Comments on: Browsers of Future Past: Seamonkey 2.0 Preview

By: masinick

masinick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have found the Seamonkey nightly builds to be every bit as stable, possibly more so, than the Firefox and Thunderbird builds. I have also found that the Seamonkey suite consumes fewer resources than the combination of Firefox and Thunderbird, and if used moderately, even less than Firefox alone, which may come as a big surprise to those who have thought of Firefox as the lighter alternative. Firefox and Thunderbird do seem to be more extensible, at least easily so, but that appears to come at the price of being considerably more memory hungry.

Seamonkey is without a doubt worthwhile as an alternative to Firefox and Thunderbird, but mainly if you prefer to use it in a classical way. Heavy use of plugins does favor the use of Firefox and Thunderbird. For me, though, I prefer Seamonkey.

By: johandk

johandk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As a web developer, i simply couldn\'t live without firefox, firebug, web developer toolbar, foxyproxy etc. combination. Seamonkey has potential, i suppose, maybe more targeted at end users?

@masinick any benchmarks on the resource usage of firefox/thunderbird vs seamonkey?

Joe, where you using it on KDE - and will there be a difference using it on GNOME (which I prefer)?

Nice write up though.

By: j3

j3 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Puppy Linux (a 100MB Linux distribution) includes SeaMonkey and I think that the reason was due to its size as a complete suite when compared with a collection of individual applications. It will be intersting to see if version 2 is equally as resource-friendly.

By: tfunk

tfunk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

For me Seamonkey is the better browser cause I love the search button instead of the search field. Seamonkey is faster while login to accounts (but this could be subjective ;) ) and a very fine feature is the bookmark popup in the personal toolbar (instead of opening a seperate window). The only thing I miss – the icons in the personal toolbar. But I can live with the stars at the moment ;)

By: masinick

masinick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I do not have any official benchmarks, I am simply another user. I have unofficially looked at htop while running various browsers and when comparing Seamonkey and Firefox shortly after invoking them, they are comparable, but Seamonkey sometimes has an initial footprint that is slightly (but not much) lighter). Considering that I can do both Web browsing and Email from a similar sized footprint and it is familiar with what I have used for many years in the past, I go with it.

When I do want the more modern conveniences, I do not hesitate to use Firefox as well.

By: jqball2u

jqball2u — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

While it is true what this article says about Seamonkey, I have found that Seamonkey crashes a LOT less than FireFox … do not get me wrong on this comment, I DO like FireFox a LOT; it\’s just that I\’ve had FireFox crash on me sooooooo many times (yes, I\’ve read the article that blames the crashes on (mostly) the add-ons \’clashing\’ with each other but it is a pain in the arse to figure out which is the culprit in making FF crash!) … while I usually do not use any of the other parts of the suite (I use an online email client and rarely use IRC unless necessary), I really like Seamonkey\’s stability! I\’ve RARELY had Seamonkey crash on me and when it did, it was usually on account of my computer (i.e. lack of sufficient memory &/or low processor capability/power). I keep Seamonkey in my browser choice on all my machines, as a backup as well as for general browsing, keeping the others for more specific browsing (i.e. keeping the tab bar set for email, specific web pages, etc). Keep up the GREAT work Mozilla! ;D