Hi,
I got the idea to try out the SeaMonkey web browser after reading
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html . The article mentioned
that "Mozilla 1.8" builds are faster in most respects than Firefox 1.5.
So I downloaded the latest stable version, which is now SeaMonkey 1.0.1.
I must say I am very impressed. SeaMonkey starts up faster than
Firefox, seems to use less memory than Firefox, and the best part: It
has an excellent built-in mail client and an excellent WYSIWYG HTML
editor. Although Firefox, Thunderbird, and NVU are excellent apps on
their own, they each have a HEAVY memory footprint individually, and
trying to run even two of them together on my old laptop with 128MB of
RAM absolutely brings it to its knees. But SeaMonkey integrates all of
these together in one binary, so memory usage is MUCH MUCH less. And
they integrate very well, better than the above mentioned 3
applications. Here's another link where people mention memory usage of
just FF compared to SeaMonkey:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7815
I had used older Mozilla Suite versions in the past, but I always felt
like they lacked functionality and ease of use compared to the next
generation FF/TB/NVU. But now, the best features of FF and TB seem to
have been backported into SeaMonkey, and it's a real pleasure to use.
The mail client in SeaMonkey is so much improved compared to the old
Mozilla; they've put a lot of work into bringing it up to par. It is
much easier to use, and MUCH more powerful than Sylpheed claws, in my
opinion. It has built in, easy to use Bayesian spam filtering, and even
better, a powerful address book that can be used as a standalone contact
and information manager. SeaMonkey also brings a few features (like a
nice Sidebar and a Roaming Profile Manager) that are not even available
in FF / TB.
The downsides of SeaMonkey: Many (but not all) common extensions for
Firefox don't work with SeaMonkey. A notable exception is Adblock,
which does officially support SeaMonkey. Some of the commands and
shortcuts are different on SeaMonkey. I am indifferent to these
changes. Most notably, if you want "Find as you type" searching, just
start typing and watch the bottom of your screen, and hit F3 or Shift+F3
to search next/previous. Another problem is that the default SeaMonkey
theme is terribly ugly. But you can quickly solve that with
http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&content=c_linuxseamonkey.php
which makes it look and feel a lot like FF/TB.
All in all, I realize it's late in the devel cycle to change this, but I
strongly suggest replacing Firefox and Thunderbird and Sylpheed with
SeaMonkey as the default browser/email client on Xubuntu, because of the
performance increase. Almost all users need web browser and email open
simultaneously, and it's just not possible using FF and TB, they are too
resource intensive, and Sylpheed doesn't go over well with many new
users. SeaMonkey is a very nice solution.
Any thoughts?
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