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Sea Monkey only has four bugs left

One thousand squashed by volunteers
Monday, 2 June 2008, 12:30

ACCORDING TO Mozilla's bugzilla site that hosts bug reports, the Sea Monkey web browser and e-mail client, formerly known as the Mozilla Suite, only has four bugs left to fix... honest.

A Bit of History: Three years ago, the Mozzarella Foundation decided to de-emphasise Mozilla and switch its efforts to its handicapped "browser only " product, Firefox. But a group of volunteers dubbed the SeaMonkey Council was formed to keep the project alive.

Since then they have kept the project alive, releasing new versions and bug fixes on a regular basis. Also worth of mention is the availability of most of the Firefox extensions modified to install and work on the Web browser/e-mail reader/html editor/IRC chat Sea Monkey powerhouse.

Bugs, Reports, and Statistics
The Coordinator and developer at the SeaMonkey project, Kaiser Robert - also known as Kairo - recently trumpeted on his weblog the fixing of a thousand bugs by the volunteers in a matter of a couple months. His post reads "The people helping us here have killed about a thousand bugs in eight weeks! This is absolutely awesome, thanks and congratulations to everyone helping with this effort!"

At the time of Kairo's writing, the number of pending bugs to fix was fifteen. That number has been reduced, at the time of this writing, to just four - which are still unconfirmed. This is specially impressive since the Sea Monkey project is managed by volunteers.

Okay, four might not be totally accurate, as Sea Monkey inherits all the outstanding bugs present in the Mozilla "Gecko" HTML rendering engine also used by Firefox. But you get the point. The number is pretty low.

A grain of salt
That doesn't mean there are just four remaining issues or problems to fix in the software. New bugs are found all the time, and others linger for years. Blogger Ned Batchelder wrote about bug reports: "Triaging bugs is an important part of any development process. It's the simple but treacherous process of deciding what bugs should get fixed when. Simple because there's only one thing to decide: when should we fix this bug? Treacherous because it is tempting to turn the triage process into a long drawn-out affair with many people"

Mozilla is no exception to these problems. Take this bug for instance. It was first reported nearly eight years ago, at the time of Mozilla 0.x. Yet, the last entry seems to suggest the bug has been fixed in Sea Monkey. Yet, the bug remains open.

Volunteers and Mozilla
Despite all this splendid bug-squashing effort by the Sea Monkey project members, even the best team of volunteers sometimes has its limits. For instance, lead coordinator and project engineer Kairo recently took a well-deserved vacation. At the time, a security issue was found that would trigger a crash in the Javascript engine. The bug fix will come in Sea Monkey 1.1.10. But version 1.1.10, as of this writing, hasn't been released yet.

The reason not to release a new bug fix update immediately was explained by Kaiser: "we have no evidence that the crash is really exploitable, and every release is quite costly to us, localizers, and users (full re-download) ". The options offered in security advisories to prevent the possibility of this remote-triggered application crash were to either disable Javascript or to wait and use "1.1.10", which, well, isn't here yet.

On the other hand, it should be noted that some Linux distros like Suse did release fixed versions last month, as version 1.1.9-6.3. In any case, the Sea Monkey project is supposed to release its next version 1.1.10 really soon now.

Food for thought
Still, the question remains in the air: If a small team of volunteers were able to get this far and squash more than a thousand of bugs in two months bringing order to Bugzilla reports for this Suite, would things have been better or worse if Sea Monkey had the full steam (read manpower) of the Mozzarella Foundation behind it?

Or maybe it's the other way around. Perhaps, the project is better off without it. Feel free to fire away in the comments section. µ

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Comments
Maybe this just means..

Maybe this just means there isn't enough interest in the software that people aren't reporting bugs. I found the software horrible to use, and rather than continue using it, I just ditched it for other software. People only seem to submit bug reports if they actually care enough about the project to want the bug fixed.

posted by : BB, 02 June 2008 Complain about this comment
SEAMonkey is Better IE8

I Love SEAMonkeys, You Send For Them From Ads in Comic Books, Litttle Critters Come ALL Dried UP. Man. Then ADD Water, Wait few Days & all these Live Little SEAMonkeys Swim About, Amazing. 
They Can Swim In Your Mouth ,Too. Where they live Forever.
If You Arn't So Generous with Life, SEAMonkey browser will do Streams that others refuse, especially IE, when blotched, SEAMonkey To Rescue.
If You Wonder, Seamonkey or Firefox, Come on, Where have YOU Been. Its SEAMonkey WorldWide.
Drashek

posted by : SeaMonkey_Fan, 02 June 2008 Complain about this comment
Better off

They are probably better off without the support of the Mozilla foundation behind them. I don't know why a much larger organisation can't seem to fix the increasing number of bugs in Firefox, or why it regularly prompts you to update the software sometimes two or three days in a row. I still think the best version of Firefox was around 0.7. Version 2 is so unreliable and leaky that Mozilla should be ashamed of themselves. Fingers crossed for version 3 - the beta is promising.

posted by : H. Ruiz, 02 June 2008 Complain about this comment
What happens if you sic a SeaMonkey on a Firefox

Fire vs. Water. This is just begging for a comic book-style battle.

posted by : Jason Goatcher, 03 June 2008 Complain about this comment
Hail SeaMonkey Suite!

The SeaMonkey Internet Suite of apps would have been better off if the 'full' backing and support (manpower, infrastructure, money, promotion) of the Mozilla Foundation had of been behind it; however seeing that was not the case, with the Mozilla foundation moving in a different direction, the SeaMonkey Suite is much better off where it's presently at. 

And possibly could be better off still, if it had sufficient resources of its' own to further distance itself from the Mozilla Foundation; all the while maintaining and even increasing the volunteers required, essential, and invaluable input on SeaMonkey's development.

Long live the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite! 
( http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ )

Ahh yes, opinions abound. :-)

lc

posted by : LC, 03 June 2008 Complain about this comment
ease of use

the best advantage of seamonkey is the ease of use.

When working on mail and browsing it is the easest way to do.

that's a lesson for developpers, think ease of use.

posted by : gl, 03 June 2008 Complain about this comment
I use both.

The truth is that I'm happy using both Sea Monkey and FireFox. 

FF is my primary browser and goes everywhere. However, I run a pretty restrictive (NoScript, FoxyProxy, etc) environment.

SM is smoother and works better with my bank and several other sites which I have configured to come up when I open it.

Basically, I do all of my financial stuff in SM and all other stuff in FF. If you stop and think about it, doing so increases my security because the cookies and cache for both browsers are stored in completely separate places. I never have to worry about websites visited in FF attempting to read cookies set in SM. 

On my Linux based system at home, I use Konqueror, FireFox, Sea Monkey and Opera simultaneously at times simply to maintain clean separation of web activities.

It's a security/privacy thang.

posted by : SeaMonkeyUser, 03 June 2008 Complain about this comment
compatible?

where a lot of things work just fine in seamonkey, i still have to use Internet Explorer for my online banking, they support several browsers:
Microsoft® Internet Explorer
version 5 and 6, and 7
or: Netscape™ Navigator™ version 7.1 and up
or :Mozilla 1.5 and up
or: AOL 8.0 and up (AOL subscribers only)
or: Firefox 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0
or: Opera 9.x
no seamonkey tho =| natwest online banking used to only be ie and firefox, so it would seem they are expanding doing something to be more compatible.

posted by : Lewis, 03 June 2008 Complain about this comment
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