Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Seamonkey vs. Firefox — Any Takers?
Rexdude writes "Firefox continues to be criticized for their new versioning system and being a memory hog. People talk about Chrome, IE9, Opera as alternatives — but do Slashdotters ever use Seamonkey? I've never seen anyone mention it in any discussion on browsers. The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a full-blown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor. Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox. And they don't update their versions like crazy either; the current version is 2.13.1. I've been quite happy with it so far — it's snappier to use than Firefox. How many people on Slashdot use Seamonkey, and what has been your experience? (Note — I'm not affiliated with the project.)"
Look, it's a version number. Who cares?
And they don't update their versions like crazy either
LOL they release weekly just like FF, only difference being they increment the version # by less than 0.01 usually, instead of 1 like FF. Big deal.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/news
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The interface in the screenshots remind me of Netscape! for some reason.
5 Minutes and no takers?
It doesn't have the asinine upgrade cycle of Firefox, it doesn't have the horrible GUI of firefox, and it's UI is stable. And that's what I want- I've been using a web browser for almost 2 decades, I don't want it to change unless there's a HUGE benefit. The last time that happened was tabs. Oh, and it crashes less, uses less memory, and seems to be more responsive. I see no reason for Firefox to even exist when SeaMonkey is such a better project, except that it keeps the idiots in charge of Mozilla busy.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My kid and I both use it.
It's handy as both a browser, nntp and email client in one.
Even the html editor comes in handy for occasional quick stuff...
It's a good throwback to the old Netscape Navigator days and it's still being updated regularly.
I've been using that and Chrome.
Unfortuantely for me, all of Seamonkey's "extra features" make it less desirable for me.
In fact, I can't use it at all on my work machine - no software that can access IRC allowed = no Seamonkey :(
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
Firefox is not a memory hog anymore. In fact, it is one of the most (if not the most) frugal mainstream browsers today.
People should stop spreading 5 year old information without bothering to check first.
I need ABP to block Slashvertisements!!
Some of us never stopped using Mozilla.
I've used Firefox for ages, but they're so obsessed with turning the UI into Chrome I'm switching to Seamonkey to get the UI back to the Firefox 3 days. Tabs on bottom, and tou even get a proper status bar back again! It's designed for people that have a monitor larger than a postage stamp. And it's not designed for "the masses" - it's designed for (and by) more advanced users like myself, which hopefully means it won't start pandering to the latest UI gimmicks further down the line, either.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
and seamonkey for things like opening URL on click, and other uses.
Actually I remember a year or two ago someone in Slashdot claiming the WYSIWYG editor of Seamonkey being one of the best. Dunno though, have not tried it.
When I want a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which is not all the time, I use Seamonkey. The rest of the time I don't use it.
I would prefer that the editor simply not be there. Or at least remove the freaking menu key binding. I don't need to edit pages on a whim with a keystroke, much less at all, and control-E is too close to control-W and gets hit too much by accident. It can be changed, but you have to go in and unzip the right file, and remove the menu key binding, but then your work gets wiped a week later when there's an update.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The latest turn of the crank is highly incompatible with most add ons. 75% of existing add ons, easily are incompatible. It's a bit less clunky and sluggish than FF.
I like to use it because it is more conservative with features.
No "awesome bar" and when I open a new tab I will not share my browsing history with the people around me.
Seamonkey and Opera are my favorite browsers but I keep hitting a lot of rough edges with Opera lately so SM tends to be my primary browser.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
I'm sticking with my Firefox (actually Waterfox) because it has my old Qute-style them and looks just like it did years ago. SeaMonkey has the new icon style (combined with a few antique Netscape-style icons), so I'd just have to redo all my customizations again, with the only benefit being a bunch of other apps that I don't need in my browser (bloat).
The only reason to use SeaMonkey over Firefox is if you want the extra apps that it includes, as they're both based on the same core and the interface is completely customizable. Rather than switching away from Firefox because you don't like the interface, why not simply change it to your liking? Works for me anyway...
...and is hard to build on non-*buntu systems.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I started off on Netscape, then Mozilla and now Seamonkey mainly because they all had a similar UI and set of features. When everybody was moving to IE6, I stuck with Netscape Communicator 4.72 for years while Mozilla was completely rewriting the code base. I think the first Mozilla I ran was M18. And when Mozilla decided to release FF as their main project, I switched to Seamonkey.
