Remember Mozilla? - it was a rolled-up suite of open source web tools, including browser, e-mail client, a web page composer and an IRC chat client. It's what I used in the good old days before the tools got split up (the browser component became Firefox, the e-mail client became Thunderbird and the web page composer became Nvu. There's also work on the calendar component as Sunbird).
Anyhoo, Mozilla Application Suite went off the boil for some reason and stopped being developed by the Mozilla Foundation (I believe they just switched their focus to Firefox and Thunderbird). Then some enterprising Open Source developers picked up the code and started hacking on it again to produce "production-ready code derived from the application formerly known as Mozilla Application Suite". This project was named SeaMonkey and is now looked after by the SeaMonkey Council rather than the Mozilla Foundation (although Mozilla.org still host the SeaMonkey website).
Confused? Good.
Put simply, Mozilla lives on as SeaMonkey, and today marks the release of Version 1.0. To borrow some words:
"The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite". Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" — and have it stable enough for corporate use.
SeaMonkey is available as a free download from its mozilla.org-hosted website, features a state-of-the-art web browser, a powerful email client, a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client. For web developers, mozilla.org's DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger tools are included as well."
So, all good, healthy open source stuff, and of course it runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Downloads are here.
There's also an interesting post here that claims that, ironically, Mozilla is a faster browser than Firefox overall, despite the fact that Firefox is supposed to be smaller and lighter. I wonder if this holds true for SeaMonkey.......
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