The future of Seamonkey?

Discussion of general topics about Seamonkey
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Redbugdave
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Redbugdave »

I was reading the history about Seamonkey. I grew up on the internet with it as it developed. But...I never knew about ButtMonkey till today! That's funny!
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by patrickjdempsey »

SeaMonkey isn't a perfect product. And it does face many PR issues in the community of people who do know about it. A few things that come to mind:

1. For many years, websites that engaged in user-agent sniffing completely borked up on SeaMonkey. That has been remedied for a long long time now with the inclusion of Firefox in the UA string but users who tried SM 3 or 4 years ago may still have that bad taste.

2. It used to be slow. But then, so was Firefox. There are a lot of Firefox users out there who are not happy with the ever-expanding resource-hogging Firefox is doing. It's becoming a bloated program and e10s is going to make that worse. On this score I think SM wins. The browser alone is a MUCH lighter application and speed-wise it's on par with Firefox. But there's a PR issue here. People don't seem to understand that if you never open Composer or Mail/News... those parts of the application never hurt your overhead. While on Firefox, even if you never use Devtools, the code and theme stuff is still being loaded every time. And theme stuff... the default theme in Firefox has gotten HUGE. Meanwhile, the browser-only part of SM is still back around the size of Firefox 1.0.

3. The interface *is* getting much-needed improvements. Most recently, SM earned the ability to hide and auto-show the menu bar natively. Doesn't seem like much but there's a whole generation of users out there who aren't used to seeing menu bars on web browsers. Rolling that into the default settings a'la Firefox 3.0 probably wouldn't hurt.

4. There's still UI improvements that need to happen. There's absolutely no reason SM shouldn't ship with tab closers, even if they are turned off by default. (The icons are already in Global!) And why aren't grippies optional or just plain removed? The default toolbar arrangement and the buttons available for customization haven't changed in nearly 20 years now. Is there a good reason for that, or is it just a tradition? Stuff like that makes SM look old fashioned just for the sake of it and gives folks a bad first impression.

5. Theme work needs to happen... and not just icons, the whole thing needs to be re-thought-out and made cohesive again. Whether that means looking to the past for inspiration or embracing some of the new ideas, either way something's gotta give. Even if the default looks "native", Modern needs to look really slick... and it can, the design concepts in Modern are still some of the most beautiful even conceived, and everyone working in browser UI knows it... or nearly 20 years later they wouldn't keep mining it for ideas.

6. What good is a WYSIWYG web editor that doesn't really work? Composer needs serious love or it needs to be completely reconsidered. I'd love to see DOM Inspector rolled into SM. And as much as I absolutely hate the way Firefox Devtools stuff works, are there any ideas in there that SM could use? Or should that aspect of the "suite" just be ditched?
Tip of the day: If it has "toolbar" in the name, it's crap.
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mightyglydd
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by mightyglydd »

patrickjdempsey wrote:SeaMonkey has ~120,000 users

Pat is that for real ? I'm kinda gobsmacked if it's true.
#KeepFightingMichael and Alex.
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Frank Lion
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Frank Lion »

mightyglydd wrote:
patrickjdempsey wrote:SeaMonkey has ~120,000 users

Pat is that for real ? I'm kinda gobsmacked if it's true.
Yep, it was in the SM Council status meeting stuff a while back.

That's why I was making the point that some 'one man and his dog' browser projects have more users. Well, that and I knew that otherwise someone would try to take that point down the 'It's true, that we don't have the vast advertising budgets of companies like Google...' path.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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tonymec
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by tonymec »

patrickjdempsey wrote:SeaMonkey isn't a perfect product.
Of course it isn't: Nothing is.
patrickjdempsey wrote:[…]
3. The interface *is* getting much-needed improvements. Most recently, SM earned the ability to hide and auto-show the menu bar natively. Doesn't seem like much but there's a whole generation of users out there who aren't used to seeing menu bars on web browsers. Rolling that into the default settings a'la Firefox 3.0 probably wouldn't hurt.
[…]
4. There's still UI improvements that need to happen. There's absolutely no reason SM shouldn't ship with tab closers, even if they are turned off by default. (The icons are already in Global!)
Doesn't it? According to the source comment on browser.tabs.closeButtons (displayed by the Config Descriptions extension):
Where to show tab close buttons:
  • 0: on active tab only
  • 1: on all tabs until tabClipWidth is reached, then active tab only
  • 2: no close buttons at all
  • 3. at the end of the tabstrip
IIUC the SeaMonkey default is 3, while on recent Firefox builds a single behaviour has been set by the Firefox developers and the setting doesn't have any effect anymore.
patrickjdempsey wrote:And why aren't grippies optional or just plain removed? The default toolbar arrangement and the buttons available for customization haven't changed in nearly 20 years now. Is there a good reason for that, or is it just a tradition? Stuff like that makes SM look old fashioned just for the sake of it and gives folks a bad first impression.
I beg to differ. The grippies occupy almost no space on the screen, and they are a simple way to make any toolbar (including the menu bar and the location bar) appear or disappear at a moment's notice. You said above that it was important to be able to hide the menubar and griped that this ability had been added "only recently". Don't you realise that it was there all along, thanks to the menubar grippy? Click it and pop! The menubar disappears and the grippy tucks itself horizontally below the bottom toolbar, ready to let you make the menubar visible again. Other bars can be tucked away in exactly the same way, even all of them (except the tab bar if two or more tabs are open) if you like a "lean and mean" display. Or are you talking about something else when you talk of grippies? The ones I'm talking about are present on GTK builds (i.e. default Linux builds), they are present at the far left of every toolbar, as high as the toolbar and maybe 2 or 3 mm wide (or perhaps 0.1 in, which is about 2.5 mm). I'm not sure if they exist on Windows and/or Mac.
Another way to get a lean and mean chrome for big content is of course to hit F11 (full-screen mode) and the most important buttons (including the three [_][↓][X] buttons on the OS titlebar) move to the URL bar, and all other bars (including the OS titlebar and the menubar but not the URL bar) go away together.