I still use an email client, so if I were to use FF or Chrome today I'd have to install two programs instead of one. There is another benefit. I always had Linux on my desktops, but not on laptops due to their weird hardware (try getting Optimus working in Linux). Mozilla and Seamonkey use the mbox file format both in Windows and Linux, so moving mail between the OSes was simple after a reinstall. Just copy over the files and you'd be done. I think Seamonkey is still the only cross platform email client.
That should be enough, but there are other reasons.
The bookmark structure in Seamonkey has remained the same since Communicator and until recently moving to a new computer was as simple as replacing an html file in the profile folder. Now it's a bit more complicated, to the extent that I have to import/export that same html file.
Seamonkey also has a lot of extra config options in the Preferences window compared to FF. In this respect FF feels completely dumbed down. I am aware FF and Seamonkey have virtually the same options in about:config, but modifying things means looking up values instead of just clicking an option.
TL;DR? I'm just too lazy to retrain my muscle memory with a new browser when I've been using Seamonkey and its predecessors for at least a decade and a half.
My home desktop runs Seamonkey. I have an archive of many years worth of emails on it, so I use it and Seamonkey as my mail history "way back machine". I do not suggest it is faster or better, but it is easy and, after long use, very comfortable - never had a major glitch with it. I think it is a good program.
Aaahh not another browser! We need fewer browsers, not more of them!
Please pull this story from Slashdot as soon as possible!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I've been using Pale Moon (a Firefox derivative) for about a year now as my primary browser, and I'm very happy with it. It has some stuff stripped out of it that seems to make it more stable, and there's a 64-bit version. http://www.palemoon.org/ for more info.
I'm Peggy.
I tried it once and then stopped using it straight away when I saw that fraps was trying to render a frame rate on its windows. I'm fine with my Firefox 3.6
I've been using Seamonkey from the days when it was just the Mozilla browser. All the important Firefox extensions seem to work with it, and it renders most things just fine. It's more stable than Firefox and more traditional in its layout. Is it a lot better than Firefox? No. But it is a little different.. and it has a web editor and email client built in that are fine for occassional use.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I dont always do WSIWYG HTML, but when I do, I prefer Seamonkey
FTFY
Having recently switched from Firefox to Chrome, I'm not looking to make another change. It would have to have exclusive features which save me time or solve a need for me to even take a look at this point. I haven't seen anything suggesting SeaMonkey does either.
"Women. Can't live with 'em. Pass the beer nuts." -Norm
it's essentially just what Netscape was to Navigator, or what Mozilla was to Phoenix/Thunderbird/Firefox
It's not "essentially" Mozilla. It IS main-line trunk Mozilla. They simply changed the name a few years ago.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Does it support extensions yet? I remember that being the main issue with the, formerly known as, mozilla suite. I also find it hilarious how Firefox started as a lightweight version of seamonkey.
I never switched from Netscape, really -
Netscape
Mozilla Suite
Seamonkey
The switch from Mozilla Suite to Seamonkey was made against a cacophony of support for Firefox. Firefox then was like Chrome now - lean, mean, the future, in a word: cool.
People bitched and moaned about how the Mozilla Suite (and, by extension, Seamonkey) was burdened by bundling its mail, news, chat, and html edit programs together; people wanted a lean-and-mean browser.
The tables are turned now, though. By avoiding all the pointless cool chrome (to use an expression), Seamonkey has managed to stay feeling light and purposeful.
Add to that the fact that
- the UI is stable
- the version numbers are sane (and the release schedule is sane, unlike what the current top post on this story says - maybe one minor release per month. very manageable)
- the prefs don't talk down to you
- it has mail and chat attached by default (I like that!)
- it has a single address/search bar
- it uses Gecko, so under-the-hood it's up-to-date
- when you spawn a new tab, the new tab appears at the extreme right, instead of displacing the existing tabs by spawning to the immediate right of your current tab
- the new-tab button is fixed in the extreme left of the tab bar, and doesn't jump around depending on how many tabs you have open atm
There are probably other things I could list. But in general, it _is_ a browser for people who know what they want: a browser that has a perfectly workable UI and does not change based on fashion. And a browser that has a modern HTML engine.
