SeaMonkey 1.0 Goes Beta

CTho9305 writes "SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta is out! Since the alpha release in September, it has picked up numerous bugfixes, a new logo, and a few cool features (also discussed on the SeaMonkey blog). For those who don't know, SeaMonkey is the continuation of the Mozilla Suite after the Mozilla Foundation ceased shipping new releases, so if you liked Mozilla or Netscape be sure to try it."

Comments

Good.

[truefluke]

It's good to see this version of the Mozilla codebase continuing. I dunno. I really don't have THAT much to say against FireFox; I use it every single day, every time, all the time. I just wasn't happy with 1.5.

Point 1: There's this weird bug where my flash blocker plugin is now doing JUST THAT. Nothing in flash works. It is just a blank screen. A community website that I browsed frequently in the past, and is ONLY accesible thru their Flash client, is now non-accesible. Since the blocker just presents a blank page, regardless of how much re-loading or clicking I do on the > arrow.

Point 2: My Bookmarks Menu. Yes I still use this. I do not use 'declicious' or any other community/social bookmark wiki system. My bookmarks are none of anyone's business, IMHO. After leaving FF up for a couple of hours, the highlighting feature when I scroll through the deep levels of my bookmarks just stops working and 'flickers'; I can't SEE what I'm actually highlighting when I want to get to the page I've marked. So I have to quit the thing and re-start it to achieve normal behaviour again.

These are un-acceptable showstopper bugs to me. Sorry, just my own opinion. You are free to dis-agree. I hope they fix it for other users' sake.

As far as the "suite" flavour goes: I had used Communicator (loyally) for so long, it does not bother me one bit as to how that software build is organized. In the past, I left it up for WEEKS at a time and never had a problem. My two cents.

Long live Mozilla in all their flavours.

Re:Good.

[moro_666]

flashblock needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled when you upgraded to 1.5 some time ago, now they claim that it should work automagically. i did uninstall/install and my flashblock works just fine. i wish they'd have this thing built in instead of a hack addon. it still flickers and does some weird tricks from time to time.

see the details on http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

about the bookmarks ... i guess i'm not that much a fan of bookmarking, i bookmark only rare stuff and use my memory and google for everything else.

the only bad thing from the "rise of the firefox" is that they lost the speed that phoenix had. i loved phoenix because of it's gui speed. firefox is just damn slow.

Re:Good.

[stromthurman]

I've seen those same bugs in FF 1.5 as well. The flickering bookmark bug is a pain, it seems that occasionally if you click on a bookmark folder, it will stop the flickering, but this doesn't always work and the only sure method does seem to be to close the browser and start again. I'd recommend the session saver plugin as something to help cope with that irritation.

As for flash, I initially had the same problem, but it didn't seem to be tied to Flashblock, rather the flash plugin itself. I'm currently running Ubuntu, so this may not be the same issue you're having, but the solution I found was to backup my bookmarks, then blow away all of ~/.mozilla/firefox, and let 1.5 rebuild the directory as it saw fit. Simply removing the plugins folder wasn't enough.

I hope this helps, but if not, at least I wasted some of your time!

Re:Good.

[p0ppe]

Had the same problem. Uninstalling flashblock and installing the latest version solved the problem.

Point 1: There's this weird bug where my flash blocker plugin is now doing JUST THAT. Nothing in flash works. It is just a blank screen. A community website that I browsed frequently in the past, and is ONLY accesible thru their Flash client, is now non-accesible. Since the blocker just presents a blank page, regardless of how much re-loading or clicking I do on the > arrow.

Re:Good.

[truefluke]

Thank you! For trying to help me with my problem. However this link:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Returned an 'unable to install' error. Guess the site might be swamped?

Re:Good.

[truefluke]

Thanks for trying to help me with my problem. I went to the 'Extension' menu sub-level under 'Tools' and did just that. I un-installed flashblock and then re-installed it from the mozdev page.

Same behaviour. Clicking on certain flash extensions doesn't work.

Thanks for trying tho. I fear my original point still stands.

Re:Good.

[kbrosnan]

Also make sure you update adblock or use adblock plus, if you use it. adblock cand cause the issues you are reporting. Flashblock and adblock are avalible from Firefox addons google for adblock plus to find the site.

If you cannot install extensions type about:config in the adderess bar and in the filter paste xpinstall.enabled if it is false double click to turn it to true.

Re:Good.

[zebs]

I beleive its specifically the obj-tabs in the adblock preferances that causes the problems with flash.

holy seamonkey...

[kwoff]

I thought the project I worked on had a lot of bugs.

Extensions/Plugins?

