Mozilla SeaMonkey Finally Goes 2.0 The Successor to the Mozilla Suite Hits a Major Milestone Sean Michael Kerner
From the 'Long Release Cycle' files:
Remember the Mozilla Suite? Or maybe you remember Netscape Communicator?
Neither of those all-in-one browser solutions exists under either of those names anymore, but their successor SeaMonkey is still (surprisingly) around and kinda/sorta moving forward.
Today, the SeaMonkey project released version 2.0. Yeah version 2.0. We've got IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4 which are all 'younger' projects in many ways, but SeaMonkey is a version 2.0, go figure.
In my view, this is a release that has been a long time coming.
The last time I wrote about SeaMonkey was the 1.6 release in 2004, when Mozilla still held the reigns of the project and Firefox was just taking off. Back in 2004, SeaMonkey was the Mozilla codename for the Mozilla Suite, but it has since branched off into its own seperate effort with legal backing from Mozilla.
Just like the Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Suites (that I personally relied on for many years), SeaMonkey includes a Web browser, advanced e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat, and HTML editing capabilities.
With SeaMonkey 2.0, the project has now moved to a Firefox 3.5.x base for the underlying web browser. The mail client has also been updated, providing additional stability for users. All good stuff, but does it really matter given the current environment?
With all the extensibility of the Firefox model with its add-ons, I'm not sure there is a place for the whole suite anymore.
While it may have been normal back in the Netscape Communicator days to have a big all-in-one program, today most users want to do it themselves.
Firefox was created and has become successful because its core focus is the browser. With Firefox, Mozilla made the browser cool again and re-invigorated both its own organization and community as well as the whole browser space.
There are always those that want what they used to have. As such, I suspect there will be a place for SeaMonkey for a long time to come. In my case, I moved from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox in 2004 and I
haven't looked back since.