Unless and until the HTML engine becomes stale, I see no reason to change. I like my menu bars, I like spending a few extra horizontal pixels up to have back, forward, reload and stop buttons, I like having an attached mail client. Good design is good design no matter what decade it is.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I've used it ever since they renamed mozilla to seamonkey. I've always liked searching from inside the address bar, which has been the main reason I did not switch to Firefox. I don't talk about it much in the same way I don't talk about using libgettext: it's just a browser, it gets the job done. Browsers and web development are overrated and overhyped.
A billion years ago.. well, maybe not.... This is all from memory. I didn't have anything specific to do with any of these groups, though my job depended on HTTP, HTML and web server programming, so I kept an interest.
Netscape as a company was toast. They had been beaten by IE, they weren't moving servers (I used Netscape's webserver once, and found it was pretty clunky compared to Apache even in those days). As they shrank, they what code they could to the Mozilla project.
So, now you have these smart and fast engineers, and with less corporate management you can let them run free and produce the greatest browser ever! Well, not really... it looked like Navigator, but with no market researchers telling them no, they're free to jam even more features in it. Lets keep usenet there, even though only geeks know what an NNTP server is. Lets keep mail and a web browser together. And lets add IRC chat, cause everyone uses IRC right? As for the shiny stuff under, lets rewrite COM to be cross platform! Lets write a cross platform XML based GUI! In short, it was a mess. It was crash prone, and even the shiny cool tech under was shiny and cool (the XML based GUI layout engine has been copied by many now, including Microsoft) it was not ready for prime time. It was just too big, too bulky to get right. And too much for the timelines they wanted to use. The fact that they coded a lot of other tools (Bugzilla, Tinderbox) didn't help timelines either. They had good ideas, its just the three goals "code everything", "code perfectly", and "release early and often" just don't mix.
As it stuttered, a group of Mozilla folks forked some of the code and made a lean mean browser. Since they thought Mozilla was bogged down, they wanted to rise from the ashes of Netscape and Mozilla, and called their fork Phoenix. Even early on, it was fast, lean, and got a lot of attention. Very early, it was obvious that this was the direction of Mozilla. Then the name changes. Eventually, Phoenix tech, the guys that make the BIOS on your box sued. They might want to have a webclient in the BIOS, and a Phoenix web browser may be confusing. OK, lets call it Firebird. And then we call the mail client Thunderbird, very cool. But wait, there is already an OpenSource project called Firebird. So, we get Firefox.
Mod up informative.
BTW Firefox is built upon that XML-based GUI thing (XUL), that was one apparently bloated thing that apparently the Netscape people got right.
I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I actually like Seamonkey quite a bit, and use it periodically, but I wish it had better extension and customization support. There were only about a half-dozen themes last time I looked, and only a few extensions. Fortunately, they had the important ones (AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, etc.) but it would be nice to have access to more. Still, a fine and stable way to browse the web.
Good news, everyone! Now that Chrome has even more functionality than Firefox, it has even more problems than Firefox.
Seamonkey is faster and uses a bit less memory, or at least it has in the past, which is why I used it on my limited platforms like Dt168/Dt366, or the i-Opener.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
XUL isn't the prettiest GUI API, I wouldn't necessarily say they got it "right". But there's a whole host of even more atrocious APIs (Win32 comes to mind), so there's that.
I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.
Sometimes handy for quickly testing a program, but installers pretty much remove the effort to figure out where to put programs, or that required to make shortcuts to them.
(FWIW, Firefox used to provide plain zip files for Windows for a long time on the FTP... iirc even 3.6.x releases had them. Though on looking, it appears it's only available via installer in recent days.)
As someone that has never really liked Chrome, I've tried to stick with Firefox mostly because of its reliable blockers (AdBlock Plus and NoScript) but the direction FF has been taking has really not been that great. It's trying to be slick and basically turn into Chrome; all I've wanted is a simple, classic browser, and SeaMonkey is that, exactly, while keeping compatibility with many of FF's addons, like the all important ABP and NS.
