“SeaMonkey 1.1 is now available. Powered by the same engine as Firefox 2 and the upcoming Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1 includes numerous enhancements including more visible security indicators in the browser and enhanced phishing detection for e-mail, a new tagging system for e-mail that supersedes labels, support for multi-line tooltips in web pages, and previews images in tab tooltips. Other changes include inline spell checking in the browser, an updated version of ChatZilla, and a significantly improved startup script on Linux. See the release notes for a complete list of changes.”
I still can’t figure out why Seamonkey hasn’t had all the momentum that Firefox has had. Firefox is basically a stripped out version of Seamonkey, without the great features (unless you take the extra effort to search for extensions). It seems people prefer having separate applications for all their web needs. This is why I don’t use Firefox. I like everything in one application. This is why I use Opera.
I totally agree.
I’ve always used Mozilla, then Seamonkey. I tried out Firefox two recently, but it just isn’t as fast as Seamonkey, and is missing vital features which can be easily accessed.
Seamonkey forever!
I agree too!
I jumped from Netscape 4.7 to Mozilla-M18 (around 2001) so I saw it growing
I’m really happy that Mozilla has found its reincarnation in Seamonkey and it was not left dying.
It also have a better menu for options, Firefox is really a mess!
And I love to use it as browser+mail client, much better than Firefox+Thunderbird.
I love it!
Edited 2007-01-20 00:35
Are you forgetting?
The whole reason firefox came into existence in the first place was people who were tired of Mozilla’s integrated bloat.
Ah yes, the bloat question. It is a myth that the Mozilla Suite was actually bloated. The applications that are bundled as components only consume RAM when they are running. Users might not find the other components such as Mail, Composer, IRC chat useful but you can actually specify which components to add during the installation. Did you know that Seamonkey actually uses less memory than Firefox to run?
The Firefox UI is easier to understand than the Mozilla Suite and this made it attractive to new users. In general it looks better and more modern. This is similar to advertising products: the prettier package usually attracts more consumers. Also Firefox has one technical edge over Seamonkey with the extension manager. Extensions can work in Seamonkey but there is no integrated extension manager yet making it unattractive to less technical users. The extension manager will eventually make it over to Seamonkey. Once the UI is updated and the extension manager is integrated I think Seamonkey usage will grow. If you want a better theme to blend it with Gnome or Windows you could try the SeaGnome theme I am writing:
http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&content=c_linuxseagnome…
Edited 2007-01-20 01:36
The perception was, and still is, there among the potential userbase. Especially those who just want to browse the web.
I’ll agree that a newer UI would improve it’s attractiveness to new users though.
The perception was, and still is, there among the potential userbase.
I agree with you on that point. I have argued on development forums that the installation should be changed to default to installing just the browser leaving the other less used components as options. People freaked out on me when I suggested though. I guess change is difficult both for users and developers.
When you install Seamonkey/Mozilla, there was always a screen that asked you to pick between Browser only, everything, and custom. The choices are in that order, but everything was the default – mainly because back in the day, the Netscape browser + mail combo was pretty standard in businesses.
The biggest problem with Mozilla/Seamonkey is that once they hit 1.0, everything was pretty much set in stone. In terms of user noticable features, Seamonkey 1.1 is the most significant new release since Mozilla 1.0.
Ah, the bloat question. It was mostly about install size and “perception” of bloat, not RAM.
Ah, the bloat question. It was mostly about install size and “perception” of bloat, not RAM.
I don’t agree with you on that point. If you asked most Firefox users which browser uses less RAM most will tell you Firefox since it is less bloated, i.e., the code is perceived to be designed better or there is less of it.
The whole reason firefox came into existence in the first place was people who were tired of Mozilla’s integrated bloat.
What you call bloat, I call features. How is Firefox less bloated than Seamonkey? If you put together Firefox and Thunderbird, you have Seamonkey.
Now, what I call bloat is this:
1o) Opera, 4.7 MB: Web browser, E-Mail client, IRC client, BitTorrent client, RSS reader, Usenet Client, Widgets.
2o) Firefox, 9.14 MB: Web browser, RSS “client”.
No comment.
References:
ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/910/final/en/i386/shared/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.1/lin…
Right. Try the statically linked version of Opera for a better comparison: 6.5-7.1 MB.
The shared version means Qt is shared.
Once Firefox makes XULrunner shared, you’ll see the difference diminish.
