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.)"
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, it's a version number. Who cares?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Add-on developers.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...).
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
It's been years since I've benchmarked them but at one time, on an Athlon 1800 and slow dialup (26.4) SeaMonkey used to display a Slashdot page in half the time as Firefox, both with the CPU pegged. Same source tree, same optimizations on the same compiler.
SeaMonkey never pegs the CPU now a days on a X6800 core2duo and still feels much faster then Firefox. Perhaps better caching as I'm still on the slow dialup where the limiting factor should be bandwidth.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Sea Monkey has trouble with add ons.
Nightly 19 doesn't.
My take. and yeah I use both.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, but what are you going to do in a week from now? :)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
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That at least should get Firefox past the next couple of months, but I'm not sure what they will do after that.
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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.
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Look, it's a version number. Who cares?
That wasn't his main point.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"I just think it was a Lame attempt to seem cool compared to Google Chrome."
Why would anybody need to "seem" cool compared to Chrome? If you think a browser that was designed to help gather information about you and advertise to you is cool, that's your opinion I guess.
As Eben Moglen said recently [slashdot.org] in two videos on Slashdot [slashdot.org], if you are interested in personal freedom and privacy, use Firefox. Period.
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if you are interested in personal freedom and privacy, use Firefox, with third party cookies and location info disabled, and AdBlock, Request Policy, HTTPS Everywhere, and BetterPrivacy add-ons installed. Period.
Fixed that for you. Firefox doesn't have great privacy by itself, but it can be made to have better privacy with add-ons and changing some of the default settings. But those add-ons and settings do have equivalents on Chrome. Chrome's sandboxing and integrated Adobe flash player updates might give it a slight edge on security, sometimes.
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As someone who's actually had stuff break on every new major release, I can say that version numbers wouldn't be an issue if they were done correctly and Mozilla had an actual spec system in place.
That's the problem. The snarky remarks about version number marketing are a side effect. Yes, now that the mayhem has died down it's not as big a problem as it used to be, but there was no need to pull this stunt in the first place, and people aren't going to forgive and forget so easily, especially while the ot
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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]
Re:Release weekly (Score:5, 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.
Re:Release weekly (Score:5, 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.
Re: (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.
Default Interface (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Because it is. Mozilla Suite was Netscape. SeaMonkey is the old Mozilla Suite. So the lineage is direct (although stuff has obviously been added). The question in my mind is what would you want out of a browser GUI that wasn't in Netscape/Mozilla? I haven't seen a single feature that's worth adding in any of the newer browsers, UI wise.
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There's no feature that I feel is lef
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The navigation bar isn't that big, and can be minimized. But really the amount of screen space you save is negligible and I want that bar open- the back button is something I use every few minutes. The icons could probably be made a bit smaller, but eh, why bother?
Something different/new isn't the point of SeaMonkey. The point is *not* integrating all of the new fluff of Firefox/Chrome/Opera on the outside and keeping the same UI that's been working for 15 years. It's a browser for those of us who are
Re:Default Interface (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
The first time I used Netscape (beta) was on a 640x480 256 color display, but admittedly that was better than my first time using Mosiac (on a 320x240 with 16 shades of gray) or WorldWideWeb on NeXT, which I believe was a 320x240 4000 color machine (incidentally, I saw Mosiac before WorldWideWeb even though the latter was out first). 320x240 is where space is at a premium, and I massively preferred Gopher to it at the time. My first html experience pre-dated any graphical browsers, and I'm fairly sure it wa
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No way NeXT had a pathetic 320x240 4000 color display. NeXT started with a 1120x832 grayscale display. The 4000-color display was an Amiga-thing.
Re: (Score:2)
[...] or WorldWideWeb on NeXT, which I believe was a 320x240 4000 color machine [...]
The NeXT had a 17" monitor with 1120x832 pixels with 4 different shades of gray.
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OK, I feel better for letting that off my chest.
Re: (Score:2)
USENET?