My hope is that SM doesn't decide to go down the same dark road as Firefox in the future.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
I use SeaMonkey as my daily browser/mail client. I know quite a few people who use it too (girlfriend, neighbor, family, ...), where I worked before, we used Mozilla Suite with FTP calendar for employee schedules. In fact I just followed the natural evolution: Netscape Communicator -> Netcape -> Mozilla -> Mozilla Suite -> SeaMonkey. Fun fact that I still have more or less the same interface in front of me for 15 years while benefiting of latest technology. I still use the same profile too even if I switched mail box providers a few times over time.
Mozilla split this suite to separate browser/mail client apps to compete with Internet Explorer/Outlook combo and it worked great. But I wasn't fan of the way they dumbed down the browser app to make Firefox, removing many great features (initially, it improved with time), it really was a step back. And I really love to have one application only for all my Internet needs (well I use Bluefish for web dev, not SeaMonkey's built-in editor, and I don't use the integrated IRC client as much as I did a few years back). I have only one extension installed, and that is Lightning (calendar). We use a common calendar (stored online) with my girlfriend so anyone can add future activities. It's an awesome piece of software, better suiting corporate needs than Firefox. Too bad Mozilla doesn't push it more. It's really overlooked. :-/
By the way, I also like the fact the address bar and search bar are common. It saves space and is very convenient. To run a Google (for example) search on a word, just type it in the address bar and click the Search button. Or even faster, type in the word and press down, enter. Fast and easy!
I suggest anyone to give it a try, it has a lot going for it! ;-)
The WYSIWYG editor, called "Composer", started with the old Netscape browser and has been updated somewhat since then, but is not what anyone would consider a fully functional, modern, web page editor. Still, it has some advantages. It's free, for one thing, and pretty easy to use and good for teaching the basics of creating web pages to beginners, who would panic if they had to understand HTML. Another advantage is that it works the same on both Windows and Macs, so it's easy to teach a class to people who use either system. One more advantage is that the FireFTP add-on works with SeaMonkey, so beginning web developers can have a complete editor, browser, and FTP client in one package.
Its pretty bad. It hasn't changed significantly from Netscape's version. Its what you see is what you get. Instead of What you see is what you would actually want to show people if you are using your real name (WYSIWYWAWTSPIYAUYRN).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'm kinda addicted to Pandora, so I use Seamonkey just for accessing Pandora.
I have to use a US proxy in order to access Pandora since I live in Israel and Pandora cannot be accessed outside the US. So I defined a proxy (through ssh SOCKS) in Seamonkey and I use it only for accessing Pandora.
hemi
I don't know what filehippo is or why you refer to it, but SeaMonkey 2.13.1 has been released 2 weeks ago and is
as modern (and is supporting as many standards) as FireFox 16.0.1
The patches of FireFox quickly make it into SeaMoney, which shares large parts of its code (and of Thunderbird).
It even sends Firefox as part of its user agent string, just to satisfy those that know about Firefox and not about SeaMonkey.
I've never seen the need or reason to have a mail client and a browser as the same app.
The list when I 'downgraded' from FF (actually, Palemoon 15.2):
BBComposer
Download Statusbar
Fireform
Flashblock
Greasemonkey
IE View Lite
iMacros
ImageBlock
Memory Restart
TabMix Plus
A couple of these have other variants that will work around but several of those are dealbreakers.
Been using Chrome for about 4 months now, and have yet to see the same slowdowns I saw in FF.
Kids and their new-fangled browsers. I still prefer NCSA Mosaic 3.0. All that new fancy HTML stuff just leads to the devil.
Bearded Dragon
Seamonkey still supports one of the original Netscape Easter eggs "Ctrl-Alt-F" which takes you to the Fishcam. Reason enough to use it? :)
I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.
You can get a "portable" version of Firefox that is packaged in a single folder from PortableApps.com
Seamonkey is by far the best browser ever made. It's the only one I use anymore. It's all inclusive. And it's not a lot bigger than that bloated Firefox. The page source viewer is very pleasant. The editor and its email aren't so bad. And it's interface hasn't changed since.. like... forever.. a very big plus, especially for one with bad eyesight. I can update will-nilly and everything is still exactly where it was before. No silly trendy changes there. I hope it stays that way.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Visit a Youtube video and Facebook with chat open and leave those tabs open for a few days.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It's my primary browser/E-Mail/Usenet client. Why install two products when just one will do?? It also takes up less resources as well.
