gallery pages makes this problem worse). A loss of just a few bytes per image is made much worse by pages with thousands of images.
Add to this addins created entirely out of script and it becomes sluggish on large pages.
HOWEVER, ff is 100x better than the alternative and however sluggish or much memory it uses, it still works.
liqbase
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...
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.
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.
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
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. --
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
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.