Following up on our earlier mention that the Mozilla foundation was discussing the discontinuation of the Mozilla suite, they announced today that development of the project (code-name: Seamonkey) will be taken up by a community group that is being formed to pick up the baton.
Development of the Seamonkey suite would be discontinued following the release of Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0. Well, that’s happened, and it seems to me like it’s really time to move on…
I am sorry about this. I use Mozilla all the time. It is powerful, it works really well, and I like it. Firefox is great, but I still prefer Mozilla.
Anyway, I understand their reasons, and I am happy that someone is taking over.
Thanks for your hard work, guys.
I’m still wainting when will those two to actually share their core framework instances (in form of GRE).
Mozilla at least did that.
Having to load two geckos doesn’t help bloat perceptions.
It would be perfect if I could make Fi, thu, nvu, sunbird and komodo use the same, shared libs.
Have somebody any info on this?
In a word: yes.
This has been the plan for a couple years now, but there seem to be a whole lot of people who never bothered to read the Mozilla Foundation’s public statements or the development pages, and who are shocked and outraged to find that the plan is going ahead as planned.
Saying “Seamonkey is dead” is about like saying “Happy New Years!” on January 1st. It may be noteworthy, but it’s only news if you really haven’t been paying attention.
Thanks to the Mozilla devs for their work over the last few years – many people cut their teeth on the Mozilla suite quite some time ago – cheers guys, the works appreciated
Kinda’ developed a wait and see attitude. You see I read the article with Camino, which was gonna be dead 2 years ago with Firefox stormin’ the horizon…
Camino, like Firefox is really good….today.
The Mozilla suite still carries the capacity to be a complete platform agnostic productivity bundle… way beyond just internet apps. And developers from every platform converge there.
Hope they are not peeing away alot of potential. All the hard work has been done. Infrastructure and common expertise etc.
It would be perfect if I could make Fi, thu, nvu, sunbird and komodo use the same, shared libs.
Have somebody any info on this?
Google for XULRunner.
Mozilla is an “integrated suite” whereas Firefox and Thunderbird are distinct applications.
I guess I’m confused about the distinctions between the two save for the integration, in terms of functionality and features.
If Mozilla “died” I guess we’d also lose the Composer application, chatzilla and the news reader? Any of these being forked off as well?
But I guess the real question is how does integrating these things make them that much more complicated compared to the the workings of the different tools themselves?
I mean, I use Mozilla, I’ve never used Thunderbird, but I like having Composer and Chatzilla.
If Mozilla “died” I guess we’d also lose the Composer application, chatzilla and the news reader? Any of these being forked off as well?
I don’t know about Chatzilla, but Composer has been “rescued” and improved upon by the Linspire folks. The new program is called NVU, and you can download it here:
http://www.nvu.com
Thunderbird handles news.
Chatzilla is available in the Firefox section of the Mozilla extensions site. I don’t know how well it works since I have never used Chatzilla.
as was mentioned in the comments from the last post, chatzilla exists now as an extension to firefox.
Well, what’s funny to me is how quickly it became “Seamonkey” instead of Mozilla as if trying to distance themselves from their flagship product.
I use Firefox, but am glad someone is continuing Mozilla Suite development.
Mozilla Suite is dead… Long live Mozilla Suite!!!
I’m using Mozilla right now in NetBSD and I gotta say it generally runs allot better then Firefox, atleast on this OS.
Anyway, they could have atleast officially finished up work on 1.8, before passing the tourch…
In 2003, the Mozilla Foundation stated that future efforts would be directed towards separate applications, such as what is now known as Firefox. They stated then that 1.7 would be the last supported version of the Mozilla suite. 1.8 was NEVER intended to be a released and supported version; it’s always been for testing only, as part of the transition to the new modular approach.
They passed the torch two years ago, but it seems like quite a few people weren’t paying attention.
I’m amazed at the number of people who seem to think that sticking to the plan announced years ago is some sort of betrayal. Most people applauded the new plan. If you are one of the few who didn’t, you should have made your objections known THEN.
probably everyone knows this but chatzilla can be had as an extension in FireFox at http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/chatzilla, integrates pretty well with firefox.
iirc if you put all the DLLs from firefox and thunderbird in one directory (some will overlap, that’s a good thing) and put that dir in your %PATH% they’ll share the DLLs and not load them into memory twice. This is on Windows, of course.
Mozilla names suck: Seamokey, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sealion, Sunbird…
This is becoming ridiculous. Why not DirtyPig for the Mozilla fork?
Gimme a break…
I’m amazed at the number of people who seem to think that sticking to the plan announced years ago is some sort of betrayal. Most people applauded the new plan. If you are one of the few who didn’t, you should have made your objections known THEN.
Who said anything about betrayal? Sorry if I didn’t get that news flash 2 years ago :
/me files this one under BS
I also think SeaMonkey sucks. It full of the comic book shysterism of the 70’s (http://www.sea-monkeys.com/).
Anyway, I never understood why one crashing app would take down the whole suite. But I was really amazed recently when I saw how much FASTER it was in general browsing of the net, than Firefox.
However, I am addicted to Firefox plugins, and themes too. Why are themes different for every version? Why are plugins borked for every version?
If mozilla didn’t suffer from this also, we’d see a lot more acceptance. One of the great ways to convert people from IE to Moz was to use the IE skin. It made my transition easier, until I just didn’t like IE anymore, then I went with a different theme. But I digress.