The only issue I have is that a lot of Firefox extensions won't work in Seamonkey, and their authors don't seem terribly eager to support Seamonkey either. I used it in Windows, and now that I'm in the process of migrating to Linux (Ubuntu), I'm using it there, too.
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
I've been using Seamonkey for many years. I started when I needed a quickie HTML editor for something, tried it, liked the overall browser and stuck with it.
Every so often I try the various other browsers. So far I've seen no reason to change and lots of reasons not to.
But I thought this was very unusual. Seems it isn't.
If FF had taken a couple days to slow down, I could have lived with it. But a couple hours...
People want choices, Chrome takes those choices away.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I've been using Mozilla/Seamonkey since 2001. It was the best browser then, and the best now, IMO.
I never cared for Firefox, it's always been a rebranded Mozilla with a worse interface, fewer features and fewer options. This is ever more apparent as Firefox follows Chrome into the simplicity abyss. Also, version numbers - I like them to mean something.
How about making Seamonkey even faster and simpler by removing everything except the browser? Then replace the bloated Firefox with that, what could go wrong?
Control W closes the current window, so you don't have to guess the correct tab.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
> The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a full-
> blown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor.
All of which nobody wants from Mozilla. We just want the web browser. I already have, from other sources, a *much* more feature-complete mail/news reader (Gnus) and an overwhelmingly better HTML editor (Emacs with some custom elisp that I wrote back in the nineties; one very major advantage this has over an HTML-specific editor is that it works when I'm writing snippets of HTML embedded in other kinds of files, such as in server-side Perl code), and if I had any use whatsoever for an IRC client I hope someone would smack me back to my senses.
Really, I just want the browser.
With that said...
> Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox.
Yes, I know. It took Firefox well more than a year just to have extensions _available_ for some of the features that I relied on heavily in the old Mozilla suite, and I refused to switch over to it until the extension manager changes that allowed you to upgrade the browser without having to find and install all your extensions again from scratch (sometime around FF 1.5 IIRC). Using the suite, I'd need about a third as many extensions as I need in Firefox, because the rest of the things I use extensions for were built in out-of-the-box in the suite.
> And they don't update their versions like crazy either;
More to the point, they haven't been gratuitously dorking around with the UI trying to see how screwed up they can make it for the last three years.
So yeah, I've thought about it. Currently, I find that Firefox 2.0.0.20 with NoScript is still adequate for my needs, but its days are obviously numbered. The nail in its coffin will be the CSS features that it doesn't support simply because its Gecko version is too old. The most important of these is probably display: inline-block, since sites that rely on that can have quite seriously messed up layouts (and, frequently, overlapping text) when it's not supported. Eventually, I'll have to upgrade because of that. (There are also some Javascript performance issues, but I find that the number of sites I ever use where I actually _want_ the functionality that the Javascript provides can be counted on the fingers of one hand without resorting to clever math tricks. Lang-8 is the main one. So I just use that site in a different browser. Sorted.)
And yes, if the Firefox team doesn't eventually quit playing around with the UI like hyperactive third graders and produce something solid and reliable, it is entirely possible that Seamonkey will be my upgrade path. Chrome is obviously unsuitable for my needs (because it's even less customizable than IE and furthermore lacks a number of features I'm not willing to live without), and while I use Opera on the side for certain things, I would have grave reservations about making it my primary browser. I've also checked out Epiphany, Midori, Flock, Galeon, and several others. So far, Seamonkey looks like the best bet, if Firefox doesn't eventually find its way back to a place where I can meet it.
If I thought I had anywhere near the C chops for it, I might attempt to fork Firefox 2 and update it to use a modern Gecko, but I'm nowhere near enough of an application developer and have nothing like enough knowledge of C to realistically attempt that kind of undertaking. (I have some programming background, but I mostly write glue code, personal utilities, and server-oriented non-GUI stuff. I'm a network administrator, not an application developer.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I have been using suite web browsers since early Netscape days. Even Mozilla (the name of its web browser) before renaming to SeaMonkey. I like having my newsreader, e-mail, web browser, etc. all at once and integrated. Extensions can be a problem since not all work in it. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I regularly have FF open for days without slowdown, and have over a dozen extensions loaded, including greasemonkey with a couple of scripts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, I'm sure my slowdowns were not typical. But they were real. I've always assumed it was a plugin, but I was never able to isolate which one.
