Bruh, why do you hate SeaMonkey?

[crogonint]

Greetings!! Long time no see! This is the guy that gave you the second set of flags. I was reading through some of your stuff on the main website.. it sound like the set I gave you was the set that I modified for the website that I was working on. My bad! The website was a dark dark gray with blue highlights, and some of the flags looked comically bright, so I muted some of the flags to match brightness levels. You actually could have fixed the colors yourself by restoring the brightness levels, but no biggy. Also, the flags all popped up in the same box when you selected a region, so that's why they were all adjusted to the same precise size. :/

Sorry about that. I'm sure I still have the original set laying around somewhere, but it sounds like you're better off just using the Wikipedia set, anyway. I hope they served you well while you needed them.

So.. I ditched Firefox when they started including adware in the browser. That was just the final straw, actually. Firefox has some SERIOUS internal issues that I bugged them to fix for years, but they haven't. So I moved to Pale Moon, but then I ditched it when the developer refused to at least stick with an ESR release while add-on developers were scrambling to fix their add-ons because of the webextensions mess. Some of the devs said it would be impossible to import their add-ons in to webextensions, and that they weren't even going to try. FireFTP was the straw that broke that camels back.

Sooo.. I'm using SeaMonkey. I version hacked all of my favorite add-ons to work in SeaMonkey, and now life is grand!! I've even got a couple of gui hacks to make SeaMonkey act like the old school Firefox. I'm loving it. Just yesterday I figured out a way to mirror my profile on to different machines. I'm still working on a solution to sync profiles.

Which all begs the question, why do you have it marked down as 'not recommended'? I'm using Flagfox 5.2.7 in current SeaMonkey, and it works flawlessly. ^^

[DaveG]

So.. I ditched Firefox when they started including adware in the browser.

Adware? Only things I can think of are the defaults for the new tab page, which I just disabled and forgot about, and that Mr. Robot BS, which I never saw.

So I moved to Pale Moon, but then I ditched it when the developer refused to at least stick with an ESR release while add-on developers were scrambling to fix their add-ons because of the webextensions mess.

Yeah, I'm not thrilled with Pale Moon's decisions either.

Sooo.. I'm using SeaMonkey. I version hacked all of my favorite add-ons to work in SeaMonkey, and now life is grand!! I've even got a couple of gui hacks to make SeaMonkey act like the old school Firefox. I'm loving it. Just yesterday I figured out a way to mirror my profile on to different machines. I'm still working on a solution to sync profiles.

Which all begs the question, why do you have it marked down as 'not recommended'? I'm using Flagfox 5.2.7 in current SeaMonkey, and it works flawlessly. ^^

Well, to start, SeaMonkey is still a bit of a mess; Firefox was created as a drastic simplification for a reason. However, the main reason I started listing SeaMonkey as supported by Flagfox 5.2.x but "not recommended" is that when I switched over to the WebExtension storage API for saving preferences, SeaMonkey claimed it supported it but in reality had bugs that broke everything, so I had to put in a hack to detect and block it from the new stuff. (Flagfox 5.2.x has dual-support for the old Firefox prefs and the new WebExt storage API for prefs; this was required to migrate user settings/data, as Firefox 57+ has absolutely no way to access the old system after upgrading) Being broken in mysterious ways is way worse than just not working yet, from the perspective of someone who has to attempt to decipher it. The current version of SeaMonkey is based on Firefox 52 ESR, which hits end-of-life next month, and the current version still has a giant red blob of text on their main page stating how automatic updates are completely broken. Unless they release a version matching WebExtension API feature parity with Firefox 60 ESR, Flagfox 6.1+ can't run on there. All in all, I don't have a lot of confidence the SeaMonkey project is even still fully alive. So yeah, currently not recommended for Flagfox 5.2.x and not supported for Flagfox 6.x+.

[AlexDi]

Do you see any redeeming qualities of SeaMonkey? What do you think they would have to change to make it better in your eyes?

[crogonint]

Nothing. I love it.

I've got true Flash support (and Java, of course).

I've got my extensions for anti-adware support, ABP and NoScript. NoRedirect silently does it's thing, along with a handful of GreaseMonkey scripts. Cookies Exterminator silently erases standard and script engine tracking cookies. User Agent Switcher gets me around annoying webpages that block me. Prefbar does all sorts of weird proxy stuff and etc.

