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SeaMonkey:Reasons: Difference between revisions
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* Integrated Browser and Mail/News-Client (needs not be same process, but should work well together, share settings, etc) | * Integrated Browser and Mail/News-Client (needs not be same process, but should work well together, share settings, etc) | ||
==Chris Thomas== | ==Chris Thomas== | ||
I personally strongly prefer SeaMonkey... there are a bunch of reasons. I've used it (well, the Mozilla suite) for a few years and am more used to it, and I see more eye-to-eye with other SeaMonkey developers. | |||
Firefox is somewhat annoying to use, because lots of little things are just different (for example, if you type something in the URL bar, SeaMonkey will open it in a new tab if you hit ctrl+enter, while Firefox uses alt+enter; Firefox's download manager has annoying default behaviors; having a separate search bar instead of just searching from the URL bar means both your URL bar is smaller and you can see less of what you type when you search for something; find-as-you-type has a weird dialog in Firefox; many other things). If you haven't used SeaMonkey before, though, some of these won't be a problem for you. | |||
As a developer, I don't like some of the practices used in Firefox... for large patches, their philosophy seems more like "include the patch and let users (people who use the nightly builds) find bugs" whereas in SeaMonkey we do more up-front code review. When porting Firefox patches to SeaMonkey, I've had them be rejected because the code quality I copied wasn't good enough, so they had to be cleaned up. I really don't like the way the "lead Firefox developer" (Ben Goodger - in quotes because that title is really unfair to the other Firefox devs) does his big patches... in the cases I've looked at, he checked in patches that either were entirely broken (when he rewrote the options dialog, it didn't work at all and was mostly invisible (see-through, I'm not kidding)), or full of bugs that a few minutes of testing would find (the info bar that alerts you to blocked popups, blocked extensions, missing plugins, etc. had a lot of bugs I came across when I ported it to SeaMonkey). | |||
A lot of Firefox's popularity probably just comes from the fact that it's new and therefore "cool" or interesting, whereas the suite looks similar to Netscape 4. It seems that the new name "SeaMonkey" is actually generating a little interest though, which is kind of cool . | |||
If you're into testing lots of extensions, Firefox definitely makes it easier (specifically, uninstalling extensions in SeaMonkey is hard), but the thing about SeaMonkey is that I don't need extensions with it, so it isn't really a problem. I have one extension (FlashBlock) that I've used for years and never needed to uninstall... and I used autoscroll until recently (autoscroll will be integrated in SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta, so I don't need the extension any more). | |||
Anyone who tells you Firefox is faster is probably confused or buying into hype. Every recent test I've seen has SeaMonkey starting up faster (even without QuickLaunch, which makes it launch almost instantaneously - a feature Firefox doesn't have), and they use the exact same rendering engine, so pageload speeds are the same. | |||
I'm not sure how they compare in memory use, but in my experience, the cache and webpages themselves tend to use significantly more RAM than the interface itself, so I wouldn't expect much difference. If you also use an email program, however, SeaMonkey is going to be a LOT smaller than Firefox+Thunderbird, because it shares a lot of data, while FF+TB duplicate a lot. A quick test showed Firefox alone was ~21MB at launch, and SeaMonkey ~22MB. Opening the mail client for SeaMonkey only bumped it up to ~28MB though, while Thunderbird is going to eat another 20MB or so for itself. | |||
=Developers and QA= | =Developers and QA= | ||