Good Bye SeaMonkey

[Xavier]

The Mozilla Foundation annouced today that they will not release Mozilla 1.8.x. This comes as a shock to the development community who has been working on the Suite's feature-set which is inherited from Netscape 4.x (memory serves).

Michell Baker, Chief Lizard Wangler, noted in her blog today that development work done on he Mozilla 1.8.x suite (including so-called Alpha and Beta releases) was solely done as a support service for continuing Gecko development.

Most in the Mozilla community are not profoundly impacted by the annoucement as the Mozilla Foundation as been working on the Aviary suite of products for the past two (or so) years, as noted by Asa Dotlzer in his blog.

The Mozilla Foundation will continue to offer resources to the Seamonkey community (if one exists). They will also continue to maintain and secure the Mozilla 1.7.x series of releases.

I personally think that this is a good step for the Mozilla Foundation. The reason for Firefox is violated by continuing to offer the Mozilla Suite. If people wish to continue to use the suite, why not develop a set of extensions or even UI on top of the Firefox Toolkit?

Anywho, I never cared for the Mozilla Suite and only ever had it installed for Composer. However, I'll miss being able to see the word Seamonkey.

Yours,
Xavier

PS: In other Mozilla news, Ben Goodger, chief software engineer(?) for Firefox, posted a bit today on the continuing progress of Firefox and its plans for the future.

[$cirisme]

Seamonkey's not dying, it will continue to be developed by the community rather than the staff of Mozilla.org.

[Xavier]

That's true... I did mention that the community would continue workings supported by MoFo. However, at this point, support of that community seems light... Just based on comments from around the Mozilla Blogsphere.

[Sheepdog]

yeah. as long as FF is on it's development track, my thought is "Mozilla who?"

[Taran Wanderer]

Oh my. I have just learned that I am very out of touch with web browsing software. I've used Netscape for ages because I like the way it does bookmarks. When I saw this thread I paid a visit to Wikipedia to find out what SeaMonkey was, and I discovered that Netscape has been basically ignored by the market for years! Netscape 8 beta is out, but Wikipedia says that it's based on FireFox, so what's the point I wonder? I started using FireFox at work a few months ago just to be familiar with it. I'll probably switch over to it completely before too long.

Does anybody use Opera? I tried it a few years ago, but I got scared and stopped using it when it messed up my bookmarks. I like the idea of mouse gestures, though.

[Xavier]

You can get an extension for Firefox that does Mouse Gestures... And no Ads!

[Sheepdog]

yeah. the ads are pretty much the reason why i only use Opera to see how my html renders in it.