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Seamonkey the Browser© Copyright Darrell Anderson. (January 2007) Trying to find a decent web browser these days is hardly easy. Users are subject to the whims of developers and developers have their own agenda about how to design a browser. The Mozilla Seamonkey browser is no different. After testing Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and K-Meleon, I decided to finally test Seamonkey too. The other browsers disappoint me, so why not add one more browser to the list? The first time I tried Seamonkey was version 1.04. After a quick installation, I decided the browser was not for me. First, the Gecko Runtime Engine (GRE) was installed in the %Common Files% directory rather than in the product directory. Second, because of a desire to implement support for roaming profiles, the browser always created a \Mozilla\Profiles directory in my C: partition. Unlike many people using Windows, I use several partitions. I use my C: partition only as a system drive and I detest any software that installs non-system specific software in that partition. Worse, this directory is used to store browser cache files (as a default location), and the infamous XUL.mfl and XPC.mfl bloat files. Clutter. Moving the location of the cache files is a straightforward process, but strangely, the Seamonkey developers provide no such option for those stupid XUL files. Supporting roaming profiles might indeed be a noble idea, but the storage location of any related files should be and must be user-defined. Such locations should never be hard-coded. With the release of version 1.1, and my continued dissatisfaction with the other browsers, I decided to try again. Perhaps the developers had improved Seamonkey. After starting the install program, I noticed that the default install location was %Program Files%\mozilla.org\Seamonkey rather than %Program Files%\Seamonkey. Why do software developers always need to stroke their egos by installing software in a directory named after their organization? Easily modified, of course, but nonetheless pompous. As is my practice, I chose the Custom option for installing. In this particular instance I am not interested in using Seamonkey as a suite. Many people are, but I am not. I simply want a browser that I finally can be happy with. Yet, after disabling all the options, I noticed I am unable to disable the Composer. People who want a browser only do not need or want a web page composer. So I was stuck installing that bloat. After installing the software I noticed that Seamonkey 1.1 no longer cluttered the %Common Files% directory with the GRE. That was a nice improvement. But the Mozilla directory in my C: partition stubbornly remained and from what I can garnish at the Mozilla forum, this nonsense will remain. I strongly urge the Seamonkey developers to make this a user-defined location. Additional irritations included slapping a shortcut on my desktop. I keep a clean desktop and do not clutter the area with shortcut icons. Why do the Seamonkey developers not ask me if that is what I want? Many other install scripts ask this simple question. Much like the Mozilla directory in my C: partition, this seems hard-coded and is rammed down my throat. Easy to delete, but irritating. The installation, as with all the Gecko based browsers, also cluttered my registry with a useless StartMenuInternet registry key. I use NT4 and the registry entry is not used in NT4. After adjusting the Preferences; manually tweaking prefs.js; copying my userChrome.css and userContent.css files, and then copying my cookies.txt, hostperm.1, and password file from K-Meleon, I then ran into a stubborn problem. Seamonkey insisted that the SSL protocol had been disabled. I found no clues on the web, but I suspected the cause was the same as the recently released Firefox 2.0.0.1. Yesterday I tried updating Firefox from 2.0 to 2.0.0.1, but every time I ran the browser I received an error message that the browser could not initialize the security component. I saw this same message several times with Seamonkey too. I suspect the problem is with the newer Gecko engine. None of the recommended solutions helped eliminate these problems. I restored Firefox 2.0 and shrugged with Seamonkey 1.1. I doubt I’ll ever solve this problem and I searched the web hard for potential solutions. Other problems appeared. I am a long time user of opening tabs both in the foreground and background. I cannot predict how I might open any particular link. I use both options regularly. In Opera and K-Meleon, those options are built into the link context menu. I can configure the Firefox context menu similarly with an extension. But I could not figure out how to do this with Seamonkey. As I stated in my other browser reviews, I am not going to use a mouse middle click to accomplish this. I also could not figure out how to configure Seamonkey for single window browsing. There were a few options in Preferences, and I added some options in prefs.js, but I never completely resolved my desire to run Seamonkey in only one window. Although Seamonkey supports alternate (right-clicking) with bookmarks, and in that pop-up menu is an option to open the bookmark link in a new tab, I could not find a way to make this the default action. I want all tabs opened through bookmarks to open in a new tab, not the current tab. Likewise for my history, search bar, and URL bar. I am not going to use the keyboard to modify my options. I should be able to set those options as my defaults. In Firefox I need an extension to create this behavior, but K-Meleon and Opera provide these options directly. I noticed that Seamonkey provided no session saving or crash recovery restore feature. Perhaps an extension exists, but by this time I was growing tired of the charades. Let me say that I am not entirely sour with Seamonkey. Seamonkey is based upon the same runtime engine and allegedly same core code as Firefox. Yet Seamonkey is noticeably faster, both in rendering web pages and with the user interface response. So sluggish is Firefox that I am amazed that another XUL product can respond so crisply. Firefox has deteriorated with each subsequent release, an observation embraced by other people. I also am pleased with how Seamonkey is not a geek’s browser. Seamonkey offers a nice user interface to configure many configuration options and preferences. The Firefox developers believe everything should be configured through about:config and awkward css files. Seamonkey is a breath of fresh air in this respect. Seamonkey also provides a splash screen, something Firefox developers snobbishly loathe. Yet Seamonkey loads on my aging hardware in only a few seconds compared to the double digit time required by Firefox. Firefox loads so slow and needs a splash screen. However, other than these positive differences, I cannot jump on the Seamonkey bandwagon. I continue to use K-Meleon despite a dozen or more missing options, and secondarily Opera and Firefox. Seamonkey definitely is faster than Firefox, but lacks too many options. Finis. |
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