SeaMonkey 2.53.1 Beta 1 | Hacker News Reader

SeaMonkey 2.53.1 Beta 1

seamonkey-project.org

74 pointsXzetaU832 comments

I use Seamonkey at work and my coworkers make fun of me whenever I have to screenshare. I originally switched because some years ago, Chrome was being a memory hog, and I remembered using Seamonkey years before that.

I still use it every day, and was recently wondering when the next update would happen. Thanks to all the devs out there fighting the good fight!

OMG. I could have written this very comment. The chortles and sneers I get are numerous.

One other reason to use SeaMonkey is it works the best with the -D (socks5) feature of ssh, even better than Firefox's implementation. If you have to traverse into networks via SSH and browse, SeaMonkey is your best friend.

Curious what/how it does better with socks5. I'd assume it's the same code.

> I originally switched because some years ago, Chrome was being a memory hog, and I remembered using Seamonkey years before that.

Same for me a loooong time ago, when I found out that running Seamonkey Web browser and e-mail client together used less memory than either of Firefox or Thunderbird alone.

After a few years I stopped using it for e-mail, because I had troubles with several specific versions crashing too often, and having all one's eggs in the same basket is not a good idea when one of the eggs rots the others (i.e. a browser crash killing the e-mail client and vice-versa).

My parents are still using it for both Web and email, one on Linux, the other on Windows. It is more stable these days.

[ posted from Seamonkey, my main browser on Windows and single one on Linux :-) ]

How do they plan to maintain the code for HTML WYSIWYG composer, IRC chat client, when current and future releases are based on modern Gecko and Firefox? Will composer in particular be dropped sometime in future? It is (in my opinion) one of the selling points of SeaMonkey as its a really easy to use HTML editor for creating quick pages.

I can't answer your question (I don't use that part of Seamonkey), but I have the feeling they are unfortunately following the same steps as the main Mozilla product, just with some (appreciable) delay: they dropped GTK2 support in last version, and they are dropping ALSA support soon (I thought in this release, but I don't see it written in this page), both things I need on my Linux setup. Another user said he was happy to see this new release for his XP laptop; well, they are supposed to drop XP in this release too :-(

Probably not a popular sentiment, but for someone continuing to use and maintain a Win XP Thinkpad T60, this is really cool news.

Are you aware of any other web browsers for Windows XP, which are still updated, besides MyPal and this one (SeaMonkey)?

New Moon, K-Meleon, 360 Extreme Explorer (Chromium 78)

https://msfn.org/board/topic/180462-my-browser-builds-part-2...

https://msfn.org/board/topic/178380-extreme-explorer-360-chr...

Maxthon

XP is still huge in China https://www.maxthon.com

I use that on my XP VM

You can find all here http://www.xpbrowsers.com

"Bug that grants admin rights to malware found in Maxthon, China's favorite browser"

https://www.zdnet.com/article/bug-that-grants-admin-rights-t...

This is interesting. Why would anyone need to still use Windows XP?

Same reasons people still use record players perhaps.

Caveat: I only run Linux and for most of the last 20+ years that has been true. My windows experience is very limited and very outdated.

For me, the last version of windows that was usable out of the box was 2k. The interface was clean and intuitive. With some work, you could make XP behave like 2k. Not sure about 7 but doing that in 10 appears to be impossible. (I've tried to help family members make sense of it, with no luck.) If I had to use windows for something, that's the UI I'd hope for. I don't get what's going on with it any more. I'd take it over macos but that's just because I have some muscle memory for the keyboard shortcuts and I find the macos shell hyper unintuitive too.

I use xfce because it feel like just enough UI to run the two GUI applications I use: xterm and a browser. Maybe it's time to use SeaMonkey again. Used to love it.

> for someone continuing to use and maintain a Win XP Thinkpad T60, this is really cool news.

Less cool news: "SeaMonkey 2.49.5 will be the last version supporting Windows XP/Server 2003 and Vista/Server 2008." (https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/legacy)

Yep, the "let's drop everything which has been stabilised and working fine for 15 years" frenzy has reached them too :-(

If you're OK with using an unmaintained operating system, why not just keep using the 2.49.5 version of Seamonkey indefinitely.

Because that's quite unrelated. Websites display will be fine or break independently of the OS, but depending how the browser has been updated to follow the last trend or not. Same goes for security: if he doesn't install crap on his XP, the main source of danger is Internet: malicious files input to unmaintained programs, and of course his Web browser first. Maybe there are performance improvement coming too, either in the browser or the e-mail client.

Personally, I don't use XP, but I'm stuck with 2.49.1 because they broke GTK2 support between that version and 2.49.5. When I'll have enough, I'll switch to another browser, perhaps Palemoon which still had GTK2 support last time I built it (28.6.1). /Edit:/ Just checked on Palemoon forum: they say they will support GTK2 until at least 2024.

Living a bit under a rock here. Can somebody help me understand the utility of SeaMonkey in comparison to FF?

Traditional browser with the typical UI going back to almost the beginning, menu bars and everything. Plus mail, newsgroups, calendar.

”Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.

Under the hood, SeaMonkey uses much of the same Mozilla Firefox source code which powers such products as Thunderbird. Legal backing is provided by the SeaMonkey Association (SeaMonkey e.V.).”

Think of it as Firefox but with the old Netscape UI intact.

This is the open source version of Netscape Communicator circa 1997. It is mozilla.org's first and oldest open source browser client. That client was eventually split in to Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (the rest).

It has all the features of Firefox, plus built-in support for your favorite social media newsgroups, email, and contacts.

Open Source version of Netscape 5, which came out later than 1997

Neither this comment nor my sibling mentioning Netscape 5 are correct. SeaMonkey's lineage is Netscape 6. Netscape 6 is from the early 2000s, not the late 90s. This is significant because they are different codebases, and there was a substantial gap between the latest mass market release in the 90s and the first release prepared from the new (nglayout, now known as Gecko) codebase. The code that was first released in the 90s was the then-in-progress state of the never-finished Netscape 5. The decision to scrap Netscape 5 is the source of the "never do a rewrite" meme that came out of Spolsky's article.

At a previous job I had different Linux boxes I had to run a browser “on the box” through ssh connections. Both FF and Seamonkey have socks proxies in their UI so it was handy to have both to point to different machines.

Firefox has long supported multiple profiles. Network settings are per profile.

a pleasure to see the old gui :)

Killed by Mozilla...

I was always surprised that Mongo used SeaMonkey for running scripts. Why didn't they pick V8?

Believe you're thinking about SpiderMonkey. SeaMonkey is an application suite with email, browser, IRC, etc.

Hahaha, yes. Oops.

They did run v8 for a time but changes in v8 meant when isolates came in made it not feasible anymore as I remember. So they switched back.

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