Mozilla Suite born-again despite Firefox Foundation

THE BROWSER, and e-mail software - OK, HTML authoring tool as well - formerly known as "Mozilla" or more recently referred to as "Mozilla Suite" is back alive and kicking, despite recent efforts from the Firefox Foundation ^B^B^B^B^B^B^B^B^B Mozilla Foundation to make it go away after freezing future development and deciding to only provide bug fixes.

Two weeks ago, the "SeaMonkey Community" released the first alpha of the successor of the Mozilla Suite, dubbed "SeaMonkey"and described as "a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite". It's a 11.7MB download and it installed on my windows system in less than a minute after double clicking on the installer file.

SeaMonkey Alpha 1.0 showing the Inquirer page. Amazon's A9 and Google toolbars installed

While the Foundation wished the tightly integrated software would just go away and annoyed quite a few core developers with their original announcement, there's still not only a sizeable amount of users who like it, but developers as well who are willing to continue evolving it.

This proves two things:

1. That you must take news stories that say "company x kills product y", "x is dead" or "x is gone" with a grain of salt. (sorry Nick). While some of us journos have a tendency to describe everything in black and white or -dead or alive- terms, software is often able to resurface and be brought back to life, specially if it's open source. The beauty of this open development model is that there is always an option to "fork" and continue development. As a friend put it "there's always someone willing to continue developing great software". Sometimes, it comes back to life under a different name, but the product is the same.

2. That the Foundation is able to mess up things and annoy people in the purpose of pursuing "a higher goal". They admitted their mistake and the developer's uproar when they said: "There is no doubt that the series of 1.8 alpha and beta releases have caused some confusion about whether there would be a 1.8 product released by the Mozilla Foundation. In addition, a set of people have done a non-trivial amount of work on 1.8 features, thinking this would be part of an official Mozilla Foundation release. This has been a major error on our part. These contributors have reason to be unhappy with us. We can only apologize, at the same time recognizing that apologies only go so far and can't fix the error."

First Looks

SeaMonkey showing a SVG vector graphic embedded on a web page

Despite it's current ugly logo -due to the lack of an official one-, I've been using SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha (based on the Gecko 1.8 engine, to be used in the upcoming Firefox release) daily since its release and I'm very happy with what I see. One of the things on everyone's -I'm referring to long-time Mozilla users- "want list" has been "roaming profiles", that is, the ability to store your profile's data (Bookmarks, address book, cookies and security certificates) on a central server, so you can "roam" and switch from one PC to another on a home network and still share a central user profile. A rather primitive version of this feature was available in the closed source Netscape Communicator 4.x product released about 9 years ago, but for some strange reason was never implemented when the company decided to open the browser code in 1998 and later rewrite it almost from scratch, to create Mozilla.

Save download URLs from oblivion!

I didn't get a chance to test Roaming Profiles -remember this is an Alpha version, so backup your profile data if you decide to play with SeaMonkey!-, but since this feature is included and enabled, I conclude it must be in working order. Another feature worth mentioning is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support. This is an open vector graphics format that has been developed for a long time, but which wasn't included in default Mozilla builds. I have tested this and it works great, at amazing speeds. SVG has the potential to eventually replace the proprietary Flash format, at least in adverts, web graphics and other kind of complex drawing or animation that requires no interaction. The Javascript engine has been also supposedly updated to include what's going to be "Javascript v1.6". Notice I said Javascript, not "Java". Java is not Javascript. Javascript is a Netscape invention, Java is a Sun invention. Different fruit, with a similar name.

Roaming Profiles, at last!

The Mail client includes several long needed tweaks for usability, specially in the e-mail account configuration screens, and also features the ability to set up different "identities" for a single e-mail account. This is something I've been needing for ages. Another noteworthy addition: when you start typing an e-mail address, if it's not a known email address (ie, it's the first time you send an e-mail to someone, or it's not but you misspelled it) the email address turns red, helping you spot typos that too often result in e-mail bounces and undeliverable messages.

Multiple e-mail identities for a single each e-mail account setup

The SMTP servers configuration - specially if you have different set-ups for different accounts- is much easier than before. And finally, other feature that caught my eye is that the download manager now includes a VERY useful feature "copy source url" so you can obtain the url from a file you have download yesterday, or a month ago! -depending on how frequently you purge your Download Manager list-. Example: suppose you have SomeCoolFile.zip on your hard drive. It's big. And you want to e-mail the source url to a friend so he can download it instead of you having to send it to him. So you google for the filename... and found nothing. Well, with this feature you can bring the download url back from oblivion, no matter how obscure was the file's location!.

SMTP servers set-up got a badly needed reorganization

The SeaMonkey alpha picked up my old Mozilla profile and all its configuration settings, and for me, it has been working fine so far, even with third party mozilla add-ons like Amazon.com's A9 search toolbar and the Googlebar. As a daily user of the Suite, I can only say: kudos to the SeaMonkey rebels!, and long live Mozilla!.µ

See Also
Mozilla Suite: A Role Model Against Browser Anorexia
Extensions for the Mozilla Suite that you can't live without
Mozilla Foundation kills Mozilla
The SeaMonkey Council, and Wiki page