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!

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.

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