Mozilla 1.8 spirit reincarnates as SeaMonkey 1.0

MOZILLA the venerable old open sauce Web Browser, E-Mail client, HTML composer and IRC chat suite that was later cut to pieces and gave birth to Firefox, Thunderbird and NVU separate components, has now reincarnated.

Here showing the INQ page, Google tab in the sidebar

After suffering neglect and slow euthanasia from the Mozzarella Foundation, the SeaMonkey Council announced the release of the first non-beta version of the program. It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS-X.

It's not a beta anymore...

Version one sports the same improvements we enjoyed while looking at the beta version, among those:

• SVG vector graphics support (without plug-ins)
• "tab re-ordering": tabs can be rearranged by drag and drop
• "Autoscroll" support - middle clicking on empty space allows scrolling by moving the mouse
• Can set the e-mail client to use a single "Inbox" folder
• "Roaming Profiles": store your complete user profile in a remote server (FTP, LAN share, etc)
• Auto save draft messages in the e-mail client
• Caching improved. Hitting the "Back" button shows previous pages much faster
• See and retrieve original (source) URLs from the download manager's list of previously downloaded files

The integrated e-mail client

This time, I decided to test the final version on Linux, as I know that the Windows version works and installed fine since the alpha days. The linux beta on the contrary failed completely to even install in my tests on "Ubuntu 5.10 for AMD64".This round, having got rid of that contraption, the installation was attempted on my P4 32-bit desktop running RedHat (Fedora Core 3), not the official RedHat build but a nice UK distro based on it (you'll read about it here on the INQ soon).

Installed in Linux after supplying a missing library

Luckily for me, this time the SeaMonkey installer didn't crash and burn, yet it still complained about a missing linux library: "libstdc++". I fired the "Synaptic Package Manager" -a tool in some linuxes which allows you to search for and automatically download and update components, programs and libraries-, and found that libstdc++ was there, but there was a second package not installed: compat-libstdc++. I clicked on that and let Synaptic do its chores. Magically, the SeaMonkey 1.0 installer worked after that!. Also note that this time there are 64-bit builds also provided.

Displaying SVG files in web pages is strikingly speedy

Conclusion: if you are a long time Mozilla -or Netscape 7.x for that matter- user and you have avoided SeaMonkey because of it's experimental/beta status, try this first official version. No "1.0" software is perfect, but remember this isn't actually a 1.0 version, this is what was going to be Mozilla 1.8 - before some narrow minded people gave it an early and undeserved death sentence.µ

See Also
SeaMonkey 1.0 web page
SeaMonkey beta improves on Mozilla legacy
Mozilla Suite 'born again' despite the 'Firefox Foundation'
Mozilla Foundation kills Mozilla