The future of Seamonkey?

Posted November 15th, 2015, 8:13 am

I just switched from Firefox to Seamonkey and I'm very excited about it, it's kind of like how I remember Firefox being before a bunch of UI changes I don't like got added (like australis, etc).

But I just had a conversation with a guy I know, and he seems to think Seamonkey won't be around much longer due to the whole xul/xpcom thing.
This is a conversation we just had:

14:37 < me> I've switched to Seamonkey and I really like it
14:43 < acquaintance> Seamonkey will be killed off most likely when xul is removed
14:44 < acquaintance> or it will be stripped down like Firefox to a worthless Chrome UI clone
14:44 < me> Are you sure they're going to remove xul from seamonkey though?
14:44 < me> I know they will from firefox, but have they said they'd do it for seamonkey?
14:45 < acquaintance> It will. Seamonkey guys would be forced to maintain whole XUL on their own - that is impossible for them
14:46 < acquaintance> Pale Moon actually has the same trouble

It makes me a bit worried. Is this at all true? I know this guy is fairly anti-Mozilla so he might be exaggerating it a bit. But I'm still wondering, what's going to happen to Seamonkey in the next few years, has there been any comment from the development team about this?

Posted November 15th, 2015, 8:27 am

stevensegalfan4000 wrote:14:43 < acquaintance> Seamonkey will be killed off most likely when xul is removed
14:44 < acquaintance> or it will be stripped down like Firefox to a worthless Chrome UI clone
14:44 < me> Are you sure they're going to remove xul from seamonkey though?
14:44 < me> I know they will from firefox, but have they said they'd do it for seamonkey?
14:45 < acquaintance> It will. Seamonkey guys would be forced to maintain whole XUL on their own - that is impossible for them

I think it's not known yet. I don't know why they are so certain.

stevensegalfan4000 wrote:14:46 < acquaintance> Pale Moon actually has the same trouble

This is not true.

stevensegalfan4000 wrote:But I'm still wondering, what's going to happen to Seamonkey in the next few years, has there been any comment from the development team about this?

Well, there's viewtopic.php?p=14228963#p14228963 and has been some talk in the irc channel (moznet/#seamonkey)

Posted November 15th, 2015, 9:05 am

Right, thanks. So then, I think a good part of it is just that my acquaintance is seeing what he wants to and exaggerating things - he's really anti-mozilla for some reason.

Posted November 15th, 2015, 1:48 pm

Skipb48,
I split off your topic to here viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2973923

Posted November 15th, 2015, 4:39 pm

Right now, nobody knows. But as far as I can tell it is true that SeaMonkey would basically be forced to maintain Gecko on it's own. And that would also mean maintaining a TON of code that interacts with the interface on their own, and patching it to work with the new features coming from Mozilla. The Thunderbird team is also going to have to make a decision on this soon.

PaleMoon is not really impacted by this AFAIK because PaleMoon devs froze Gecko at version 24 and forked it into "Goanna" so they could shoe-horn security patches into it. Supposedly they are also adding support for new web features, but if they will be able to continue this after Gecko is dead is anyone's guess.

It's not hard to be anti-Mozilla lately. Their complete lack of transparency in these very important product decisions have left many people in the community confused and angry. Mozilla has been back-pedaling lately, but because they still refuse to be clear about their actual intentions it's impossible for anyone to really know what's going to happen. For instance, they now claim that Complete Themes are going to be redesigned for the new interface and not just canned as they have lead people to believe for some time now. But it's impossible to know if they are being serious or just trying to do some after-the-fact damage control.

Posted December 11th, 2015, 6:38 pm

I'd really hate to see the demise of SeaMonkey what the developers should do is concentrate on security updates & If they can add new features then add them, The most important thing these days with web browsers is security other may not agree with what I'm saying but for me that's my biggest issue.

Posted December 12th, 2015, 2:40 am

That's just the thing... who's going to develop those security updates? Who does the testing, who does the creation of patches? Once Mozilla switches over to Servo, security updates for Firefox simply aren't going to apply to SeaMonkey. It'll be a totally different product. You might as well try to apply a security update for IE to Firefox.

This is why IMO it will be important for SM and TB devs to work together on coming up with a solution that works for both products. Unfortunately, we may not know exactly what that solution looks like until Mozilla is closer to unleashing Servo, which means there's going to be a lot of things like Themes that SM and TB are going to have to go out on their own with.

Posted December 13th, 2015, 7:07 am

Patrick...I am not a developer, what is "Servo"? That's the first time I have heard of that term.

Posted December 13th, 2015, 7:08 am

What is the possible timeline for Servo being implemented?

Website · Posted December 13th, 2015, 8:05 am

Redbugdave wrote:Patrick...I am not a developer, what is "Servo"? That's the first time I have heard of that term.

Short answer (on Wikipedia)
Long answer (on github)

Posted December 13th, 2015, 12:22 pm

Redbugdave wrote:Patrick...I am not a developer, what is "Servo"? That's the first time I have heard of that term.

The new rendering engine Mozilla is using for Firefox. It will not render XUL, which means the Firefox interface will have to be completely rewritten for it, and other projects like SM and Thunderbird are going to have to figure out a plan to work around it.

Peter Creasey wrote:What is the possible timeline for Servo being implemented?

Sooner than later. Mozilla is yanking support for Complete Themes right now and I would suspect that XUL-based extensions aren't far behind. Once that's done they'll probably remove the whole XUL addons infrastructure and the old customization stuff (they have a new customization system overlapping the old one since Firefox 28). So long before Servo is fully integrated, SM and TB will have to start supporting XUL stuff on their own.

"2016" is pretty vague as timelines go...

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/09/mozill ... x-in-2016/

Posted December 13th, 2015, 5:18 pm

Thank you Tony and Patrick.

Posted December 13th, 2015, 7:54 pm

If you had to leave SeaMonkey, what browser and mail programs would you use?

I don't much care for Firefox and Thunderbird seems to be in the same position SeaMonkey is in.

I could switch to Outlook for E-mail and IE 11 or Edge for Browser but that would not be my preference. I do not want to use browser based E-mail.

Hopefully this is still a long ways off but maybe it's time to start thinking about it?

Posted December 13th, 2015, 8:20 pm

I hope I never have to leave SeaMonkey. :-&

But if that became the case I might go for Vivaldi, since is the only remaining browser suite that I know still active. I'm still waiting for the integration of mail, though. :sleeping:

With all that said, I'll stay with SM till the very end, and hopefully will never come. [-o<

Posted December 13th, 2015, 9:09 pm

Ztruker wrote:If you had to leave SeaMonkey, what browser and mail programs would you use?

God, I don't even know. I'm here because I hate modern browser interfaces. I grew up with Netscape and Mozilla, and I think the Firebirds and the Chromes all get things fundamentally wrong. And IE isn't any better these days, with every improvement to the renderer offset by major interface cockups(read as: trying to be like Firefox and Chrome). Id' made my mind up to ride the last Mozilla release as far as possible before changing when I found out Seamonkey existed, so I guess I'd ride an increasingly-dated Seamonkey until I couldn't anymore.

The future of Seamonkey?

Who is online