Peter Creasey wrote:I'm perplexed. How can SeaMonkey, even with its great capabilities, have a future if it is not viable for someone like me who operates with a fully updated Windows platform and without any extensions?
Well, to put it bluntly, as I mentioned
here, SM doesn't have a future.
As it is, SM 2.49.* is stable, I suspect that 2.43 will be stable and that 2.57, despite best efforts of SM devs, will be somewhat unstable and unpredictable and not a build I'd fancy. It is very unlikely that SM builds could be based off any more recent Firefox builds. Security-wise, as I've explained, the 2.49.* series will be the most up to date, unless security fixes for other Firefox versions can be shoe-horned into later SM builds.
When the security life of each build ends, then the SM project effectively ends. At that point, users drift away, extension/theme devs stop writing new stuff and will hardly maintain existing. With the absence of users, I suspect, that the Support side will also vanish, leaving just the written records in the KB, etc.
I can also see T/Bird moving into a Firefox-type webextension direction at some point, which would cause problems for SM.
However,
KMeleon, for example, packed up years ago, but it's still, sort of, going. So, anything is possible.
I did outline
here the route I'll be taking. However, I would emphasise it's not for everyone, as you'll be on your own and fixing your own problems. You'll also have to be adaptable.
For example, I've never understood this 'Highlander - there can be only one' approach that many people have with browsers. The reason I mentioned my many graphics programs was not only to get across that older programs are often fine, but also that they either do different things or some do the same things but better. That's why I need so many. Same is true for media players, audio players, pdf readers, etc...and browsers.
Thus, at the moment, if a website needs DRM (UK's Channel 5, etc) and I want to use that site, then I will use Firefox or whatever and then return to SM when done. Good few years down the line, as web standards bite, I'll need to probably do that with other things, until you finally reach a silly point where you are using XXX browser more often than SM. I don't see that happening for a good while and have no problem with using what I need to use to get the results I want.
Given the lesser of two evils, this was not a hard decision for me, but it's not ideal for everyone.
Before I forget - I use Simple HTML in Email, not Simple Text, as I erroneously wrote in an earlier post.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
.