I stuck around using it for longer than I probably should have. The integrated chat and mail clients were useful. The HTML editor not so much, and didn't appear to get much attention.
One of the main things I miss is the LCARSTrek theme by KaiRo. Unlike any other LCARS browser theme, I found it to be usable on a day to day basis. Sadly it isn't available for Firefox.
I also miss using both Seamonkey and themes :( I wasn't a fan of LCARs, but Earlyblue was great.
> The HTML editor not so much, and didn't appear to get much attention.
I found it useful. Firefox's inbuilt HTML editor features are worse, they don't have floating table editing. Nowadays I use Thunderbird to write HTML whenever I don't want to do it by hand, almost the same thing.
Good point – I'd nearly forgotten about design mode! I wonder what other browsers include a user-facing feature and UI to enable it and make it useful?
You can enable it in the javascript console (document.designMode = 'on') , but the lack of an editing UI makes it less useful.
The onramp to web page creation – and javascript programming in the browser for that matter[1] – is tantalizingly close. I wish it were a bit more discoverable in mainstream browsers.
Seamonkey used to be simply be known as "Mozilla" or "Mozilla Application Suite", and was the original browser by Mozilla before they decided to spin off the code into the "Phoenix" and "Thunderbird" projects. Originally the plan was that Mozilla was a browser for developers and that consumers would use Netscape. However AOL laid off the Netscape developers in 2003 and focus was switched to making Phoenix, which was then called Firebird the main product of the Mozilla project, and it become known as Firefox in 2004. I was around for the original 1.0 releases of Firefox and Mozilla, and after it was clear that Firefox was more popular than the Mozilla Application Suite it was spun off into the Seamonkey project, taking the name from the original codename used in the development of the browser. In recent years, the legacy code of Seamonkey means that its rendering engine hasn't kept up with Firefox, meaning that most modern sites don't work with it anymore, but it is an interesting historical browser who's user interface hasn't changed much since the 2000s, compared to Firefox which changes its user interface regularly.
I used to work for a company owned by Apollo - if its the one i'm thinking of...and if so then "corporate raider from the 80s" is putting things mildly. Those guys really were the type to squeeze every ounce of value of any org without remorse for the future or without thinking of the long-term value that an org could produce.
Yahoo had good tech, sadly well hidden thanks to a bad board and execs. it was still doing bleeding edge freebsd, like netflix just found out and can't stop talking about lately.
last good ceo was bartz, but she lost for carl Icahn who wanted to destroy Yahoo so his shares on MS and google ad business would go up. then he managed to get mayer to go in and do his bidding from the inside and the rest is history.
That makes me wonder, regarding AOL/Yahoo/Verizon/... what's the story behind "8 BITMIME" and their mail server's broken 8-bit handling ([0],[1])? Did they just get server software with bugs in one of the acquisitions/mergers? Or is it some incompatibility or configuration issue comparable to the 500-mile e-mail story [2]?
(Note: I had no idea they hadn't fixed it yet (at least the utf8 part)... I tested just now, and, sure, it's still broken... currently it is operating in "State 2".)
that actually matches the timeline i described. it's already on mayer and Icahn destroying it. i think only senior left on mail was responsible for spam and nothing else.
I've never worked for AOL nor yahoo so I have only an outsider view...and I'm sure to a degree you're not wrong. But still, these Apollo guys are just another level of value extraction.
This still has the best SOCKS5 proxy abilities, even over normal Firefox. This browser + "ssh -D" has saved me many times working in highly restrictive networks.
I keep an install of SeaMonkey 2.49.5 on my desktop. It's my preferred platform for browsing FTP and Gopher (the latter with the OverbiteFF add-on), and is the last version of SeaMonkey that has full NPAPI support, useful if I find an old site with a Java applet, or would for some reason need Silverlight. And being based on Firefox 52, it still works with most web sites as well; more recent versions would work even better with modern web sites.
I should try its HTML editor, it might be a nice upgrade from writing my HTML pages in Notepad++.
The vintage UI is part of the charm. Admittedly the "Stop" button is less useful than it was in the '90s, but I'm a believer that we've lost more than we've gained with the trend towards low-chrome browser designs.
Why not VSCode? It's support for extensions are great. Emmet for rapid HTML scaffolding, inline hex color preview, autocomplete for attributes, and not to mention great multi-line editing support. And, of course, CoPilot which can write/edit HTML so much faster than I can type. Can you tell I'm a fan?
It seems like a lot of Firefox addons are not longer compatible with Seamonkey after Firefox changed their addon functionality and Seamonkey is still using a old Firefox version.
The old addon system was more powerful so I guess they kept it also for backwards compatibility of existing addons. But now the new addons won’t work and the old ones are old and probably not longer maintained.
Usually all email clients have a good web version nowadays which make the integrated email less interesting.
To make this project live again it would need to break backwards compatibility and adjust to the Firefox release cycle.
Overall it would be a good candidate to integrate with AI.
I'm afraid the hype is still rising very much, and a very large percentage of AI products are snakeoil, or barely functional PoCs, that are hyped up for a quick cash grab.
I have been using Seamonkey since when it was called Netscape, but there are so many sites that do not work with it that I been forced to switch to Firefox. I still use Seamonkey for my mail though, I prefer it to Thunderbird.
It does use the same engine from Firefox, although not always the latest version. This project strives to backport security updates from newer Firefox versions whenever they can, sometimes being able to upgrade the base Firefox version, while keeping the legacy XUL based add-on support. This is actually one thing I like wtih Seamonkey, alongside its HTML editor (that which could see better support for CSS and Javascript/ECMAScript stuff) and GUI based image blocking.