I love it (Score:2, Interesting)
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 bu
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I used SM for years, and I really liked it. I switched to Firefox when I got a new laptop with a smallish 16x9 screen. Firefox, when maximized, uses less of the screen's Y axis for chrome. Otherwise, I'd still use it.
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Is Seamonkey plugin compatible with Firefox? Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Ghostery are the only reasons I still use Firefox. I make Firefox more usable with Pentadactyl, so I'd need something like that too.
Re: (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: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: (Score:2)
A frequent upgrade cycle is always a bad thing, it introduces bugs. I want to decide when (or if) their feature set has improved to the point of an upgrade being worth the hassle. I want to upgrade much less frequently than they do unless there's a security bug.
And there's a multitude of UI issues in the latest firefox. Lets start with the fact the URL bar and the search are two different bars, which wasn't the case for most of a decade and is a pointless annoyance. Then lets move onto the "awesome bar"
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A frequent upgrade cycle is always a good thing. It fixes bugs. I don't want users deciding when an upgrade is worth the hassle, I want them bug-free so they don't get pwn'd by the latest hack.
Of course, neither the parent nor the above is completely true, but the point is that frequent updates aren't the problem. What the updates do is the problem.
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I said I want security updates (just nothing else). But in my experience, frequent updates are just an excuse for the devs to get careless about acceptance testing, so on average they cause more bugs than they fix. It does probably depend on the length you consider "frequent" to be though. If frequent is less than a month, I stand by my claim. If frequent is more than a month, then you might have time to decently test a release.
Extra features prevent use (Score:2)
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 :(
Re: (Score:3)
SO, you cant use a web browser then? what a shame.
(There are web-based irc clients/gateways. all that's required is javascript. cf: http://webchat.freenode.net/ [freenode.net] )
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.
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Re:Memory hog? (Score:4, 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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Which tabs? Note that some web apps keep allocating more and more memory until you reload the page (e.g. Google Reader will do this) because they "cache" all sorts of stuff in global variables and whatnot.
So it's pretty easy to hit 800MB in all browsers with 5-6 tabs, especially if you leave them open for a while. :(
That said, I'd be interested in how the output of about:compartments for you compares to the list of 5-6 tabs you have open. What does about:memory say about where the memory is being used?
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot (natch)
TheRegister
Yahoo Mail
FreshNews.org
TechDirt
Wired
Add-ons
AdBlock Plus
Add Bookmark Here
BetterPrivacy
Flashblock
Ghostery
Https Everywhere
NoScript
Print Pages to PDF
Status-4-Evar
All-in-One Gestures
Re: (Score:2)
about:memory
Main Process
Explicit Allocations
257.63 MB (100.0%) -- explicit
107.31 MB (41.65%) -- js-non-window
57.36 MB (22.27%) -- compartments
47.99 MB (18.63%) -- non-window-global
18.79 MB (07.29%) ++ (164 tiny)
16.74 MB (06.50%) -- compartment([System Principal], jar:file:///C:/Users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/yudihldp.default/extensions/%7B
Re:Memory hog? (Score:4, 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: (Score:2)
appreciate the response. This is, perhaps not so obviously, my work machine stats and currently it's about 350MB in task mgr, it's worse at home, but then that's XP and this is Win7 so perhaps that has some difference.
Add-ons are mostly the same, though the sites browser are a wee bit different ;-)
Given that I reloaded FF before getting these metrics and haven't browsed more than 5-6 pages since then, 350MB to me *is* bloated, maybe it shouldn't be considered that way but I do.
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Ah, 350MB in task mgr would match the ~400MB resident metrics from about:memory.
And again, about 100MB of that is not even Firefox itself...
For the rest, the basic problem is that web sites are doing a _lot_ of JS, as are the extensions you have installed. So they're using a lot of memory for all those JS objects. :(
It would be interesting to see how much memory other browsers use on that set of sites, for what it's worth.
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Yes, the 800 MB is my home computer this is my computer at work 5 minutes after restarting FF; sorry that wasn't clearly specified.
