Ask Slashdot: Seamonkey vs. Firefox — Any Takers? 302
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.)"
Release weekly (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 [seamonkey-project.org]
Memory hog? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Seamonkey is fine and stable but..... (Score:4, 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.
Re:I love it (Score:4, Informative)
https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:Release_History#SeaMonkey_2.3_and_beyond [mozilla.org]
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)
Re:I love it (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 (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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It has a WYSIWYG editor (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Seriously? (Score:2, Informative)
Sea Monkey has trouble with add ons.
Nightly 19 doesn't.
My take. and yeah I use both.