Chrome plugins seem to have less ability to screw up the browsers.
Must be an Apple product. Sounds like a great product except the windows version wouldn't even start the installer, just got lost in a spindizzy. The linux load has got to be the biggest kludge going. It's not in the repository so to get an icon on the desktop you have to register it, then cut and paste a graphic. Mozilla wouldn't just create an installer. Talk about an orphan.
All I say is by way of discourse, nothing by way of advice
I've had a blog since the 20th century, and am too lazy to write HTML direct, so seamonkey it is. Son in law got me onto Wordpress for a while, but in the long run, it's less secure with all those fancy bits. Caught a virus, and i gave it up.
Admittedly seamonkey has a few bugs, but wtf just have to find a workaround. (one annoying bug is textsize especially on cut&paste.)
So keep up the good work at SM.
I'll throw a plug in to DonationCoder.com. I am not affiliated with the ownership, just a member and donator. There are guys there who specialize in those little "one feature widgets" that fit you just because you're you. Specifically, look for Skwire and MilesAhead. They're among the two who are the fastest at these little things.
As a broader philosophy, if a browser does everything you need *except one obnoxious quirk* then sometimes if you can fix the quirk you are better off overall. For example I just got a "turbo-backspace" widget that sits in my Windows tray and deletes either 4 or 7 keystrokes via a couple of hotkeys. Cumulatively I've saved at least an hour of my life by not hitting backspace 11 times per sentence to fix my Frankenstein typing style.
Another time I got ticked off at the Maximize button, so I got a widget that disables it. (Though that one is a little finicky.)
So look at a browser for its overall merit, then see if there is a finesse you can fix.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And yet, by the time of Firebird IIRC, SeaMonkey was faster. The developers who wrote bloat moved to the fork, called it the standard and crippled it. Try both on a slow machine, SeaMonkey is still faster while giving you more options
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Because many years ago the Mozilla developers who were into bloat moved to Firefox or perhaps it was still Firebird or Phoenix, and took all their bloat with them.
At one point on an old Athlon 1800 and dial-up SeaMonkey could load slashdot twice as fast as Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
As a bonus, your user will be pleased to discover that publishing in Composer is almost instaneous now.
SeaMonkey uses the same rendering engine as Firefox. Maybe not quite as well supported but when you reproduce the SeaMonkey bug on Firefox (which is usually the case) Mozilla tries hard to fix it and the few SeaMonkey only bugs are usually fixed pretty quick as well. Also uses the same development process including sharing bugzilla, tinderboxes and such, as Firefox.
Has mostly the same issues as Firefox, so as long as a page displays in Firefox, it'll display in SeaMonkey.
It is usually a day or two behind patches as Firefox due to lack of developers but those same 4 exploits patched in 16.01 were patched in 2.13.1 within days.
A surprising lot of people use SeaMonkey, amongst the people I interact with it's about a 50/50 split.
Websites don't usually break with SeaMonkey excepting the odd one coded by someone who has no idea how to check the user string.
Plugins and extensions (which I think you meant as plugins are binary like Flash) break at the same frequency as Firefox as it uses exactly the same API.
You could consider SeaMonkey to be just a different themed Firefox with some default extensions but it is faster and more stable especially for people like me who are using 16 year old operating system on 8 year old hardware with dial-up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Thunderbird was designed wrong from the ground up. So I can't see using SeaMonkey as Opera's email client is so much superior.
being a memory hog
I understand people talking about Chrome being a faster browser, and I don't begrudge them that. However, anyone who contends that Chrome uses less memory doesn't know what they're talking about. Firefox uses less memory, is a smaller download, and is a much smaller installation than Chrome (particularly if you only measure code and leave out translations).
The Firefox installer on Win32 is almost half the size of Chrome, and the installed code is about half the size of Chrome as well. It's no wonder it uses less memory.
yes yes yes
I have used SeaMonkey from the day they made the fork, relatively happy even if I nowadays also use Chrome for better cross-instance isolation.
I also have Opera installed, I use that exclusively for online banking.