Support for a slew of protocols. Built in email client, calendar and tasks (Lightning) and ICQ chat (Chatzilla). Gmail support with gContactSync, Provider for Google Calendar (and Google Tasks), EnigMail and PGP for encryption. Of course we can't forget FireFTP, that's the straw that broke the camels back and had me writing nasty emails to the head FireFox devs. ErrorZilla Plus intercepts useless error pages and gives options like URL repairing and accessing Google cache, the Wayback Machine and etc.

I've got ALL of my favorite extensions like Session Manager, Down Them All, FlashGot, ImageZoom, Search by Image and ScrapBook I've got the original Speed Dial extension (which doesn't have adware built in). I've got my highlighter and sticky note extensions (which seem to have disappeared from Firefox for no reason I can discern.. maybe it's not possiible without WebExtension?).

I've got interface enhancements, Modern2 gives me a dark theme, and puts my browser buttons back where they belong. Flagfox and ShowIP give me visual indicators of WHERE I'm browsing. Download Status Bar gives me my download bar back. xSidebar gives me my sidebar back with a slew of custom sidebars, including ScrapBook bars, developer bars, eBook stuff, and the standard history, search and etc. sidebars. (HEY! It just occurred to me that torrents.me would make a great sidebar. ) The SeaFox extension puts the new tab button back on the right hand side (where it belongs!) and puts the tab close buttons back on each tab, along with various other enhancements. MrTech Toolkit tweaks the GUI and operational characteristics.

I have a slew of priceless developer add-ons. ColorZilla gives me an eyedropper, color picker and gradient generator. MeasureIt lets me measure dimensions. Dom Instector, Edit CSS, HTML Validator, Live HTTP Headers, all allow me to play with coding pages live. SQlite Manager lets me mess with my SQL databases. Of course, I've got the formidable built in DevTools.

Color Transform lets me automatically colorize websites that irritate my eyes after extended viewing.

What can they do better? Not much. Mousing over Amazon pictures takes a while to load, but I expect that that's some faulty script coding on Amazons side that doesn't allow the pics to pre-load. They COULD integrate various protocol controls. I never understood why the Mozilla broswers never adopted (Thunderbird), Lightning, Chatzilla, FireFTP and intelligent error page handling (ErrorZilla). They need to fork off Firefox, definitely. Put the GUI stuff like the new tab button and browser buttons back where they belong.

Basically the only thing I would like to see them do is improve performance and simplify the codebase for SeaMonkey. If they're going to ADD anything, add in sensible features.. free of adware and etc, of course. Oh, I would LOVE to know why recent versions of browsers all suck up like 500MB of RAM. I'd like to see WTH ever causes that reverted.

[DaveG]

No offense intended, but I'm pretty sure Alex wasn't asking for a SeaMonkey ad.

Do you see any redeeming qualities of SeaMonkey? What do you think they would have to change to make it better in your eyes?

To be clear, let me separate this into my decision with respect to Flagfox re-gaining SeaMonkey support and my personal opinion about the browser itself (the former of which should be considered something I personally also expect SeaMonkey to do, if they want to be taken seriously).

For me to add SeaMonkey support to Flagfox 6.1+, they need to fix their WebExtension APIs to not break mysteriously and get up to feature-parity with at least Firefox 60 ESR. If they do that, and it all works without confusion in their GUI, and nothing else explodes if I try and test it, then I'll probably add support. That said, if they're smart, they'll do that and then update SeaMonkey to support most Firefox 60+ WebExtensions out-of-the-box without needing me to do anything on my end at all, this time. That's how newer Firefox forks handle things.

For me to personally think SeaMonkey is actually worth anyone's time, they'd need to do at least a few things that are genuinely better than Firefox, rather than just be the browser that time forgot. They'd also need to revamp their update scheduling to give some sort of confidence that they'd keep in lock-step with security/performance/bugfix updates released in Firefox and Thunderbird. As of right now, SeaMonkey hasn't received any updates since July, and that last update was broken in the automatic updater! (https://www.seamonkey-project.org/) Regardless of their future, I'm not sure if they even have a present anymore. If the SeaMonkey project isn't fully dead yet, it ain't looking good.