Frank-Rainer Grahl wrote:
Greetings,
I am just relaying the following message for the SeaMonkey Council. It
is not on the web page but it is official. If you have any questions you
can either ask here or use the provided web address.
Have fun
FRG
+++ snip +++
Hello fellow users and supporters of the SeaMonkey suite.
The important part first: SeaMonkey is alive and we do not plan to
discontinue it. But in continuing to deliver the best and only suite
based on the Mozilla Gecko web engine, we need your help.
Lets first start where we are.
SeaMonkey 2.46 was released in late December after struggling for months
with infrastructure and build issues. While still using the Mozilla
infrastructure, we are mostly on our own here. We plan to release a
final 2.48 based on the level of Firefox 51 soon. Again this is late
due to infrastructure and build issues, but not so much as 2.46. Being
based on Firefox 51 means that security patches are again not up to par
with current Firefox. Believe us, we dislike this as much as you do.
The SeaMonkey project is entirely driven by volunteers working on it in
their free time. The current members of the core team (count up to 7)
are committed but, with all the changes, are getting slowly overwhelmed.
This means bugs do not get fixed as fast as we would like. With an aging
infrastructure becoming more and more abandoned by Mozilla, due to
switching Firefox building to the cloud, releasing builds does not
become easier. It also means that if even one of the current key people
quits, the project is in danger of becoming un-maintainable which is
even worse.
Also keeping up with Firefox is becoming difficult at best. Mozilla
plans to discontinue classic extensions and themes with Firefox 57 which
is right around the corner. XUL, one of the key technologies of
SeaMonkey, is also on the chopping block and will be discontinued in the
near future. The replacement technologies, based on modern web
standards, are immature and still under constant development. In the
end, an almost complete rewrite of the current program will probably be
needed. If it weren't for our friends from the Thunderbird project, we
would now have even bigger problems.
The good news is that financially we are a little better off than last
year. DuckDuckGo is now the default search engine of SeaMonkey. Every
time you use it for searches in SeaMonkey we get paid. For the
conspiracy seeking people out there:) Not being able to easily set the
search engine in 2.46 to another provider was a genuine bug with a
workaround documented in the release notes from day 1. It has now been
fixed.
What we plan:
After releasing SeaMonkey 2.48 we will switch to the Firefox 52 ESR
source code for 2.49.x releases. This means that the code base is more
or less frozen for a few release cycles and only security updates and
bug fixes will be in the releases.
The infrastructure issue has been discussed. While critical, there are
no final plans yet (also thanks to lack of manpower). Thunderbird is in
the same boat and we hope to work out something together. If worst comes
to worst, we could ask our team member Adrian Kalla to produce our
regular builds. This had been discussed earlier. It was dismissed, for
now, as no crash symbols for builds would be available on the Mozilla
servers.
Switching to ESR means we can work on bugs in the current tree for a
while longer without having to fear that they are carried over into a
release. They need to be fixed for the next ESR of course.
The most critical issue is to support web extensions in one of the next
releases. It is unclear how long we will be able to support classic
extensions.
There are a number of Gecko Forks in the wild. We do not plan to switch
over to one of them as the basis for SeaMonkey. We think that they
currently do not have enough developers themselves to cope with the
changes Mozilla plans. Web technologies are also evolving all the time
and we fear that they are not able to keep up.
Also, we are not planning to support any abandoned stuff like classic
extensions and NPAPI plugins on our own. We will try as long as
possible. But when they are gone, they are gone. The current developer
base is much too small to do our own fork.
Based on how successful Mozilla is, or if one of the forks gain ground,
this might change in the future.
What we need:
Setting up our own infrastructure, potentially in conjunction with
Thunderbird, will cost. If you feel you can contribute towards future
releases in this way, please consider donating:
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/donate/
But what we need even more is people to help out. Even if you are not a
developer, you can help. For example, writing a document such as this
takes time. Also, maintaining a website is not done by staring at it all
day.
So if you want to help, these project areas are looking for a few good
contributors:
- Development. Most code is either JavaScript or XML/CSS mixed with C++
and Mozilla technologies based on XUL and friends. In SeaMonkey not so
much HTML right now, but this might need to change. The build
environment makes heavy use of Python.
- Graphics: Icons and symbols need a face lift for HiDPI screens. There
are plans to switch everything over to svg files in the backend which
would mean a massive effort to convert existing files. With a sometimes
extremely conservative user base when it comes to changes in the
interface, not an easy job
- Website: Some areas are severely outdated and things like release
notes need to be written too.
- Bug hunting and triaging: We could use a few more people to check out
bugs and try to reproduce and categorize them in Bugzilla. We are
especially short on people doing this on macOS. While we are on it.
Writing lengthy threads in the news and support groups is fine but if no
one actually reports them as a bug in the end they usually won't get fixed.
- Everything else not covered above. If we forgot something you can fill
this slot too. Just think about it.
As a final statement, we do not think that SeaMonkey will take over the
browser world any time soon. SeaMonkey is a niche product and will stay
that way. Too many people are not interested in a classic suite anymore
and most users are happy to use what is hip. That is OK with us. It's
all about choice.
We would like to continue supporting the power users like ourselves and
those who are looking for something different and flexible without
reinventing the wheel with every release. We try to listen to you, our
user base, for advice/orders/demands/suggestions. Of course, we won't be
able to implement everything under the sun. But we would still like to
implement something and stay current. It's your call now.
If you would like to support us, either send a mail to us, the SeaMonkey
Council (seamonkey-council at mozilla dot org), ask for guidance in the
official support groups or just pick your favorite unassigned bug from
Bugzilla and start.
We are looking forward to hearing from you.
The SeaMonkey Council
Would like to try DuckDuckGo, but the Release Notes just say to go to
the Sidebar. O.K., did that but not clear how to try DDG. Yes, due to
the Bug there is no way to change the default browser. What do I do?
Larry S.
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