SeaMonkey:Name And Version

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet; 
   Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
SeaMonkeylogo.png
Resources
SeaMonkey Homepage
FAQ / Help
Goals
Organization
QA
Supporters
Add-ons
Localization
Reasons
Branding
Release History
Tasks & Projects
IRC Chat Logs
Discussion
Suiterunner

The official project name is "SeaMonkey".

Announcement of project name: SeaMonkey Project Continues Internet Suite

The first stable release of SeaMonkey was version 1.0, which is based on Gecko 1.8.0.x code, and SeaMonkey 1.1 is based on Gecko 1.8.1. The current stable release branch is SeaMonkey 2.0, based on Gecko 1.9.1. We will release SeaMonkey 2.1 based on Gecko 2.0 and are currently working hard on finishing up this project.

The "1.0" version number was picked because the Mozilla Foundation urged us not to use the previous suite versioning scheme, so we could not go with 1.8 for the Gecko-1.8-based suite. Additionally, we are a new project, a completely new development team and this is our first stable release, warranting the 1.0 version number.

The project decided on a new logo on December 2, 2005. For further details see the SeaMonkey artwork page. The new logo is used in SeaMonkey 1.0, and in the current trunk and branch nightly builds.

Both the name and the logo have been registered as trademarks by the Mozilla Foundation (providing legal backing for the SeaMonkey project) in the US and have filed such registrations in the EU and Japan.

Origin of the name "SeaMonkey"

Seamonkey (with lower-case m) has been the codename for the Mozilla Suite for some time, though it originally was invented by Netscape management as a codename for the release later called Netscape 6 — they simply needed a "politically correct" version of the codename Buttmonkey (symbolised as *~ and making a "rheet" sound) their developers had actually voted for (and apparently Jenga was the run-in in this voting). (Thanks to dveditz, Google cache and pseudorandom.org IRC logs for helping us to find out about that.)

The real "Sea-Monkeys" (Artemia Nyos) are a hybrid of Artemia Salina (brine shrimp). Read more about those animals in Wikipedia.

By the way, the German translation of the name, Seeaffe, is an alias for the Sea Mink (Mustela macrodon), which is an extinct species (hunted for its highly-valued fur, extinct around 1890) of the Mustelidae or weasel family. A close, still living, relative to that animal can be viewed in the Wikipedia article. Interestingly, weasels might look similar to small foxes and the codename for unofficial modified builds of Firefox is Iceweasel. ;-) By the way, while the Chinese word for Firefox can refer to both the red fox and the red panda; the latter is a closer relative to the Sea Mink than the former.