SeaMonkey 1.0.6 and 1.1 beta released
The product previously known as the Mozilla Suite has been regularly maintained as SeaMonkey. Version 1.0 of SeaMonkey would have been Mozilla Suite 1.8 if the Mozilla Foundation hadn’t dropped support for it after the 1.7 series. This codebase was also used by Netscape for Netscape 7.x.
An update to the SeaMonkey 1.0 codebase has been released. Thi is a security and stability release of the 1.0 series. Please read the release notes before downloading.
1.1 is a beta release intended for developers, testers and those interested enough and comfortable using pre-release software. See the release notes before downloading, and make sure you back up your profiles if you’re upgrading from a stable SeaMonkey release.
I’ve not used what’s now known as SeaMonkey as a regular browser since Firefox (then known as Phoenix) was at version 0.3. SeaMonkey is based on a suite of applications and so would be familiar to any old time Netscape users. I’m interested to see how they’ve progressed with SeaMonkey so I’m going to download it and give a quick review.
Back when it was known as Mozilla, SeaMonkey never did capture the imagination of people like Firefox did. The main reason for this was probably due to the fact that in the pre-Firefox days Netscape was the main contributor to Mozilla so the user interface of the suite was heavily dictated to by Netscape who’d often try and make changes to the interface without discussion then arguments would break out on bugzilla, the newsgroups and on forums. In contrast Firefox had a small group of people who made the final decisions and they developed a much more usable application.
Now the SeaMonkey team is a small independent group it’ll be interesting to see how much it has improved since I last used it.
UPDATE: I downloaded SeaMonkey 1.1 beta on my Mac to have a quick test. I’ve never used SeaMonkey or the old Mozilla Suite on a Mac before but I always remember reading in the forums how Mac users hated the appearance of the browser. On that front nothing has changed:
A nice feature that they’ve added (and has previously been in Opera) is the tab preview feature where if you hover over a tab a preview appears as a tooltip:
I will give SeaMonkey a proper spin when I’m next on Windows or Linux. I’m somewhat disappointed that the theme has not had a revamp, but the theme still tends to look better under Windows and Linux, it just stands out too much on a Mac.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:00 am
I never used Seamonkey it looked and felt too much like Netscape 4 for my liking.