internet

We were impressed!  OK, we have a soft spot for open source software but we feel that this suite is good.  Overall, the different parts work well, both together and as part of the application.

Of course, there are things we didn't like - like the lack of themes - but these will be fixed in time and overall the pleasant things outweighed the not-so-good ones.

Various addons are available and can be seen here.  Some are amazing in their scope and transform the browser.  Try, for example, the Web Development tools and also the blogging tools. 

One thing we did not mention is that SeaMonkey asks to keep part of itself in memory so that it can start quicker.  We granted it this and were surprised when, on our 8 year old machine, it opened very quickly - far quicker than Firefox or Internet Explorer.  Although there is a memory overhead to this, we thought it worthwhile and, so far as we were concerned, it didn't make our machine run noticeably slower.

Surfing is as good as any other browser and we had no problems.

Surfing is as good as any other browser and we had no problems.  Pages opened quickly and content seemed correctly displayed.  Sadly, Siteadvisor would not work (so far as we could see) which means that we wouldn't use it as our main browser.  That aside we have nothing but praise. 

Email works and so, too, do newsgroups while the web creation program, we thought, was superb.  It's easy enough for a beginner to use and we found it useful for creating quick pages of links and for 'copy and pasting' html from the internet as html.

Release 1.1.9 is a security release to fix various vulnerabilities so you should have no worries about using it for surfing.  However (and maybe we are being too cautious) we would not yet use it where security was an issue.

Open source software is not created by a faceless company but made by people like you for the benefit of everyone.  If you use it and like it then it's worth looking to see how you can help improve it and the link is here.

But the ultimate test of any software is: do we use it ourselves?  We use a variety of browsers and operating systems and, having tried SeaMonkey for a few weeks, we will definitely continue to use it.

SeaMonkey is available for Linux and binaries can be installed for most distributions.  We do not have a Mac and if anyone uses SeaMonkey on a Mac (or the Camino browser) we would be interested to hear their comments.

If you try SeaMonkey and like it (or even if you don't) do let us know below.

Tags: life, seamonkey