It has been said time and again, here and elsewhere, that "following the fashion of the day" is no reason to remove a working feature that has been tested over time. Firefox has even been reproached on this very thread for following fashion too much and tradition too little. Well, SeaMonkey is more conservative. Some will even say that it looks old-fashioned (personally I like this old-fashioned look, but YMMV). In any case it can browse the web, or HTML and text files on your local disk, just as well as any browser, old-fashioned or newfangled, and the same applies mutatis mutandis to SeaMonkey Mail and ChatZilla.
patrickjdempsey wrote:6. What good is a WYSIWYG web editor that doesn't really work? Composer needs serious love or it needs to be completely reconsidered.
I agree; the problem is that the main developer for that feature has been busy earning his daily bread and his family's, and hasn't had enough time to look into it recently. Are you ready to put your hands where your mouth is? The code is in the open for anyone to see. If you want to give the Composer the overhaul it badly needs, go ahead, no one is stopping you.
patrickjdempsey wrote:I'd love to see DOM Inspector rolled into SM.
It is; at least in Trunk and (I think) Aurora builds; and it has been distributed as part of trunk builds for as long as I can remember. Welcome to the new SeaMonkey 2.43a1 which has been released today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone)!
patrickjdempsey wrote:And as much as I absolutely hate the way Firefox Devtools stuff works, are there any ideas in there that SM could use? Or should that aspect of the "suite" just be ditched?
Well, SeaMonkey had to import Devtools when Firefox moved it away from shared code, just so that the Suite and some valued extensions would go on building (IIRC, ChatZilla was of that number); so there are some ideas there that SeaMonkey already uses. But that is a development which happened very recently (last week IIRC, or maybe the week before), and new ideas are welcome. Especially if they are accompanied with working patches of course.
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Tony
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Frank Lion
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Frank Lion »

tonymec wrote:<snipped very long post>
Nope, Tony. You are missing the point here.

The point being made by Pat and myself is that this is a time for quiet reflection and reappraisal of how things are done with SM.

What it is not about is to come back less than 3 hours after the guy posted and do an overly defensive post defending the status quo of the existing methodology..

Did I not write this in an earlier post?
Don't start reaching for your inhalers and talking about grippies and stuff to me, no one said anything about removing anything.
Seriously, please do not use terms like 'griping' and 'putting your hands where your mouth is' in reply to sincerely made posts. It is rude and disrespectful....and you owe the guy an apology.
tonymec wrote:...and new ideas are welcome.
Writing what you do not appear to believe in, is not really a very endearing quality, you know.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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tonymec
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by tonymec »

No one said anything about removing anything including grippies? Well, then I totally misunderstood what Patrick meant by «why aren't grippies optional or just plain removed?» Anyway, since my sincere opinion is taken as «rude and disrespectful» which it wasn't (I thought I was just correcting untruths, not lies mind you, but misunderstandings)… well, apparently I'm not wanted, so I'll shut up.
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Tony
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Frank Lion
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Frank Lion »

tonymec wrote:… well, apparently I'm not wanted, so I'll shut up.
Of course you're wanted, Tony, but we are in 'Think Tank' mode and all and any ideas must be given the opportunity of quiet reflection.

