Overview
Emerging battered and bruised from the browser wars,
Netscape Communicator
released its code to the open source community in March 1998 in
what some say was a last ditch effort to appeal to the masses to show interest in a non-Microsoft internet
experience. The project invited developers the world over to share and modify the code and adopted a name
which was originally used as a code name for Netscape in its development phase.
Thus the Mozilla organization was born.
Shortly after, however, the organization scrapped the idea to continue developing the Netscape code base,
opting to rewrite it instead and then spent the next four years creating a cross platform standards compliant
web browser that was a lean, mean and highly customizable version of the original Netscape. The first
official release of Mozilla came in June 2002.
Just over a year later, Netscape's mother company, AOL, effectively shut down their browser division, layed
off a bunch of developers, handed the Mozilla organization 2 million dollars and basically said, "You're on
your own." The Mozilla organization then became the Mozilla Foundation and, for three years, steadily chugged
along producing version after version of its attractive so-called Internet Application Suite.
In March 2005, Mozilla announced its so-called
Transiton Plan which, in a nutshell,
described how future development would focus on
Firefox and Thunderbird while Mozilla Suite would be left to be developed by an
independent group of volunteers. This group decided name itself after the long-lived internal code name for
Mozilla Suite and thus the
Seamonkey web browser was born. The first official end-user release of
Seamonkey was on January 30th, 2006. The latest version -as of this writing- is Seamonkey 1.0.5 with it's
official release date on September 14th, 2006 (see
SeaMonkey News for more info).
Seamonkey vs. Firefox
Compared to
Firefox, Seamonkey is better suited
for those who want "everything but the kitchen sink" in a web browser and are less concerned with customizing
the GUI or installing extensions.
Seamonkey's virtues are:
- It has fully integrated email and chat clients ready to accomodate all your online communication
needs.
- It includes extra options in the drop-down menus making the browser more user-friendly such as in the
Tools menu which allows easy access to the handling of cookies, images, popups, forms, profile switching and
more.
- It provides access to a full-blown visual web editor, a.k.a., WYSIWYG editor. (To access the
web editor, click on Window » Composer or File » Edit
Page.)
Seamonkey's drawbacks are:
- You can't fully customize the Navigation toolbar. This means no moving buttons around or adding spacers
or separators. Also, by default, the Navigation toolbar contains no Go or Home buttons (?!). The Go button,
however, can be added easily enough (Edit » Preferences » Navigator then click to
check Go in the "Select the buttons you want to see in the toolbars" section). The Home button, on the other
hand, which by default is located on the Personal toolbar, can only be added to the Navigation toolbar by
installing
this extension.
- The 'kitchen sink' that is not included in Seamonkey could easily refer to an extension manager
which is the one thing that it sorely needs in order to give Firefox a real run for its money. Firefox, on
the other hand, comes fully equipped with an extension manager allowing you to easily disable, re-enable or
uninstall your extensions. To endow Seamonkey with the same capabilities, you might try installing Jeremy
Gillick's Extension Manager but quite frankly it is not wholly reliable as it can really
mess up the Seamonkey user interface when attempting to use it on extensions it's not compatible with. (At
the time of this writing, it's unclear whether this is the fault of the extension manager or the incompatible
extensions themselves.)
Extensions
Extensions -which are little add-on programs if you will- allow you to modify the Seamonkey browser in some
extraordinary ways and definitely set Mozilla apart from other browser makers. I have compiled a list of what
I think are
the best Seamonkey extensions but
before you go there, you might want to consider a stripped down version of Seamonkey called
Firefox which is a little better suited to installing and
running extensions.
LICENSE: Freeware (open source)