My real point was we need a new name. I would like to suggest two things in this regard.
1) OpenMozilla.org – Gives you all the connotation of Mozilla suite, but tells people it’s not part of the “Foundation” anymore. Maybe can we GPL it then? (not sure about license restrictins).
2) Integration with the OpenOffice.org suite! My god, what a combination!!!!! If it did imap mail, this would be one killer, free suite of apps! (now, how to remove the JAVA from OO.o that bogs it down and forever ties it with <evil>SUN</evil>.
I’d like to see an optional browser, a la MS Office. Y’know, it only installs the things you ask for. So if I only see myself using Email and Browser, I select those two. If I want the Composer (damned fine application, that), and the browser, no problems. I could allow the others to be a) not installed, or b) installed on first use.
Definitely need to address the “one app crash kills many”. It used to drive me nuts in Netscape 3.x 4.x, and still does in Moz. Moz is sure faster and more polished than Firefox. (and I still think they shoulda stuck with Pheonix. damned fools changing the name. Firefox kinda sucks.)
They passed the torch two years ago, but it seems like quite a few people weren’t paying attention.
Maybe they did.. but:
1. Why not tell everyone that the 1.7 branch would be the last supported branch when it was released almost a year ago?
2. Why continue to release 1.8 alphas and betas (1.8b being released less than a month ago)? and discontinue support for Moz less than a month before a full release?
Something doesn’t quite add up Im affraid..
Here goes a stupid question:
What would the Mozilla Foundation be named if they dropped Mozilla? Maybe Firefoxy Foundation? 8-D
Err…just curious. Can’t help asking.
Mozilla suite is a strong part of the free software community, like OpenOffice and linux.
They should instead discontinue standalone products (firefox…), they will never become as famous as Mozilla is.
Also, I think it’s a bad thing for the opensource community to be unstable, to change the strong basis people work with.
Killing a strong products like Mozilla means for many people that the free software is not ready to use, is searching itself. By killing Mozilla, they affect the whole Linux project !
Finaly I hunderstand why there is a Netscape package in my Slackware Linux !
Mozilla suite is a strong part of the free software community, like OpenOffice and linux.
They should instead discontinue standalone products (firefox…), they will never become as famous as Mozilla is.
Also, I think it’s a bad thing for the opensource community to be unstable, to change the strong basis people work with.
Killing a strong products like Mozilla means for many people that the free software is not ready to use, is searching itself. By killing Mozilla, they affect the whole Linux project !
Finaly I hunderstand why there is a Netscape package in my Slackware Linux !
Let’s take an integrated suite of programs and break them up, then work at integrating them back together so that running multiple programs doesn’t take up so many resources.
Um… The browser portion of Mozilla has always been called Seamokey AFAIK.
Mozilla suite rocks!
It kept all non-MS fans together since Netscape 4.x died.
Also Mozilla project gave an inspiration to a lot of open source projects.
Thoguh Linux has been open source since day one but it was Mozilla Suite which showed the power of OPEN SOURCE.
However you can not blame Mozilla foundation for discountinuing support. However what is sick is that they went on to develope 1.8 alpha & beta.
So thank you Mozilla suite. Thank you for your all your help.
Rest in peice
Aditya
P.S. : I think that it will be in greater interest of open source to support FF, TH & as a suite to support Netscape rather than keeping Suite running as some small project. Just a thought
that is f*ck*ng sh*t.
I prefer Mozilla a thousand times over Firefox and
Thunderbird ’cause everything is so nicely integrated
in one app.
🙁
http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/Stu/drubenst/seamonkey.gif
“1. Why not tell everyone that the 1.7 branch would be the last supported branch when it was released almost a year ago?”
They did.
That’s why I see the complaints now as whining. MF told everyone in 2003 what they would be doing, and why they were doing it.
There was plenty of discussion about the right course to take, and a consensus was reached back in 2003. The suite supporters lost. They may have perfectly good arguments for their positions and preferences, but they lost.
Preferring the Mozilla Suite to Firefox is fine, and vice versa. But outrage over a surprise end of the Mozilla Suite is BS, because any surprise is the fault of the observer. End of life for the Suite was announced in 2003, 1.7 was to be the last released version, and it has been supported for two years past that announcement. It’s STILL supported, and will continue to be supported.
Confusion over the purpose of the 1.8 branch is more understandable. I may have this wrong, but I believe that 1.8 exists as the path to the future component architecture. The Mozilla Suite is too large and complicated, making it difficult for anyone other than paid, full-time developers to understand. The quick fix was to split out Firefox as a simplified, smaller application. This also satisfied a user demand for a smaller, lighter application. The long term plan is to split the code into separate components which can be built by themselves. When that is done, then Firefox will switch to using the new components. But those components are developed starting from the 1.8 codebase. So a 1.8 branch exists, but isn’t intended as a released product.
The Mozilla Foundation has proven itself very capable.
First with the Mozilla suite and now with Firefox.
There is no explorer suite, so separating the different
parts and going head to head against IE with Firefox
really makes sense.
But then again to be able to put together the parts again
when they have matured would also make sense.
My hopes are that Mozilla distribute Firefox and Thunderbird
seperately as well as a Mozilla Suite 2.0 based upon them.
The trick is to be able to chose weather to install the
suite as integrated or independent.
Hopefully we will get a suite that is both fast and stable…