[alacqua]

I prefer Mozilla Suite to Firefox, but I'm worried that extensions/plugins/whatever-you-call-them will stop working with Seamonkey. Do they still work with the Seamonkey beta, and is this a problem going forward? Have those APIs which are applicable changed at all, and do they plan to change them in the future? Is this a function of the underlying gecko base or does the front end handle/decide this?

Re:Extensions/Plugins?

[savala]

Virtually all extensions which worked with Mozilla will work with SeaMonkey. It's always possible for an extension to use unfrozen interfaces or rely on bugs and for things to just stop working due to changes - there's been near enough a year and a half of development time since the 1.7 branch was created after all - but the expectation is that extension authors for who this is the case will update their extensions to work with SeaMonkey again, just like they would've done for Mozilla.

Of course there's also a large group of extensions which are Firefox only; the extension installation mechanism is different, and extensions for SeaMonkey/Mozilla have the responsibility to provide their own uninstaller (not that many do), but that's really a choice that extension authors make - who they want to support - and the only thing you could do about that is ask them directly if they will provide a version for SeaMonkey, or to take their code and do it yourself.

CPU and memory hogging bug in Seamonkey?

[Futurepower(R)]

Has anyone else found that the 2 1/2-year-old CPU and memory hogging bug is worse with Firefox 1.5? Have you experienced it in Mozilla?

I'm surprised at the number of crashes in Mozilla and Firefox. Here are some quotes about crashes from the Known Issues for SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta page:

"A significant number of SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by Java. Please make sure you are using the latest available version of Java."

"Sun's JRE will crash at startup if your useragent does not begin with Mozilla/5."

"Some SeaMonkey crashes are actually caused by Flash. Please make sure you are using the latest available Flash plugin (Bug 211213)."

"On Windows the Adobe SVG plugin crashes. Workaround: Don't copy it (NPSVG3.dll, NPSVG3.zip) into your plugins folder. If you want to view SVGs, SeaMonkey builds (except Linux GTK1) include native SVG support. (Bug 133567)"

The software I write (cash register software) would be considered unreleasable if it crashed. I notice that Mozilla and Firefox developers talk about crashes in what seems to me to be an easy-going fashion. I don't feel that way about Firefox and Mozilla crashes. When they crash, or have serious symptoms like the CPU and memory hogging bug mentioned above, I may lose literally hours of work. After a crash I must re-establish all my windows and tabs.

Re:CPU and memory hogging bug in Seamonkey?

[westyx]

I have the same issue, except that i've installed the Session Saver extension, which allows you to reload all the tabs you had open at the time of the crash. You might want to give it a try.

Re:CPU and memory hogging bug in Seamonkey?

[CTho9305]

Plugins run in-process for many reasons. As a result, if the plugin performs an illegal operation (accesses memory out of bounds, divides by 0, etc), the browser gets killed when the OS kills the process. There are some protections in place to handle certain plugin failures, but it's impossible to prevent them all - since the plugin runs in-process, it could overwrite any part of the browser's memory and cause SeaMonkey to crash later in some other, unrelated part of the code. Would you rather not be able to use plugins and not have in-browser video, flash, or Java? Those are viewed as "killer" (as in, super-important) features by many people.

The software I write (cash register software) would be considered unreleasable if it crashed.
Is a cash register nearly as complex as a modern internet suite? Most cash registers I've seen appear to run a command-line application or a simple interface written in Java or VB. High performance isn't an issue for them. Extensibilitiy isn't either - do you support plugins that anybody can write and integrate seamlessly?

I notice that Mozilla and Firefox developers talk about crashes in what seems to me to be an easy-going fashion.
Nobody likes crashes, but we acknowledge they exist, and provide workarounds when we have them.

I'm beginning to wonder if you're just an anti-Mozilla troll, based on your recent posts.

Re:CPU and memory hogging bug in Seamonkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, cash registers didn't need to render arbitrary remote data with complex formatting and turing-capable embedded scripting. Also, your product is COTS payware with all the usual expectations thereof.

Crashing because of plug-ins is an old problem.

[Futurepower(R)]

I should have been more clear in my parent comment above that I understand that the problems of Mozilla and Firefox crashing because of plug-ins has existed for at least 2 years.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ditch flashblock.

[Inoshiro]

/* Prevent flash animations from playing until you click on them. */
object[classid$=":D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-44455354 0000"],
object[codebase*="swflash.cab"],
object[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"],
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"],
embed[src$=".swf"]
{ -moz-binding: url("http://www.floppymoose.com/clickToView.xml#ct v"); }

Works in userContent.css. No more flash unless you click it to play with no extra code.

You're welcome :D