SeaMonkey:New for 2.0

Revision as of 20:40, 12 June 2007 by Standard8 (talk | contribs) (Move note to extension authors to this page from SeaMonkey:suiterunner and reword it a bit.)
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Suiterunner

This page is for detailing what new features we are incorporating for the 2.0 release. This page is not for requesting new features for the 2.0 release.

New Profile Location

Due to the big change in the back-end code which would also require new profiles to be located in a different place, it was decided that all existing profiles should be explicitly migrated rather than just using what is there already.

This has several advantages, one especially is to clean up old profiles (some of which will have been around since 4.x), but also it helps to reduce the possibility of conflicts between old and new profiles due to the changes in the back-end.

The new locations are:

New Profile Locations
Operating System Folder
Unix ~/.mozilla.org/seamonkey/<Profile Name>
Windows %APPDATA%\mozilla.org\SeaMonkey\Profiles\<Profile name>\
Mac OS X ~/Library/mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/Profiles/<Profile name>/

Why mozilla.org in the profile path?

As SeaMonkey is no longer an offical Mozilla application, but is still hosted by mozilla.org, it is more appropriate that the Vendor ID of the application is "mozilla.org".

The profile path is based on <Vendor ID>\<application name> which is why we have now "moved" to mozilla.org.

Profile Migration

The profile migration dialog will come up on the first start of a SeaMonkey 2.x on your machine. It allow you to migrate your existing settings into a profile called "default".

If you wish to migrate for more than one profile, or set the profile name run SeaMonkey with the following arguments (it needs to be run twice):

  • -createProfile <ProfileName>
  • -P <ProfileName> -migration

Note: spaces in <ProfileName> are NOT allowed.

New Features

This list may change at any time and the final list will be in the release notes once 2.0 is fully released.

There is currently no time schedule for when 2.0 will be released, however as there are likely to be many new features in the release, (mainly due to the toolkit transition), we thought we'd start listing them here.


New for SeaMonkey 2.0
Feature Description Bug Reference
Add-on Manager The add-on manager provides both Theme & Extension options in the same way as Firefox and Thunderbird. This will allow extension and theme developers a much better environment than the previous extension capabilities. -
Add-on update notification As part of the add-on manager SeaMonkey will now automatically notify you of updates to installed addons. -
Thunderbird profile migration You can now migrate your existing Thunderbird profile into SeaMonkey. bug 329744

Themes

With the new add-on manager we have new themes. We don't migrate themes (or extensions), so SeaMonkey 2.0 will default to the Classic theme (now known as the "Default" theme).

If you want the Modern theme, just go to Tools->Add-on Manager, select Themes, then Modern, and Use Theme, one restart and you'll be there.

Note to Extension Authors

Now the SeaMonkey is an xul app, extensions which supply contents.rdf files and chrome.manifest files will be broken if the the chrome.manifest does not explicitly define what is in the contents.rdf file (e.g. overlays, content etc).

The reason is that in the new SeaMonkey builds, contents.rdf files will be ignored if chrome.manifest files exist. If you need to define application specific overlays etc then Chrome Registration will tell you how to do it.

Please test your revised extension in the latest SeaMonkey (links above) before updating your max version.