Shared XULrunner is a pipe dream. They’ve been talking about it for years, but it’s still not close to happening.
On Linux, Qt is a common system library not related to Opera. XULrunner is a core part of FireFox. Totally different beast. If you start including Qt in the size of Opera, you also have to include GTK and the X libs in FireFox.
Mozilla was originally intended to be a development platform, with Netscape being the end user product. The Mozilla website was loaded with warnings that you should not use Mozilla unless you knew what you were doing, and that they were not liable if it damaged your computer. That approach, combined with the developer oriented website, scared lots of people away. Mozilla’s reputation was built then, and will be awfully hard to change.
FireFox was started the same way most open source forks start off – there was a dispute between members of the development team. It was originally supposed to be Mozilla without the bloat, and that looked to be true initially. A lot of hype was built up around that. When Netscape was dissolved, Mozilla.org simply decided to go with the flow and follow the hype, without considering how things got to be the way they were. If you look at the early Mitchell Baker comments, she comments that she uses the Mozilla suite, but was going to switch to FireFox & Thunderbird simply because that’s where the hype was.
In the end, FireFox become Blake Ross’s personal browser. Rather than removing bloat, the interface was tweaked to the preferences of Blake and friends. Default settings were made to match their personal tastes, and any options they didn’t see the point of were removed from the UI. Along the way, they somehow managed to make the code more bloated, despite removing large amounts of the interface. Designing things correctly was made a secondary priority to making things flashy.
FireFox’s extensions certainly are nice, but a lot of them are just including functionality that already existed in the suite. The need for them would be reduced a lot if Blake Ross’s personal usage patterns weren’t such a dominating factor in the design decisions.
I heard that Firefox really got going when Apple was looking starting their own browser. Mozilla approached them and said “no, too bloated”. Apple then went with Konqueror, thereby making Mozilla determined to shake that perception, and put forth a browser that they could be proud of.
Not quite. Mozilla/Seamonkey and FireFox have 99% of their code in common. Almost all of the differences are in the user interfaces, which Apple wouldn’t have used anyway.
Apple’s developers looked at the available browser codebases, and decided that the Mozilla code base was too complex. Which is pretty clear if you think about it. XUL is a rather large beast – it’s an entire cross platform GUI toolkit. While that in itself is a complex beast, XUL is coded in a rather bizarre way. It’s a mix of C++, JavaScript, and XML. It’s not pretty to look at. You can’t simply remove XUL if you don’t want it, as Mozilla’s page rendering is based on it.
I’ve heard this from quite a few people lamenting the demise of Seamonkey, so I’ll tell you how I came to use Firefox. I had just moved to Linux away from XP and IE6 and was searching for a browser. The first one I tried was Mozilla and although I wanted to like it the thing was just infuriatingly slow on my machine (which wasn’t a very fast one, so YMMV). Anyway, I kept looking for something faster and soon found Opera. It still seemed a little slow to me, but it was fast enough – still I never felt entirely comfortable with it and when I heard about a new browser called Firefox a couple months later I tried it out even though it was still in beta (.7 version). Speed-wise it felt about the same as Opera but solved many of the problems I was having with it, so I started using Firefox and never looked back.
Since then, Firefox has become much slower and Opera has fixed a lot of the issues I was having with it, but I still never saw much of a reason to switch away from Firefox.
I still can’t figure out why Seamonkey hasn’t had all the momentum that Firefox has had. Firefox is basically a stripped out version of Seamonkey, without the great features (unless you take the extra effort to search for extensions).
It’s basically a stripped down and polished version of Seamonkey, yes. It’s hardly the only project like that to wildly succeed – Ubuntu is basically the same to Debian. I think the simplicity that these projects started with really struck a chord in some people, and since then advertising has really taken over.
Edited 2007-01-20 04:47
Maybe they don’t want the heavier application (be it faster browsing or not) if they aren’t using the features beside the browsing.
I use Firefox because, unlike Opera, it is open source, not just free-as-in-beer, and I don’t use Seamonkey because I want my email application on a different machine, and I don’t like the Seamonkey email client.
But I will try out the new version (as always), of course, because it might hit home this time.
Now that Seamonkey is up to par with FF, I might give it a go. The potential advantage I see is reduced memory usage because I constantly run both FireFox and Thunderbird. Am I correct in this thinking?
