There was a time, back in the day, when Netscape was the browser for Mac users. The Netscape Communicator browser was really an all-in-one suite of tools. Browser, email, news groups, address book, HTML editor, calendar and more. If you’re nostalgic for the days when real men used the internet, then you’ll love Mozilla’s updated SeaMonkey.
Another Browser?
Yes, there’s yet another web browser for the Mac, this one with a long heritage and few users, yet, it’s the 21st century, the age when browsers just won’t die. From Mozilla:
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite (see below). Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept.
Just off the top of my head I can think of nearly a dozen browsers for Mac users; ranging from Safari and Firefox to iCab, Opera, Sunrise, and others, all the way down to the Mozilla project that won’t die, SeaMonkey.
SeaMonkey is an all-in-one application so, you know, you can check email and newsgroups and chat while browsing.
Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.
Father of Firefox
If Mosaic begat Netscape which begat Internet Explorer which begat the dark ages of browsing, then Firefox is the heir apparent, whose father lives on in SeaMonkey.
Under the hood, SeaMonkey uses much of the same Mozilla source code which powers such successful siblings as Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, Sunbird and Miro. Legal backing is provided by the Mozilla Foundation.
In other words, SeaMonkey is a Mozilla project. It’s free. It’s loaded with old time religion features and stuffed with the latest Firefox web page rendering engine. The previous version was SeaMonkey 1.1.17, and the latest version is a beta, at 2.0.
It’s a Sharing thing
SeaMonkey carries the Netscape Communicator concept into the 21st century.
The Internet browser at the core of the SeaMonkey suite uses the same rendering engine as its sibling Mozilla Firefox, with popular features like tabbed browsing, popup blocking, find as you type and a lot of other functionality for a smooth web experience.
In other words, web pages viewed in Firefox and Safari are usually rendered the same, and since SeaMonkey as Firefox at the core, SeaMonkey now renders pages better than it did, which was mostly atrocious; Internet Exploreresque.
Mozilla is an organization that shares. With itself. SeaMonkey’s pieces come from other Mozilla projects. Fortunately, the price is the same.
SeaMonkey’s Mail and Newsgroups client shares lots of code with Mozilla Thunderbird and features adaptive Junk mail filtering, labels and mail views, multiple accounts, S/MIME, address books with LDAP support and is ready for both private and corporate use.
Beyond that, there’s the old HTML editor, ChatZilla for IRC, a Javascript debugger, and DOM inspector. Firefox is loaded with extensions, and-ons, that do all sorts of nifty things that are not easily done on any other browser. SeaMonkey has add-ons, too.
Despite the new look and feel, and despite the new Firefox rendering engine, one has to ask, “Why?” Why is this relic from the 20th century still around? Why does Mozilla go to the time and effort to promote and extend that which pretty much died in 1998?
The only answer I can come up with is, free labor.