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Comment by adonnjohn | Hacker News Reader

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

”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.).”

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.

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

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.

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

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