Ask Slashdot: Seamonkey vs. Firefox — Any Takers?

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Ask Slashdot: Seamonkey vs. Firefox — Any Takers?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @05:02AM from the problem-with-a-chromebox dept.

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.)"

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Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 05:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

Look, it's a version number. Who cares?
1. Re:Seriously? by Synerg1y · 2012-10-23 05:08 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Add-on developers.
2. Re:Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 05:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I think the point is you won't be getting interrupted every time you open the browser to update.
  Couldn't care less if they just decided to skip to version 100, but I'm not using it again until they figure out how to be less annoying then a pop up penis pill ad.
3. Re:Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 05:40 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Ok, but what are you going to do in a week from now? :)
4. Re:Seriously? by Mitchell314 · 2012-10-23 06:03 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Use unsigned long long for version tracking. :P
  
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  I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
5. Re:Seriously? by jellomizer · 2012-10-23 06:26 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  As someone who usually makes a snide remark every time Firefox goes up to a new version, it really isn't a factor if I am going to use the product or not. I just think it was a Lame attempt to seem cool compared to Google Chrome. You know, like that kid in Jr. High School who wasn't popular, but tries too hard to be so, in the attempt they end up looking even more uncool, in the same process he had alienated himself from the cool kids and the outsider group too.
  Not that the version number will affect the quality of the software. However by doing this firefox isn't being true to itself. And these big number changes only confuse people trying to realise if they should bother to upgrade or not.
  
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  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
6. Re:Seriously? by tlhIngan · 2012-10-23 08:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Add-on developers.
  And people who hate how the UI seems to change every version. One version things act one way, the next and it acts another way.
  It's why people don't complain so much about Chrome because the UI tends to be fairly stable. With Firefox, it's a game of "what did they change this time around?".
  Things like the status bar, the URL bar (autocomplete only does the domain nowadays rather than the full URL... very annoying), etc. I think 16.0.1 did something with the zoom control now as well... like ti seems to persist the zoom settings across site loads and windows...).
7. Re:Seriously? by hairyfeet · 2012-10-23 10:39 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Its not just the UI changes, I have to support users on older systems as well as some netbook owners and as a netbook owner myself I can tell you that FF performance on low power systems frankly has been going downhill pretty badly. As an example the nettop I use in the shop, which with a Sempron 1.8GHz is frankly more powerful than any of the single core Atom netbooks, can play SD flash just fine and do multiple tabs...under any of the Chrome varaints. With FF the CPU slams to 100% on launch, slams to 100% when opening a new tab, even slams to 100% when scrolling through my bookmarks! And I lose about an hour on my E350 netbook if I use FF over one of the Chrome variants, again monitoring the CPU it seems FF just slams the hell out of these low power chips, in fact anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT seems to be slammed pretty hard in my tests around the shop. the whole UI becomes sluggish, FF itself feels like its in slow mo, its just not a pleasant browsing experience with the newer versions.
  So while I agree that the UI changes are irritating frankly you could always learn where they put what this week, but the battery sucking and CPU hogging is a show stopper, at least for me and my customers. I've switched them all to Comodo Dragon but frankly testing any of the Chrome variants and it was pretty much the same, no CPU hogging or causing the whole UI to become unresponsive. if I had to guess I'd say they have bolted too much onto the gecko engine trying to keep up with Chrome's features and its just not cutting it, because I've tried all the forks and its the same story in Waterfox and Pale Moon and IceDragon, and frankly it wasn't doing this, at least for me, pre 5.0 which is where they really started to heavily keep up with Chrome feature wise.
  Finally as for Seamonkey? Can't really say as I haven't used it in years, but as it has the same Gecko as FF I doubt it will be much different than using Waterfox or IceDragon, just a different wrapper on the same overworked engine. Frankly the only Gecko engine I've seen that still sails is Kmeleon, but that is so stripped down and isn't compatible with much so the disadvantages usually outweigh the advantages. that said if you have seriously old hardware that needs a modern browser Kmeleon really cooks, I stuck it on a 1.4Ghz first gen P4 for an older customer and she is quite happy with it, it does what she needs it to do and feels snappy.
  
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Release weekly by vlm · 2012-10-23 05:07 · Score: 5, Informative

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

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"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
1. Re:Release weekly by Vlad_the_Inhaler · 2012-10-23 05:22 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Seamonkey releases *Monthly*, along with Firefox - normally a day behind FF.
  I use Seamonkey 80% of the time. They are often a release late in introducing new goodies but I see that as a good thing - new Firefox features are not always ready for the big time when first released. The UI does not change the way Firefox does, another good thing. I don't like having to work out the new way of doing something which worked perfectly well before.
  
