SeaMonkey 1.1 offers a good alternative to Firefox

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Product: SeaMonkey 1.1
Website: WWW.MOZILLA.ORG
System Requirements: a computer, an Internet connection, a brain
Price: €0, £0, $0

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SeaMonkey is Mozilla
The Mozarella Foundation's Mitchell Baker said back in October, 2004, when refering to the Mozilla browser and e-mail integrated application: "there are millions of people who continue to use the suite and are happy using the suite and like the way it works, and we intend to continue to make that possibility real" yet months later the organization entered a state of Firefox nirvana, leaving the future of the Mozilla Suite uncertain, until a band of beatifully stubborn volunteers picked up the torch and decided to carry on with its development.

INQ page loaded in SeaMonkey 1.1 (Modern Theme)

In short, it's not totally accurate to describe SeaMonkey, Mozilla's successor "a mating of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox with its Thunderbird email program", since it's just the natural evolution of the old Mozilla internet suite, just rebranded to reflect its new identity.

SeaMonkey Mail - Finally "Single Inbox" is disabled by default

So what's new in 1.1?

SeaMonkey 1.1 is an evolutionary, not revolutionary release. It brings bugfixes, lots of them, around sixty two for those that keep count. Then, it adds some useful features, starting with the most obvious: Tab Thumbnails, visual indication of https:// secure URLs a la Firefox, and better phishing detection and new privacy features on the e-mail client.

Secure web page notification: notice the yellow coloured URL bar on https:// URL

Among all additions, I found the Tab Thumbnails to be really nice: specially when you open so many new tabs that the space becomes really crowded and it's difficult -due to the shrinking tab sizes- to know which tab leads to which page. In that case, just position your mouse pointer over the tab and voila! you get a thumnail picture of the site. The 'secure URL indication' is also helpful, and puts SeaMonkey on parity with Firefox on the "user friendlyness" category. Newbies can no longer doubt wether the page being displayed is secure or not, the whole URL bar turns yellow when the connection is using https.

Program's About screen

Other nice additions are "active spell checking" in "textareas", translated to English it means that on any form with text entry field, spelling can be checked with a few clicks so you are sure there's no spelling mistakes left on the text before pressing the form's [Submit] button. Other additions are a bit of an annoyance, but I can understand the usefulness for beginners, for instance, if you enter "about:config" -which lets you tweak all of the program's configuration parameters- you are now shown a warning screen telling you to be careful of what you do in there.

The e-mail client incorporates some nice changes, including better phishing message detection -which was there in previous releases but now seems to work properly-. It works based on the comparison of the link text to the destination URL, in other words if you have an e-mail message that links to YourBankHere.com but whose link text reads geocities.com or any other different domain name, it triggers the "suspicious" flag and a message reading "SeaMonkey thinks this message might be an email scam" is shown above the message.

Moving the mouse pointer over browser tabs gives you a thumbail of each page

Is it stable? Yes, indeed, I use it daily since its release, often keeping between five to ten open browser windows, each in turn sporting between six and twelve open tabs. The e-mail client -SeaMonkey Mail- is always open in the background, fetching POP3 e-mail every minute. It just works. I haven't had a browser crash since upgrading from the Mozilla 1.7 product to its successor.

Awaiting Cairo, but not Microsoft's mythical one
Those of you waiting for "Cairo" will have to wait a bit more -and by Cairo I mean the integration of the namesake open sauce cross-platform graphics library into the Gecko engine, not the mythical and revolutionary OS/2-killing OS with Object-Oriented filesystem from Microsoft which never arrived.

Spellchecking HTML forms before hitting submit, notice the underlined words

Andrew Schultz, QA lead for the SeaMonkey project, confirmed that the next version will offer the same Cairo integration as the upcoming Firefox v3: "Cairo is on in Gecko 1.9, which will be in SeaMonkey 1.5". Right now, SeaMonkey is on par with the latest release version of Firefox. "FF 2.0 is also non-cairo", Schultz added.

In linux distros where the Gnome file requester is not used,
SeaMonkey's own fi dialogue does file name auto-complete. Probably the best feature

In Short
As an old time user of the Suite, I'm happy to see a group of talented volunteers stepping up to the challenge and continuing providing us a nicely integrated browser and e-mail suite, despite the Mozarella Foundation.

I use the browser and e-mail client daily, and its stability has steadily improved release after release. Plus, the ability to run cool add-ons once reserved to Firefox like Greasemonkey -see my article titled "Greasemonkey for SeaMonkey is a load of Monkeys" among an ever growing list of extensions brought from Firefox to SM, is just the icing on the cake. I give it Seven Fernandos beers. ?

The Good
Stable, proven foundation
Security features on par with Firefox
With the addition of the third party xSidebar, it can run several ported Firefox extensions, in addition to the usual Mozilla and SeaMonkey-only extensions.

The Bad
The SeaMonkey suite and its product name are not really known outside the geekosphere. I always end up explaining "it's Mozilla", and then more often than not having to explain that "Firefox branched-off from the same Mozilla source code" after getting a blank stare. The same people who don't know SeaMonkey often end up asking "and how about Netscape?", showing that the SeaMonkey team still has a lot of work to do to promote its open sauce project.

The Ugly
Nothing really ugly.

Score

See Also
Firefox 3 has alpha release
SeaMonkey Suite can use Firefox extensions, shocker
Mozilla 1.8 spirit reincarnates as SeaMonkey 1.0
Mozilla Suite 'Born-Again' despite the Firefox Foundation
Mozilla 1.7 a role model against browser anorexia
Mozilla 1.6 "beats Internet Explorer in every way" -Mike Magee
Mozilla browser extensions you can't live without

L'INQs
SeaMonkey Project at Mozilla.org
Mozilla is Dead, Long Live Mozilla (eWeek)
Greasemonkey will blow up business models, as well as your mind