SeaMonkey 2.53.1

by XzetaU8 • 6 years ago

78 33 6 years ago

Just installed. Looks like it's still in the xul/xpi era. Was hoping that this could be reasonably secure alternative to Waterfox and that I'd be able to install xul/xpi extensions. Seems not.

EDIT: I was able to convert xul/xpi addons with: https://addonconverter.fotokraina.com/ which is quite awesome. Info here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=2834855

smacktoward2• 6 years ago

Was hoping that this could be reasonably secure... and that I'd be able to install xul/xpi extensions.

These two objectives pull in opposite directions. The more you get of one, the less you're going to get of the other.

unicornporn2• 6 years ago

Care to elaborate? I still mourn the death of XUL. The extensions that really meant something are now gone or available in versions that are much worse than their predecessors.

untog2• 6 years ago

The current Mozilla Gecko codebase has seen a flow of constant major changes and api removals in the last 2 years and is no longer really usable for our needs. By the end of the year the SeaMonkey project is expected to be completely independent of Mozilla

Wow, that’s... something. Keeping a browser engine of that size maintained independently is going to be quite a task.

TingPing• 6 years ago

It's simply not possible without a large well funded team.

rubidium• 6 years ago

I really don’t understand this. All my current browsers don’t need more features. They didnt 5 years ago either.

m4r35n357• 6 years ago

Navigator rools!

jakearmitage• 6 years ago

Oh, man. This is so good.

Bambo• 6 years ago

My windows defender indicates this has malware in the download.

hjek• 6 years ago

Windows Defender being Windows Defender[0].

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1159513

michaelmrose• 6 years ago

So your malware guard by a giant known corrupt company indicates that you shouldn't install the competition. That's ... interesting.

babypuncher• 6 years ago

No need for the tinfoil hats, it's probably an unintentional false positive.

smhenderson2• 6 years ago

Always glad to see interest in SeaMonkey spread! I am writing this from an instance installed on Slackware. I use it as my daily driver at work, switching to Firefox occasionally when I need to sync with things I do on other machines.

I don't really use it often but I love that it still comes with Composer for WYSIWYG html. It's been a while but when I used it a lot about 5-7 years ago it wrote really clean, standard compliant html which made it great for quickly prototyping look and feel before diving into writing any code for new pages/sites.

Having used the stock Slackware version, which is usually just a bit behind, I'm excited to see what "our biggest release in a few years and incorporates many changes and fixes from the underlying platform code" looks like!

wott• 6 years ago

I don't really use it often but I love that it still comes with Composer for WYSIWYG html.

I tried it for the first time a few weeks ago (I never do web/HTML stuff). Seamonkey Composer crashed when I tried inserting a <video> element.

Having used the stock Slackware version, which is usually just a bit behind, I'm excited to see what "our biggest release in a few years and incorporates many changes and fixes from the underlying platform code" looks like!

According to the release notes (http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/seamonkey2.53.1/) it is mainly features removal and breakage :-/ The least one can cay is that they are not chatty about the positive changes and features those underlying changes may have brought.

smhenderson2• 6 years ago

Yeah, I went and read some stuff on Wikipedia about it after posting. Apparently Composer is considered unsupported now and only gets occasional updates because it's used as the underlying html editor in Mail.

And yes, I was mildly disappointed when I downloaded and ran this as I saw no real visual difference or changes to the UI and preferences.

So I guess Composer is not much of an option for "real" work these days. Still cool to see an alternative browser out there that's at least mostly capable of handling the "modern" web...

themodelplumber• 6 years ago

Wait, so SeaMonkey has a mail client that's based on Thunderbird but not Thunderbird?

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

                  Seamonkey
  Netscape Mail -<
                  Thunderbird

palant• 6 years ago

It's complicated. Initially there was Mozilla Suite. Mozilla Suite consisted of a browser, a mail and an IRC client. Then Firefox came out as a simpler browser, without all that unnecessary stuff. And the mail component from Mozilla Suite became Thunderbird. But the Mozilla community liked the old Mozilla Suite, so they kept developing it after Mozilla gave up on it, under the name SeaMonkey. So today SeaMonkey Mail and Thunderbird still share lots of code, but technically speaking they aren't the same thing.

smacktoward2• 6 years ago

Nitpick: initially there was Netscape Communicator/Netscape 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator), which got open-sourced as Mozilla Suite when Netscape went out of business.

(Confusingly, there were many more versions of Netscape after 4, but Mozilla Suite didn't really derive from them. Netscape 6 and 7 were just contemporary versions of Mozilla Suite with some Netscape badging slapped on. Netscape 8 was based on early versions of Firefox, dropped the other non-browser "suite" components, and was only released for Windows. Netscape 9 was also a browser-only thing, but went back to being cross-platform.)

jcranmer• 6 years ago

In comm-central, there are three overarching directories [1]: mailnews, mail, and suite. The first directory is essentially all of the backend logic corresponding to the implementation of mail protocols, database logic, etc. The latter two directories are Thunderbird- and SeaMonkey-specific code, and almost entirely consist of the GUI display and GUI driver code, although there are some product-only components.

[1] There's a few more directories that are split out of mailnews, due more to historical reasons than any sane code split.

dang2• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085934

XzetaU8• 6 years ago

The previous discussion was for the beta release, this one is the final release.

dang2• 6 years ago

Yup, got it. But from a internet forum perspective, it's going to be the same discussion. Submissions about incremental releases almost always turn out to be generic discussions about the project in general. Certainly the distinction between a beta and a final release doesn't show up as significant in threads, though of course it's quite significant from the project's point of view.

antiquark• 6 years ago

Windows Defender doesn't like it:

Trojan:Win32/Detplock

Alert level: Severe

Status: Active

Category: Trojan

Details: This program is dangerous and executes commands from an attacker.

findthewords• 6 years ago

The 64-bit installer passes.

LeoPanthera• 6 years ago

I wonder how difficult it would be to compile this for Classic MacOS, given the abandonment of Classilla.

whalesalad• 6 years ago

Web-browser, advanced e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat, and HTML editing made simple—all your Internet needs in one application.

emacs on xul

In all seriousness though I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want this ... both from a developer standpoint and a user standpoint. The recent change history is a bunch of "most of ABC other Mozilla product's code has been pulled in for X.Y.Z version, go read those notes to see what is new" and describes cherry-picking bugfixes from arbitrary versions of Firefox (60, 72, ...?)

Sounds like an absolute maintenance nightmare (or perhaps a labor of masochistic love, depending on how you look at it) of constantly cherry picking other upstream stuff into one single app for what looks like a relatively small gain. If you had no choice (ie, what linux distribution maintainers spend a lot of time on) sure, go for it, but I can use Firefox, Thunderbird, etc... as standalone apps and still have them connected using my local OS and regular old open web technologies.

kdtsh• 6 years ago

I’ve never been a SeaMonkey user but I’ve always been impressed that it’s still being developed and used, it’s really cool in a time when we’re moving to a new age of browser engine monoculture.

SeaMonkey 2.53.1

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