No, it's stuck with the engine at Firefox 68 (from 2019) with backported security fixes. A lot of the XUL removal stuff has meant that SeaMonkey basically needs to rewrite their UI to update to current versions
IIRC I set this up for my grandmother way back in the day because she wanted a netscape/mozilla equivalent. I'd be interested to know what kinds of folks use it today.
This definitely no. The reason i use it is the UI. Firefox, Chrome, Edge UI is a mess, a disgrace of UI design. I had to edit the user.css to get scrollbars at reasonable width.
I had a look into this because I became curious because the scrollbars are definitely sometimes annoying. Turns out that they removed the ability to edit Custom.css and do stuff like this in 2014. I wonder if there's another way to do that now? Haven't been able to find out.
Having scrollbars of reasonable width is not antithetical to having a UI that looks like it was made after 2006. You could easily have something that looks like Chrome and has a larger scrollbar. You could go for a different look, just not one that literally looks ancient.
Not the same thing dude. This interface is straight outta 2005. Chrome's interface has been being tweaked constantly over the years. It doesn't need an overhaul because it's not 15+ years out of date.
But I mean, you do you man. There's nothing wrong with liking retro interfaces. I once tried to do everything to make my computer look like Windows XP just for nostalgia. Regardless, the product has nice features that would be cool to use, except most people don't want one application on their computer to look like it was there when 9/11 happened while everything else looks new. There would be nothing wrong with having an application with the same features that's not off-putting to most users.
But sure, they can block themselves into a niche of people that don't care if UI looks nice if they really want. That's allowed. Not illegal lol.
>Not the same thing dude. This interface is straight outta 2005. Chrome's interface has been being tweaked constantly over the years. It doesn't need an overhaul because it's not 15+ years out of date.
You basically repeated my point. Change for change's sake. And it looks similar to 2009 Chrome, so yeah it's quite literally 15 years out of date.
>look like it was there when 9/11 happened while everything else looks new
Nevermind man. Design is supposed to look nice and look like it goes together with the rest of the ecosystem. It is not mutually exclusive with functionality. But you clearly don't care about design that looks good. You are clearly not a design guy. You do not have an eye for design. You do not care about design. As I said, that's fine. It limits the audience of the product but it can be incredibly niche like that if it wants to be.
User interface design is about designing interfaces that can be used by users.
You can prefer a style, you can customize it to your liking if themes are available (in this case, they are), but if you just replace the whole UI design field with "design is supposed to look nice", what you get might be an aberration. It might be pleasing to some people (but then still some, I really doubt you can find something that is universally pleasant?), but what good is that without being usable? Or if it makes usage much more difficult?
Bro design is supposed to be functional and ergonomic AND look nice obviously. Do you think I'm so dumb that I actually believe the first half of that equation should be left out? I was just pointing out how you seem to have absolutely no appreciation for the second half of the equation, which is tantamount to completely neglecting a huge part of what design is.
Strong agree. Concept sounds great. The UI looks like something out of 2005 and that's just not okay. It simply cannot be relevant while looking like that and updating its UI would not have to cause any loss in functionality. It's honestly a waste of time for devs to be working on something that looks like that, since you're cutting out half your audience.
> Strong agree. Concept sounds great. The UI looks like something out of 2005 and that's just not okay.
Why is that not OK? Wouldn't that mean that its UI has avoided the last ~15 years of general decline in structure and usability that we see commonly afflicting "modern" UI designs?
Lmao. Nice roast but I'm not sure I'd get a Cybertruck even if I could afford one. It's sorta cool in its own way though. I respect the Cybertruck. #CybertrucksDeserveRespect
Edit: I mean that it's cool in how it looks but yeah I would never buy Tesla because the products seem unreliable and dangerous as hell
The thing is that you were complaining about SeaMonkey due to how it looks, even though the way it looks is generally associated with an era of software design which expected much higher degree of reliability and user control than is common for "modern" software.
I don't think that's a purely contingent association, either: with software, how the UI looks and how the functionality works are deeply intertwined, and I think there may be a more direct correlation between "modern" software being unreliable, unconfigurable, and insecure, and it having haphazard UI designs that lack underlying organizing principles or adherence to well-established conventions.
So your original complaint seems to imply almost the opposite of what you are saying here -- that superficial aesthetics are more important to you, even to the point where you'd accept poor functionality and user-hostile anti-patterns as a viable tradeoff.
Im not really sure how on earth you have inferred that I think aesthetics are so important that I would compromise on functionality for that. I never said that. I am saying that both are necessary, whether you want to believe it or not. Just because you are nostalgic for the good old days where UI was more functional in your opinion, does not mean that applications have to look like they were made in 2005. What is stopping us from integrating some modern aesthetic elements into a design that is highly functional? Recognising a problem in the design of some modern apps does not necessitate us reverting to an outdated past vision. We can easily look forward and make a new alternative.
IMHO you need to step back and consider that there are more views of design, you think some newer look is "more modern" and better in itself, you say "outdated past vision". But those concepts are subjective too.
I like the Modern SeaMonkey theme. I also like the look of the classic theme (not default, but the old default, sometimes called "XPFE Classic"). Not sure if just out of nostalgia or because it looks neat to me. What I value more is that SeaMonkey's looks are customizable. I don't know if it's customizable enough to make a theme that behaves in the way you prefer, but at least there is room for customization. (I'm mentioning this because I do think this is an interesting feature to have.)
So, please consider relativizing your position, it seems you're insisting on a bias against the design just because it is not recent enough, but also wording that as an absolute.
To me that sounds like people who say some train models "look old" and "have to be replaced" just because they feature Budd-style corrugated stainless steel.
One of the main things I miss is the LCARSTrek theme by KaiRo. Unlike any other LCARS browser theme, I found it to be usable on a day to day basis. Sadly it isn't available for Firefox.
https://www.kairo.at/download/mozskins
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