| SeaMonkey 1.0.5 | |
|---|---|
| HOME PAGE: | http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/ |
| DOWNLOAD: | SeaMonkey 1.0.5 (Same as above) ALL VERSIONS OF SEAMONKEY http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/ |
| LICENSE: | Freeware (open source) |
| FILE SIZE: | 11.6 MB |
| SYS REQ: | Windows Windows 98, 98SE, Me, NT, 2000, XP Pentium 233MHz 64 MB RAM 52 MB hard drive space MAC Mac OS X 10.1.x, Mac OS X 10.2.x and later G3 266 MHz 64 MB RAM 72 MB hard drive space Linux Linux kernel - 2.2.14 with the following libraries or packages minimums:
64 MB RAM 52 MB hard drive space |
| LIMITATIONS: | None |
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.)
- 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 an 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.
External Links:
| Last updated: Tuesday January 06, 2009 |
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