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Ask Slashdot: Seamonkey vs. Firefox — Any Takers?

Posted by timothy on 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.)"

7 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look, it's a version number. Who cares?

    1. Re:Seriously? by Synerg1y · · Score: 5, Funny

      Add-on developers.

    2. Re:Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ok, but what are you going to do in a week from now? :)

    3. Re:Seriously? by hairyfeet · · 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.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Release weekly by vlm · · 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

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  3. Re:It has a WYSIWYG editor by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Funny

    I dont always do WSIWYG HTML, but when I do, I prefer Seamonkey
    FTFY

  4. Re:Nope by cant_get_a_good_nick · · 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.