internet

Unpack the browser and you will find something that looks like a cross between the old Netscape browser and Firefox.  To be honest, it's anything but pretty but beauty, as they say, is skin deep and we will return to this subject a little later.

It works like any other browser, web pages urls are entered in the address bar and pressing 'enter' takes you to the page.  There is a 'Personal toolbar' available from the 'View' menu and comprehensive bookmarks.

Bookmarks and history are accessed from the top menu or by pressing 'F9' to open the sidebar.  These days, with wide-screen monitors, it makes sense to use a sidebar and this one is very customisable.  By default, it allows you to get at bookmarks, search and choose from other offerings but maybe the first thing you will want to do is customise the sidebar to add some UK content.  At the sidebar top right go to 'Tabs' and then 'Customize sidebar'.

Sites open correctly and look good.  Click on the picture on the right for a large screen grab (much optimised) of the Monkey showing a video from the internet.

Preferences there are aplenty and they are found under the 'Edit' menu (not under 'Tools').  I added a 'Go' button to the address bar but there are lots of other changes you can make.  In particular you can make pages open in new tabs or new windows as you prefer.

One thing that I didn't like was the lack of a close button on each tab, making you mouse over to the far right to close a tab.  Fortunately a search for 'Keyboard Shortcuts' in the excellent help revealed a shortcut of 'control + w' which went some way to solving the problem.  One further annoying thing (not SeaMonkey's fault) is that SiteAdvisor (see my article) doesn't work.

The menus allow you to control the browser in the same way as any other browser and the 'Tools' menu gives instant access to some important controls.  At the bottom, on the left, are the buttons that open the other applications in the suite and these are available from the 'Window' menu in the tool bar, too.

As you will know, there are an abundance of themes for Firefox but, try as we might, we were unable to locate SeaMonkey themes, which we found annoying.  Whether this is through lack of development or whether we were simply looking in the wrong place we are not sure but it is area that needs addressing.

The next article in this series (SeaMonkey with email) will be posted next week so make a point of checking to see if it is there already or, if not, bookmark us to check later.

Tags: life, seamonkey