Re: (Score:2)
about:compartments
Main Process
User Compartments
about:, [anonymous sandbox] (from: jar:file:///C:/Users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/yudihldp.default/extensions/%7B73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232%7D.xpi!/components/noscriptService.js:857) [2]
about:blank [7]
http://36ohk6dgmcd1n-c.c.yom.mail.yahoo.net/om/api/1.0/openmail.app.invoke/36ohk6dgmcd1n/11/1.0.35/us/en-US/controller.html/0#bn=1.0.35&.lang=en-US&.intl=us&rtl=0&proxyhost=us.mg6.mail.yahoo.com&sig=4aff565d0f1ace02 [yahoo.net]
Re: (Score:2)
8 gigs is cheap...and unusable to XP isn't it? ;-)
Hello AdBlock devs?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I need ABP to block Slashvertisements!!
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Whoosh!
eh (Score:2)
I'm just switching to Seamonkey (Score:2)
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.
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But unlike Chrome you can reconfigure the UI. I run Release at work and Nightly at home, and since version 4 my UI has looked pretty much the same as it did under FF 3.6.
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Wait until they terminate tabs on bottom.
I use IceCat 4.0.1 for daily browsing (Score:2)
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.
more conservative UI and features (Score:2)
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.
SeaMonkey has the ugly new icons (Score:2)
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 com
Re: (Score:2)
Because Seamonkey makes it easier ( we know where in preferences it is) to make it open newwins instead of newtabs for us curmudgeonly old fucks. I personally can't STAND tabbed browsing - now if someone released an addon that closed the current tab when you hit the close button on the window..... then I might like tabbed browsing, it's just not worth trying to break 15+ year old habits of closing the window when you want to go back to the original link page when I have something that both works the way I
I've been using it since the beginning... (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think Seamonkey is still the only cross platform email client.
You'd be wrong. Thunderbird is. Likewise Alpine, Claws, Evolution, Gnus, GroupWise, IMP, KMail, Mulberry, Mutt, Opera Mail, Pine, and Sylpheed.
Re:I've been using it since the beginning... (Score:4, 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.
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Seamonkey also has a lot of extra config options in the Preferences window compared to FF. In this respect FF feels completely dumbed down.
This is why I used to use Seamonkey years ago. However, Firefox has grown in the options department, and plugins took care of others, and for the last few bits I use about:config. I'm not really a fan of app bundling (like an email client with a web browser), and Firefox was getting all the mindshare, so I dropped Seamonkey.
Not again (Score:2)
Aaahh not another browser! We need fewer browsers, not more of them!
Please pull this story from Slashdot as soon as possible!
Pale Moon (Score:2)
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/ [palemoon.org] for more info.
Old-timer (Score:2)
I do (Score:5, 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.
I use seamonkey (Score:2)
I use it daily... for years! (Score:2)
Mail, browser (Score:2)
Lots of addons I use today on FF not supported (Score:2)
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.
NCSA Mosaic (Score:2)
Kids and their new-fangled browsers. I still prefer NCSA Mosaic 3.0. All that new fancy HTML stuff just leads to the devil.
Interesting (Score:2)
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.
How about this radical idea? (Score:3)
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?
I use it. (Score:3)
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. :(
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
5 Minutes and no takers?
They're all trying to use seamonkey to fake the user-agent string so the apple keynote can be viewed.
Re:*Crickets* (Score:5, Funny)
They've already used their 5 minute data allowance for this month.
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I use Seamonkey. Even in cases where I only use the browser. The "Seamonkey Modern" theme is quite slick.
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Re: (Score:3)
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).
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Re:It has a WYSIWYG editor (Score:5, Funny)
I dont always do WSIWYG HTML, but when I do, I prefer Seamonkey
FTFY
Re: (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
Chromium (Score:2)
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)
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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 a
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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 [portableapps.com]
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But, is your kid 3 years old and running it on Windows 8?
Didn't you read the article you're referencing? Windows 8 is only for people with half a brain.
bpechter and his kid obviously have whole ones.
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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.
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Been using Chrome for about 4 months now, and have yet to see the same slowdowns I saw in FF.
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Visit a Youtube video and Facebook with chat open and leave those tabs open for a few days.
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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.