You are right on this point. Running Firefox plus Thunderbird takes more memory than just running Seamonkey. This is because Seamonkey and Firefox both use the Gecko runtime engine — they call it XULRunner now. When you run Thunderbird and Firefrox separately you have two instances of the runtime running. This is supposed to be fixed eventually so Thunderbird and Firefox can share the same runtime but it appears vaporous so far. Seamonkey will actually help you conserve your memory. You might run into the problem where some of your extensions aren’t available for Seamonkey. If you are not a big extension user this won’t bother you.
Edited 2007-01-20 02:16
So if Seamonkey is able to run off of one engine, why can’t mozilla and t-bird do it as separate apps?
Kind of a rhetorical question.
I would love to see a SOHO shared address book for Seamonkey. Other than that, it’s a great suite, and much less RAM intensive than FF + TB.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
(PIII 800MHz, 256MB RAM, Linux
times in seconds, lower is better)
Firefox 2.0
—————–
cold start: 12.49
warm start: 5.89
rendering css: 1.99
rendering table: 2.67
script speed: 27
multiple images: 2.27
history: 61
Mozilla 1.8
——————
cold start: 7.97
warm start: 2.88
rendering css: 1.63
rendering table: 1.74
script speed: 26
multiple images: 2.37
history: 47
.. so much for “bloat”
I wish Seamonkey would have Firefox’s search bar … It’s so much easier to use than Seamonkey’s antique search window.
Seamonkey does have a search field in the upper-right corner with a “Search” button to the right. At least here.
I wish Seamonkey would have Firefox’s search bar … It’s so much easier to use than Seamonkey’s antique search window.
I wrote an extension that adds a search box to Seamonkey. Ctrl+K opens search. You can even specify in the extension options how it opens the search results. Get it here: http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&content=c_linuxmonkeyme…
Stupid IE interface + Gecko engine = Firefox
Firefox give windoze users impression of using IE.
Who need InternetExploiter interfaces on Linux ?
ok seamonkey takes less memory than firefox&thunderbird. but it is NOT mail app. can i send 700MB movie with SM? i dont think so.
are you saying that seamonkeys mail component doesent allow to send a 700mb file?
Can you send a 700MB movie with ANY mail app? Can anyone anywhere receive a 700MB file in their email? Even if so, wouldn’t doing so only expose you as someone too stubborn or so unskilled that you can’t use FTP or BitTorrent, both better tools for the job?
Nicely stated. I was about to say the same thing. Sending a 700MB file via email is not a good example. Most mail servers are setup to reject files more than 10MB in size. I would probably FTP a file that size. I used to use Thunderbird but now I just use Seamonkey Mail. It has everything I need: mail filters, spam protection, ability to show only text not html, and as a plus Seamonkey notified you Mail is available even if Mail is closed down. The Spell checking in 1.1 also works well when writing email. I do miss the ease of being able to enable/disable extensions in Firefox.
Edited 2007-01-20 16:39
why not? its fun!
WHAT? Does anyone sends a 700 Mb attachment on an e-mail? I swear that I’ve seen people trying to do this in the not so distant past but those were not the sort of people that you would like to see reproducing…
ok seamonkey takes less memory than firefox&thunderbird. but it is NOT mail app. can i send 700MB movie with SM? i dont think so.
can i send 700MB movie with TB? i dont think so.
The reason Firefox got so much more popular than the Mozilla Suite:
Configurability.
Configurability in the sense of making the Options (aka Preferences) dialogue box MUCH easier to navigate and use, esp. for newbies.
Configurability in the sense of having great defaults, and thereby not needing to be configured (whereas whenever I recommended the Mozilla suite to newbie friends, I had to either make a list of settings they should change, or else just be there to configure it for them).
Configurability in the sense of being able to modify the interface to become essentially anything you like, using a very simple-to-use drag-and-drop editor, and going way beyond what IE6 let you do (and thereby going even further beyond what the Mozilla suite allowed for, unless you were to edit the layout files by hand).
And finally, configurability in the sense of Extensions. Firefox was THE platform where extensions came into their own; most of the extensions now available for the Mozilla suite were originally developed for Firefox. Even now, there are still more extensions available for Firefox, probably because the flexibility of its UI is more conducive for such things.
Edit: One more reason–comfort. Firefox’s interface looks like a native Windows app and includes a normal-looking home button, which makes IE switchers feel more comfortable off the bat.
