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The SeaMonkey Council is proud to announce SeaMonkey 1.0, the first end-user release of their internet suite. This open source application, available as a free download from its mozilla.org-hosted website, features a state-of-the-art web browser and powerful email client, as well as a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client. For web developers, mozilla.org's DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger tools are included as well. SeaMonkey 1.0 is one of the most complete, powerful, and secure internet software packages available today.
Information and download: [mozilla.org...]
our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" — and have it stable enough for corporate use.
How nice that sounds!
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".
Not many corporate customers need HTML editing outside of a content management system.
SeaMonkey doesn't sound very corporate
Does "Firefox" sound corporate? It all boils down to brand familiarity. "Seamonkey" was the old code name for the Mozilla Suite, and it becomes the new name for the product in the same way that "Mozilla" (the old code name for Netscape") became the brand name.
Seamonkey is not there to compete with Firefox, however. It is a community project built by volunteers who were disappointed by the Mozilla Corporation's decision to scrap the integrated suite. Luckily, as the code is open source, Mozilla simply handed out editing rights, hosted the project on mozilla.org and let the team coalesce around the new project.
What's the difference between Seamonkey and Mozilla Suite?
Seamonkey is what Mozilla 1.8 or 1.9 would have been if Mozilla hadn't stopped development. It places the core rendering engine used in Firefox 1.5 into the Mozilla suite wrapper.
Seamonkey serves many purposes: it provides a continued upgrade path to individuals (and especially corporations) who use the Mozilla Suite or Netscape 7.x with the integrated mail component or other parts not offered by the Firefox/Thunderbird combination.
Seamonkey also adds to the diversity of choice in the browser space, which is always a good thing. Not everyone appreciated the abandon of the Mozilla suite and many appreciated the all-in-one nature of the earlier product. I would hazard a guess that the non-Windows versions of Seamonkey will be most important. It will remain a niche product as it has nowhere near the same visiibility as Firefox, but it's great to see that the old code is still being used.
"everything but the kitchen sink"
Some versions of the Mozilla suite had an easter egg which gave a fully-animated ASCII art representation of a kitchen sink with running water in reference to its critics that the product was too bloated - I wonder if the Seamonkey team has retained it?! :)
Does "Firefox" sound corporate?
"FireFox" doesn't sound like anything. It's two words that sound neat together. They could have gone with "EarthElephant," "AirAnt," or "WaterWorm" if they wanted to continue the Meaningless-Element-Animal-Alliteration. Instead, they picked a meaningful (and non-alliterative) combination...
Sea monkeys are falsely advertised brine shrimp a 8 year old scraps together $5 to get, because it would be cool to have little sea people living in a tank in your bedroom.
Don't misunderstand my comments, I'm not knocking the name for general use. My only point is, I can see "corporate" prospects failing to take the product seriously because the name is loaded.
Many thanks to the SeaMonkey people for producing a great product. Keep up the good work.
do you per chance know if SeaMonkey suffers from the same memory hole that the Firefox crew seem to be unable to fix?
Have you tried the new Firefox 1.5.0.1 [webmasterworld.com] release from yesterday? It is supposed to have fixed the memory leak problems of the original 1.5. Having said that, Firefox has always had a tendancy to eat up RAM the longer you leave it running, and I never experienced that with the old Mozilla suite.
Give SeaMonkey a try: it uses a different profile from a Firefox install (you can import your bookmarks easily). If you don't need the email client etc. you can do a custom install and select just the components you want. One thing about the supposed bloat of the all-in-one suite - a browser-only SeaMonkey install is actually faster than Firefox in normal use.
I tested SeaMonkey last night, it is a very familiar experience (I used Mozilla for a long time). I use an unusual platform (AMD64 Linux), and SeaMonkey offers a contributed AMD64 build which installed easily and flawlessly in my user directory. I can't find an equivalent for Firefox 1.5 anywhere and I'm not interested in trying to compile the thing from source, so I'm sticking with my very stable default Firefox 1.07 install.
Just download a copy and give it a try - as I said the installation won't interfere with a Firefox install so you can use it safely.
Have you tried the new Firefox 1.5.0.1 release from yesterday? It is supposed to have fixed the memory leak problems of the original 1.5. Having said that, Firefox has always had a tendancy to eat up RAM the longer you leave it running, and I never experienced that with the old Mozilla suite.
"FireFox" doesn't sound like anything.
Not to be a stickler, but...
Firefox is fictional Soviet superjet from the '80's that responded to the pilot's thoughts. (Get it? So intuitive it's like it reads your mind.)
Thunderbird is an extremely affordable wine, popular among urbanites who pay neither mortgage nor rent.