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  Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
2. Re:Release weekly by NReitzel · 2012-10-23 05:51 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  What Vlad said.
  I use a browser (seamonkey in fact) daily, however, perhaps 5% of my work involves looking up stuff on the internet, and almost none of my work involves "browsing" for something. Seamonkey is just functional. No Windows Dressing (sic), no Ferrocious Lion, just solid day to day use.
  It ain't pretty, but it ain't broken, either.
  
  --
  Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
3. Re:Release weekly by Lonewolf666 · 2012-10-23 06:21 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Seconded.
  I also like the UI better than that of Firefox - the latter is a bit too eager to hide everything in drop-down menus. While that does save some screen real estate, I prefer the Seamonkey approach that leaves some more controls in plain sight.
  
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  C - the footgun of programming languages
Hello AdBlock devs?? by rodrigoandrade · 2012-10-23 05:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

I need ABP to block Slashvertisements!!
Re:*Crickets* by leromarinvit · 2012-10-23 05:19 · Score: 4, Funny

They've already used their 5 minute data allowance for this month.

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Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Seamonkey is fine and stable but..... by gelfling · 2012-10-23 05:31 · Score: 3, Informative

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've been using it since the beginning... by c.r.o.c.o · 2012-10-23 05:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:I've been using it since the beginning... by colfer · 2012-10-23 07:09 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Seamonkey is also convenient is you want to run another Mozilla browser alongside Firefox and not have to take any measures to keep the profiles separate. So it adds one to the number of browsers you can just install and run with no special setup and thereby split some of the advertiser & Facebook tracking that is so annoying.
  Seamonkey and Thunderbird also keep the Mozilla team somewhat coherent in developing the common codebase, though increasingly build issues are wasting a lot of time for those two now unpaid projects. Mozilla has three projects it supports with paid developers: Firefox, the Firefox OS and Firefox Mobile. It dropped Thunderbird recently from that group and it's not clear how the TB team is going to handle rapid release vs. extended service release. Lots of tricky work for unpaid developers to keep up with an intricate codebase continually special cased for the three paid products, and to match Chrome innovations.
  Seems to me Seamonkey developers are the ones most concerned with making current features work predictably for users.
Re:Memory hog? by fahrbot-bot · 2012-10-23 05:41 · Score: 3, Funny

Uh, say what? I regularly hit 800 MB with just 5-6 tabs, ...
Browse p0rn sites w/thinner girls. It uses less RAM.

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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Re:It has a WYSIWYG editor by LordLimecat · 2012-10-23 05:54 · Score: 5, Funny

I dont always do WSIWYG HTML, but when I do, I prefer Seamonkey
FTFY
Re:I love it by LordLimecat · 2012-10-23 05:58 · Score: 3, Informative

https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:Release_History#SeaMonkey_2.3_and_beyond
Stable releases will be more frequent (6-week release schedule) but with fewer changes, eliminating the need for minor releases. The aim is to release the stable versions right around a week of the release of the equivalent Firefox and Thunderbird.
You were saying? (and for the record, 2.2 was released a year ago)
I do by chebucto · 2012-10-23 06:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Re:I love it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 06:02 · Score: 3, Informative

When I started using SeaMonkey I was afraid of having to ditch my beloved trifecta of add-ons, but I found that Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Ghostery are available for SeaMonkey. Not sure about Pentadactyl.
Re:Nope by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2012-10-23 06:02 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Nope by squiggleslash · 2012-10-23 06:15 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Memory hog? by BZ · 2012-10-23 06:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

That's showing about 400MB RAM usage, and about 800MB address space. But address space includes mmapped files and reserved address space that is not actually backed by memory; it only matters for purposes of running out of a 32-bit process's 4GB address space.
So OK, 400MB memory usage. Of this, about 260MB was actually allocated by the browser (see "explicit"; the rest seems to be things the OS is putting into the process memory space space (e.g. the code of the browser, the code of the libraries the browser links to, etc).
Of this 260MB, looks like about 70MB is RAM used by your extensions (17MB for adblock plus, 6MB for https-everywhere, etc). Another 30MB looks like it might be JS GC heap fragmentation from those extensions.
Another 40MB is the yahoo mail tab; almost all of this is the various JS gunk it's doing.
7MB is Wired.
About 6MB for Slashdot.
Another 5MB for about:addons, and about 15MB for the browser UI.
30MB unknown to about:memory.
16MB in-memory cache for the bookmarks and history databases.
10MB images.
7MB web workers used by ghostery.
That accounts for most of the memory listed as far as I can tell.
Re:Default Interface by AuMatar · 2012-10-23 08:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't know about you, but when I'm using a graphical program like a web browser, my right hand is on the mouse, not the keyboard. The vast majority of the time I'm reading, not typing. Also, backspace to go back is a horrendous mistake in browser design- for every time I've used it and meant it, there's been 3 times where I hit it accidentally while typing a post somewhere and lost all my content.

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