Edited 2007-01-20 17:06
Configurability in the sense of making the Options (aka Preferences) dialogue box MUCH easier to navigate and use, esp. for newbies.
I don’t agree with that. FireFox’s Options are weird. Rather than a traditional tree style like in Mozilla, you get tabs along the top, with these weird collapsable subsections underneath. It’s not like anything else, and looks out of place. At least this was the case with 1.0 and older – I haven’t checked the Options screen in the newer ones in a while.
Configurability in the sense of having great defaults, and thereby not needing to be configured (whereas whenever I recommended the Mozilla suite to newbie friends, I had to either make a list of settings they should change, or else just be there to configure it for them).
That’s really subjective. While neither is the way I like it by default, I spend at least double the time tweaking the FireFox config. Doesn’t help that you have to go into about:config to access anything but the most basic settings in FireFox.
Configurability in the sense of being able to modify the interface to become essentially anything you like, using a very simple-to-use drag-and-drop editor,
Certainly not a bad thing, but not exactly significant. You’ve got 4 primary buttons in a web browser, and a few more secondary ones. Not much to customize there.
And finally, configurability in the sense of Extensions. Firefox was THE platform where extensions came into their own; most of the extensions now available for the Mozilla suite were originally developed for Firefox. Even now, there are still more extensions available for Firefox, probably because the flexibility of its UI is more conducive for such things.
Extensions became popular for two reasons. First, most of the early extensions were simply readding preferences UI and features that were already in Mozilla. Second, FireFox makes it MUCH easier to add and remove extensions. The functionality would’ve been added to Mozilla, but wasn’t due to politics. Supposedly Seamonkey will add it eventually.
FireFox’s Options are weird. Rather than a traditional tree style like in Mozilla, you get tabs along the top, with these weird collapsable subsections underneath. It’s not like anything else, and looks out of place. At least this was the case with 1.0 and older – I haven’t checked the Options screen in the newer ones in a while.
Tree-style settings dialogue boxes should be used as a last resort, imho. They’re designed for people who plan on going down the list and figuring out every single option available–as opposed to just finding the one they need–i.e., they’re terrible for the average user. Yes, tabs can get unwieldy if you’ve got more than, say, five of them–but if there are that many sub-categories then there’s already a good chance you’re making things more complicated than they need to be for the average user. And btw, Mozilla could easily use tabbed dialogues, IF they didn’t insist on putting ALL of the settings (i.e. for Mail, Composer, et al) in the one dialogue box regardless of the app you’re using.
That’s really subjective. While neither is the way I like it by default, I spend at least double the time tweaking the FireFox config. Doesn’t help that you have to go into about:config to access anything but the most basic settings in FireFox.
The Mozilla defaults of NO quickstart enabled by default and opening tabs in the foreground made it an automatic no-go for a no-configuration install (which I need if I’m going to recommend this to just any old person).
Don’t get me wrong: I used the Mozilla suite, and had my whole family using it, all the way up until Firefox 1.2 or so. I liked it a lot. Then for some period I started trying out Firebird (as it was known) alongside Mozilla for a while. At some point, some combination of the simplicity, extensibility and visual appeal of Firefox won me over. Since then, it’s not that I think Seamonkey is bad, it’s just I can’t find any reason to switch back.
The Mozilla defaults of NO quickstart enabled by default and opening tabs in the foreground made it an automatic no-go for a no-configuration install (which I need if I’m going to recommend this to just any old person).
Tabs in the foreground is annoying, but I understand why they did it. Tabs opening in the background is really confusing for the “I double click on everything” crowd. As in scare them away for good level of confusing. That might be a different story now that tabs are more mainstream though, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
As for quick start, they used to have it on by default. As the codebase became more optimized, the benefit of it reduced drastically. It’s still an improvement over not using it, but not by much. Generally only the first launch after reboot has much of a difference. Anyway, you get asked whether or not to use it during the install, so it’s really not a big deal.
yes you can!
and what about RSS in the monkey?
For those of us who had been using other e-mail applications, such as Eudora, Seamonkey had extra modules never used. Firefox was the appropriate choice.
Now that Seamonkey’s mail module is much better, thanks to Thunderbird’s visibility, Seamonkey is a good choice for many people instead of Firefox + Thunderbird. I often run Firefox or Thunderbird, especially when I’m working offline with e-mail, though.
The Mail section of Mozilla/Seamonkey was always optional. The install size dropped by about 1/3 or so if you removed mail.