In other words, let's try and bring our own thoughts and ideas to the table, rather than just shooting down other people's.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by patrickjdempsey »

tonymec wrote:Doesn't it? According to the source comment on browser.tabs.closeButtons ...
Nope. There are some in Mail/News but not in Browser. FYI, I maintain two different extensions that add Firefox style tab closers to SM. And one of my extensions re-arranges SM interface to be more like Firefox. I've also built a theme for SeaMonkey (which is currently not working like it should, darn if I know why) and built over a dozen themes for Firefox in the 3.x era when it was actually fun. I've basically spent the last 8 years tearing apart and rebuilding the user interfaces for Firefox and SeaMonkey and invested a ton of research time into Mosaic and older versions of Netscape for various personal projects. So no offense, but I do actually know what I'm talking about a little bit when it comes to this stuff.
tonymex wrote:I beg to differ. The grippies occupy almost no space on the screen, and they are a simple way to make any toolbar....
I guess you just decided to ignore the part where I asked why they can't be optional?
patrickjdempsey wrote:And why aren't grippies optional or just plain removed?
As far as all of your arguments *for* grippies... I don't find them very convincing at all. How about the fact that nobody under 40 who wasn't a hyper nerd in the 90s even knows what they are? Is there any other piece of current software on the planet that uses them? And even if you know what they are... close two grippies and tell me which one will definitely open the menu toolbar. You can't because there's no way to tell. So not only is it not obvious what they are, even if you know what they are, it's not 100% obvious how to use them. As far as them being a replacement for the menubar autohide feature... c'mon man... have you ever even used that feature? When you hide the menubar it opens instantly when you press the Alt key, including if you use the Alt key in a menu shortcut. That's on a whole different level than grippies, and is actually really great for keyboard-centric users. I would think that in the mostly-older SeaMonkey user demographic, anything that encouraged keyboard use over mouse use would be vigorously applauded.

And that bit about fullscreen.... would you be surprised to learn that SeaMonkey fullscreen used to kind of suck and that it's only been since work got started porting over Firefox's menubar autohide feature that it actually works like you now expect it to?
Tip of the day: If it has "toolbar" in the name, it's crap.
What my avatar is about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/sea-fox/
isaacschemm
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by isaacschemm »

Regarding the Firefox DevTools, those are in the process of being ported to SeaMonkey. Not sure what version they'll appear in.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1223341
frg
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by frg »

I think before plans can come into effect to enlarge the user base, add or remove features and make it the #1 web browser suite everyone wants it should first be decided what to do in the short term.

Just a quick look at www.mozilla.org is enough for me to think that Seamonkey does not have a future there. Looking at it longer than 30 seconds I suspect nothing has a future there because everyone with an IQ over 10 will have left the building :D

So what to do?

Fork and maintain everything ?
Cooperate with Pale Moon (which seems to be a somewhat one man show based on github commits)?
Fold it? PLEASE NO!
Switch to ESR45 for the time being + wait and see what Thunderbird does?

FRG
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by rsx11m »

Yeah, I agree that we have more burning issues than talking about grippies (which I think is a discussion that started back in 2001/2002?). As said, switching to comm/mozilla-esr45 with SM 2.42 might be a short-term buffer (for 8 cycles of 6 weeks each, as long as Mozilla sticks to maintaining the ESR branches as before) but of course only defers the main issue.

As for the feature discussion here, making sure that SeaMonkey can still be built and released has to be the top priority at this time. If changes are needed (e.g., certain XUL code translated into XHTML if SeaMonkey sticks to the train), that would certainly be a good opportunity to revisit that UI element whether or not it should be translated to get a literally identical user experience or if changes should be made. But first, the broad direction needs to be nailed down what the future code base and infrastructure will be, and in which time line what needs to be done.
NanM
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by NanM »

SM is a rocking browser.
This latest stable release is perceptibly more responsive on our high latency regional dsl than Fx now - both run with NoScript - and I'll be very pleased if the community can work out a way to continue supporting its development. A year or so of basic security patching only wouldn't bother me at all if the Council wants time for considering the future.

I fear that all the extensibility that made Fx unique will be lost to SM if the downloads dwindle to less than 5 figures. I hope I'm wrong and that freedom to play around with extension will continue to attract the clever coders it did to baby Fx, making it so big a success.
I've got no coding chops but am always ready to donate and pass the word around.
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Peter Creasey
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Peter Creasey »

NanM wrote:SM is a rocking browser.
Nan, We can't forget about SeaMonkey's "rocking" email and composer processors.
. . . . . . . . . . Pete
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Frank Lion
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Re: The future of Seamonkey?

Post by Frank Lion »

Peter Creasey wrote:
NanM wrote:SM is a rocking browser.
Nan, We can't forget about SeaMonkey's "rocking" email and composer processors.
We can't forget about grippies in SeaMonkey either.

Except that they are not grippies - read my lips - what you guys bang on about are Toolbar grippies and you will only confuse SM addon devs if you keep using just the 'grippy' term, which is a toggle for splitters element embedded in a splitter element.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ryE ... ox&f=false

In other words, Firefox has also had grippies forever as well. See?

patrickjdempsey wrote: And even if you know what they are... close two grippies and tell me which one will definitely open the menu toolbar. You can't because there's no way to tell.
You can, but you will not believe how! :) - viewtopic.php?p=14234339#p14234339
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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