I do like the fact that in SeaMonkey I can right-click a link in a mail/news msg and do "Open in a New Window".
I also enjoy knowing that SeaMonkey is non-mainstream, even if that isn't much a security feature these days when 90-99% of the browser code is shared with Firefox.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
No trick. This is a browser suite aimed at power users(hence the inclusion of IRC and newsgroup support and a host of extra options), and in everyday use it does startup and run faster than Firefox. It employs the same Gecko rendering engine and incorporates modern features ( SPDY support was recently added).
I use Gmail via IMAP on the built in client, and it still takes up less memory than running Firefox and Thunderbird together. The Seamonkey devs don't fuck around with the UI as the Firefox ones keeps doing, and for nostalgia you even can theme it to look like the old Netscape Communicator (if that counts).
All popular extensions (Adblock Plus included) have Seamonkey ports.
Out of the box you get better control over tab and link behavior, disable loading 3rd party images, mouse wheel integration, Firefox user agent compatibility and several other features.
What's not to like?
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Good luck fitting a "real PC" into a bag sized for a 10" laptop. Anything bigger would be impractical to carry and use on the bus while commuting to and from work.
It's clearly not an official mozilla.org build, but cool. (I actually upgraded that old box to 10.5, losing Classic as a result, because I knew that SM needed 10.5. Only then did I find out the lack of a PPC build.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I use Seamonkey and like it a lot. Works for me. My browser usage isn't anything terribly demanding. I do need to use text magnification, because of not-very-good eyesight. I use Eudora for my POP mail client, not Thunderbird. Don't use/do chat. No time for that. One of the nifty things that Seamonkey has added lately is "remembering" where I save web pages depending upon the web site I am browsing at the moment. So it defaults to the correct folder when I'm saving an on-line purchase, etc. When I upgrade, I seem to keep all of my personal settings which is nice. Only thing is when I set up Seamonkey on a new/different machine, I can't figure out how to get to all of the settings I'm using on my "regular" machine that have been carried forward "forever." If I took a little time I could figure out what is the configuration file that I should copy over to the new / different machine. When I try any other browser, I can't find the handles and don't stick with it until I learn the interface. I occasionally try another browser only when a web page is not displaying properly, and it's important. Seamonkey must have enough users that the developer community feels it is worthwhile to keep it up to date. Updates come out fairly regularly.
Starting off with AOL for the last three months of '96, I briefly tried and quickly abandoned Inept Exploder, going with Netscape for the balance of the old century and into the new, passing through Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 on my way to various flavors of Linux. About 8 years ago a friend helped me set up a NetBSD box for my intarwebz usage, insisting I try Seamonkey - and I have been using it with some satisfaction since. My current rather dodgy setup (inb4 "get a better setup", I have a couple of candidate boxen that I'm working on, but money for parts is tight), which doesn't run anywhere as well as I would like, handles Seamonkey 2.8 rather well, and certainly better than the current version of Firefox - a beast that can hardly be said to run at all and frequently locks the system so hard I am forced to physically shut the computer off entirely. Seamonkey's bookmark manager is amazingly good, while Firefox ... doesn't seem to have a bookmark manager of any kind. My chief complaint against Seamonkey is the problem arising from an update that so totally broke several plugins involved with flash video (such as YouTube) that I have been unable to repair them.
(background music: Lightwave's "Tycho Brahe.")
(I used Netscape's webserver once, and found it was pretty clunky compared to Apache even in those days).
The real problem with the Netscape webserver is that it gave absolutely no error messages. There was no way to troubleshoot anything that was going wrong with it. I suspect they removed all error messages so that the webserver would appear to be better than it was. Anyone who had to work with the damned thing suffered dearly for those surface appearances.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I think Seamonkey is more than just a Firefox clone.Seamonkey has many of the features that have become synonymous with Web browsing. For example, SeaMonkey offers tabbed browsing, interface customization, user profiles and an amply stocked tools menu.Seamonkey uses roaming profiles.This browser has a lot of good stuff,for example Password Manager, Image Manager, and Form Manager are accessible via the browser window menu bar. Here's some information from the new Seamonkey 2.11 beta: http://www.techyv.com/questions/seamonkey-211-beta-1-released Good luck! Jake