Firefox vs SeaMonkey

Post Reply New Topic

I used to browse with Firefox, but it consumed memory, was slow and it crashed a few times, I tried SeaMonkey and it seems to work better and consume less memory.

Given that both are from Mozilla, what is the actual difference between to two of them, (without counting the email, page editor and newsreader included in SeaMonkey, but rather the browser functionality), regarding the use of system resources and security? Which one would be most preferable or recommended?

SeaMonkey doesn't work with about half the plugins I use in Firefox, so I use it in special cases. It seems to do a little better on memory load, but then again it doesn't load up all the plugins and RSS feeds I use in Firefox. As an anecdotal case, there was a Flash issue in Firefox at one time that didn't affect SeaMonkey. They were both the most current releases with the same version of Flash for Linux. I don't know the details, but after submitting a bug report to the affected web site they said it was an issue on their side and were working to fix it.

They're basically the same, although Seamonkey has fewer extensions and lags a bit behind in Gecko versions, so rendering can be rougher on some pages.

My internet progression was (roughly) KA9Q -> Turnpike -> IE -> Netscape -> Mozilla -> then I tried Firefox and didn't like it, so continued with an old Mozilla, even though it was no longer under development -> I looked at Firefox, from time to time, but still found it cluttered and gaudy -> I was blissfully happy when the final build of Mozilla (codename seamonkey) was resuscitated as SeaMonkey (though sadly lacking the calendar).

I'm using SeaMonkey 2.0.7 now.

I occasionally try other browsers, and it's handy to have them around when I want to try out (X)HTML. I also keep a copy of Firefox (3.6.9) (Konqueror, Dillo, Amaya, ELinks, Opera, Links 2) here, as it's sometimes handy to be able to connect to the same placer via two (or more) browsers simultaneously.

The Lightning calendar extension can be found for Seamonkey. Last I checked, only a "development" build was available, but it seemed stable.

I did use the Mozilla Sunbird calendar, for a while (and even did some bug reports on it, which were never fixed), until I inadvertently wrecked the database (by merging my entire calendar into itself - and finding no way of unravelling the mess I had made).

I panicked, and was seduced away from Mozilla, into using Google calendar - which I haven't wrecked (yet).

(And yes, Lightning has been around for quite a while, for Thunderbird, and I see (now that you tell me) that there is a SeaMonkey build - which has also been knocking around for some time - but I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud - and once I've left one mud bath for another, tend to remain in the new one until it dries up.)

I'd rather use Konqueror than Seamonkey.

A friend of mine accesses his Google Calendar through Lightning. I'm not sure how well that works, or if the Google Calendar provider even works on Seamonkey at all.

Firefox is $hit. I just use Chrome now. I'm thinking I'll try out SeaMonkey sometime, though.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what that means... although in principle, I see no reason why Google wouldn't provide some sort of interface to their calendar - after all, they do, via their own web interface... and the data format is pretty standard.
http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/

Ah. I believe I had to go over to using SeaMonkey 2, as Google said they were not going to continue supporting SeaMonkey 1.

There's some plugin that fetches data from Google calendar and puts it in Lightning, and vice versa. I've never messed with it. Google already knows enough about my chess addiction, no need for them to know where I am at all times.


I'm not surprised... Seamonkey 1 was extremely outdated. Right now Seamonkey 2 is pretty much on par with Firefox for its browser component, at least in terms of the rendering engine used.