Just when you thought you had it all figured out—that Sea-Monkeys were really brine shrimp—along comes SeaMonkey.
Another instant pet? No, this SeaMonkey is basically the Mozilla Internet suite with a new name and a new logo.
I have always liked the Internet suite model, and thought it was actually a better fit for corporate use than the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client combined.
And, like Mozilla, SeaMonkey is extremely customizable when it comes to changing settings. So Im glad to see it making a comeback.
The SeaMonkey suite comes from the SeaMonkey Council, a volunteer group within the Mozilla Foundation.
The developers have added some nice Firefox touches to the old Mozilla suite, including tab creation and management through drag and drop, sleeker scrolling and the ability to report Web sites that dont display correctly.
Also, during tests, the Macintosh version of SeaMonkey performed much better then the older Mozilla suite for the Mac.
One unique feature in SeaMonkey is roaming profiles, with which I could save user profile information to a Web or FTP server and remotely access it from any SeaMonkey-based system.
This capability went well beyond simple bookmark settings to manual user configurations and helper applications.
Its still early in its implementation, but, done correctly, this could be a useful feature in corporate environments.
Otherwise, SeaMonkey is basically the same application as the last release of Mozilla, with integrated mail, HTML editing, chat and developer tools. And these components have been changed only minimally in SeaMonkey 1.0.
Id like to see this suite incorporate more—though not all—of the features of its Firefox sibling, especially in areas like auto-updating and RSS handling.
To download the free, open-source SeaMonkey, go to the SeaMonkey project page.
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