by chanster on Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:20 pm
Seamonkey Review:
'The Mozilla project scuttled development for the legacy Mozilla Suite in 2005 after shifting focus to work on Firefox and Thunderbird. However, rather than abandoning the project entirely, the Mozilla Project provided the infrastructure to allow the community to continue development of the Mozilla Suite as SeaMonkey.
SeaMonkey still uses the "kitchen sink" approach [You have to download the lot or it won't work]. It includes the Navigator browser, the ChatZilla IRC client, the Composer HTML editor, a mail and newsgroup client, and an address book component all bundled into one big application. To get all the functionality of SeaMonkey using the separate Mozilla apps, you'd have to install Firefox, Thunderbird, the ChatZilla extension for Firefox, and a separate HTML editor such as Nvu (which is built using the Composer codebase).
What's missing in SeaMonkey:
You'll find that SeaMonkey is missing a number of features that might be hard to give up.
For instance, SeaMonkey is missing native RSS/Atom support, so you can't use live bookmarks in the browser, or subscribe to feeds in the mail/news client as you can in Thunderbird. The search bar is also missing, which is a feature that I've come to rely on. I'm used to being able to just hit Ctrl-k to jump to the search bar and run a Google search, and I missed that right away.
SeaMonkey is also missing the spiffy new "clear private data" option in Firefox, which lets you clear the cache, cookies, and download history with a single hotkey combination.
Extension support is also rather primitive in SeaMonkey. Though you can use some extensions with SeaMonkey, it doesn't include an easy way to manage extensions the way Firefox does. I tried installing the Sage extension to manage RSS/Atom feeds, but even though it appeared to install successfully, I couldn't actually find the application in the menus or sidebar -- and there appears to be no easy way to uninstall or disable extensions.
SeaMonkey also features the old, cluttered Preference dialog, though I suspect that's not going to be a major problem for most users.
Another missing featureis the automatic update feature. Browser security is a major concern for users, and having an automatic notification and update for security fixes is essential for many users.
All thing considered, after using firefox for over a year and recently changing to Avant browser, I'll take Avant any day. It has everything you need and nothing that's a security risk.
