Is SeaMonkey Headed for Australis?

[L.A.R. Grizzly]

As the FX Australis heads for release, I'm seriously considering using SM as my default browser. Is there any chance that SM will adopt the Australis UI in the future?

[Exalm]

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2740361

What I know about the Firefox/Australis redesign:

• The changes in toolbar customization are in /browser/ and not /toolkit/ so our toolbar customization won't be affected. Right now they are twisting themselves into a knot trying to get their new customization code working properly.
• The downloads manager involves both front end and backend changes. We would have to rewrite our front end to work with the new toolkit backend but we hope to retain our more traditional UI as much as possible. Note that this change also means that almost any extension that relies on the current download manager APIs will be totally broken. DownThemAll will probably not be affected because they have their own backend.

What I don't know about the Firefox/Australis redesign:

• Almost everything else.

Phil

"we hope to retain our more traditional UI as much as possible" — I guess this applies to other areas as well.

[L.A.R. Grizzly]

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2740361

What I know about the Firefox/Australis redesign:

• The changes in toolbar customization are in /browser/ and not /toolkit/ so our toolbar customization won't be affected. Right now they are twisting themselves into a knot trying to get their new customization code working properly.
• The downloads manager involves both front end and backend changes. We would have to rewrite our front end to work with the new toolkit backend but we hope to retain our more traditional UI as much as possible. Note that this change also means that almost any extension that relies on the current download manager APIs will be totally broken. DownThemAll will probably not be affected because they have their own backend.

What I don't know about the Firefox/Australis redesign:

• Almost everything else.

Phil

"we hope to retain our more traditional UI as much as possible" — I guess this applies to other areas as well.

That's good to know. I'm "old school" and I like my browser the way it is, but the coming Australis will be a total headache for me. I have SeaMonkey current on my system, so the change over to SM won't be a problem. I came from Netscape to the Mozilla Suite. Soon after I made the change, Mozilla came out with Firefox and Thunderbird. Had I known the direction of these two programs, I probably would have stayed with the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey).

[rsx11m]

I'm rather confident that SeaMonkey will retain its own look and feel, it has resisted in the past many "improvements" the Firefox people came up with. However, if they (Firefox) eventually start removing capabilities from the shared Toolkit code, SeaMonkey would have to jump in to compensate for that. But, let's see.

[patrickjdempsey]

Yeah, generally speaking Australis is mostly browser-skin related stuff, and SeaMonkey doesn't even HAVE a browser skin. But things like removing keyword.URL hit SeaMonkey as well because that happened deep in the core.

[L.A.R. Grizzly]

Yeah, generally speaking Australis is mostly browser-skin related stuff, and SeaMonkey doesn't even HAVE a browser skin. But things like removing keyword.URL hit SeaMonkey as well because that happened deep in the core.

If I had known the direction of FX back when FX 4.0 came out, I wouldn't have created my themes for the toolbar icons. I would have switched to SM. I'm not going to update my themes when Australis lands. They will just die along with many of the other themes of late. Aris has an upcoming add-on that looks promising, but what happens if he drops support in the future. By switching to SM, the amount of time I can enjoy my browser setup will be lengthened. The one thing I will miss is the amount of add-ons available for FX (SM add-ons are very limited).

[patrickjdempsey]

There's a thread of requests for SeaMonkey versions of Firefox extensions here: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2481107 A GREAT MANY extensions require only a few changes to run in SeaMonkey as the underlying core is the same. Things that touch the UI or Firefox-specific feature calls will be broken.

[L.A.R. Grizzly]

There's a thread of requests for SeaMonkey versions of Firefox extensions here: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2481107 A GREAT MANY extensions require only a few changes to run in SeaMonkey as the underlying core is the same. Things that touch the UI or Firefox-specific feature calls will be broken.

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a go-over. I already have one modded add-on (FireForm), maybe I'll find some more!

[rsx11m]

FWIW, Australis has landed on Firefox trunk - viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2773103

But they keep a "backup" (nick-named "holly") of the current nightly branch which receives the same patches as the main branch. They keep the option to merge aurora from holly rather than mozilla-central, in the (not unlikely) case that Australis isn't considered mature enough for the next merge (scheduled for December 9th) to proceed down the release train.

We'll see if that will have any impact on comm-central builds, but as long as only the browser/ part of mozilla-central is affected, SeaMonkey should be fine.

[L.A.R. Grizzly]

FWIW, Australis has landed on Firefox trunk - viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2773103

But they keep a "backup" (nick-named "holly") of the current nightly branch which receives the same patches as the main branch. They keep the option to merge aurora from holly rather than mozilla-central, in the (not unlikely) case that Australis isn't considered mature enough for the next merge (scheduled for December 9th) to proceed down the release train.

We'll see if that will have any impact on comm-central builds, but as long as only the browser/ part of mozilla-central is affected, SeaMonkey should be fine.

We'll see. I hope I'm not disappointed.

[casper1975]

I think It would be fantastic If they could provide the Australis theme as a option but keep the same layout using the theme.

[patrickjdempsey]

Australis is less of a "theme" and more about the whole layout issues, so it's really not possible to do that. The only major "theme" change in Australis is the wonky tabs.

[dunegoon]

I like the fact that I can configure SeaMonkey to use all text menus, no icons. I've spent a lifetime learning to read and I don't like confusing icons. I find it quicker to understand "print" than to squint at some silly picture. I hope this is retained forever.

[casper1975]

Another thing I'd like to see is the return of the options to select the components you want to install & a quick launch feature like the older versions.

[ElTxolo]

I think It would be fantastic If they could provide the Australis theme as a option but keep the same layout using the theme.

If you like the (removed by moderator) of Australis, your option is fairly clear, use firefox.