SeaMonkey (Internet Suite)
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I recently discovered that SeaMonkey is still around! Itâs the continuation of the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite, itself the successor to Netscape Communicator.
It really feels like a throwback to the early 2000s. Partly because itâs an all-in-one suite combining a web browser, email, news reader (with both Usenet and RSS/Atom support), calendar, IRC chat, and even an HTML page editor. (The only modern suite I can think of is Vivaldi.) But also because they havenât changed the look of the program since then. It still has gradient toolbars, 3D icons, stippled toolbar handles on some platforms, a bookmarks sidebarâŠwait, those are back now. And I could swear the Preview icon in the editor goes back to Communicator.
Compatibility
Thereâs no official ARM version for any platform as near as I can tell, just x86_64. It runs fine on ARM-based Macs and Windows using emulation. They arenât signed, though, so on macOS you have to jump through hoops to get the system to let you run it the first time. (Itâs still included in Fedoraâs standard repo, though!)
I keep running into trouble with web apps. Gmail and Roundcube-based webmail sites seem to work, but Outlook breaks after login. Nextcloud canât even show the login form. OpenStreetMap works, but its online editor doesnât. GitHub sort of works. WordPress dashboards seem OK so far.
But it canât even display Bluesky or Mastodon posts (theyâre JS;DR). Elk and Phanpy donât run. The only Fediverse client Iâve found that works at all is Enafore, and then only partially.
SeaMonkey shares code with Firefox and Thunderbird, but still uses an old version of the renderer due to incompatible changes in the code. So until someone has the time to do a massive rewrite, itâs stuck at the level of Firefox 60 (7 years ago as I write this), which would explain the compatibility problems.
Another problem is websites that mistake it for a scraper and actively block it. Anubis seems to tag it more often than it ought to. Annoyingly, this includes the SeaMonkey forums at MozillaZine . It usually works as long as you go directly to the HTTPS version, but if you follow an old link to plain HTTP, Anubis is convinced youâve turned off cookie support and rejects you.
Mail & Newsgroups
The email component is sort of like a really old Thunderbird in the sense that the browser is sort of like a really old Firefox.
When setting up an email account, it doesnât even try to look up the settings based on your address. You have to add them all manually. Worse, it doesnât offer secure transports during setup (or alternative authentication methods like OAuth2) That means you have to set up a placeholder first, then fill in the settings. Or if your mail server still supports unsecured connections, itâll try to set them up insecurely first, which IMO is irresponsible in this day and age.
I was able to connect it to Gmail, though! Presumably the same approach should work for Outlook, Yahoo, or other providers that use OAuth2.
Calendar and address book are hidden away inside the mail app, though they seem to work entirely locally. No two-way sync as far as I can see, and only one-way subscription to remote calendars.
The RSS/Atom feed reader appears in Mail & News when you add a âBlogs & News Feedsâ account.
And it still seems able to connect to Usenet! If you know of an NNTP server, you might actually be able to use it!
HTML Editor / Composer
These days, when hardly anyone writes their own web pages, those who do often use a templating system, and most mainstream platforms either have built-in WYSIWYG editors or only accept plain text anyway, the idea of an editor that generates HTML feels kind of obsolete.
And to be honest, the code it generates is obsolete too. Late 1990s-era HTML, color specified using font tags, no support for CSS styling (so you canât make something that adjusts to light/dark color schemes) or scripting.
But the code it generates is also compact and efficient. No scripting support means the page isnât going to load half a megabyte of dependencies to show you a page of text. No CSS support means itâs not going to import a gigantic stylesheet that clears and reimplements the basic styling it can do.
It supports tables, and embedding images and links, and the basic HTML styles of lists, quotes, bold and italic. If you want to learn HTML by example, building a page in SeaMonkey and then looking at the code is a much better choice than picking a random real-world website to start with. Or worse, exporting from Word.
The Publish button really is obsolete, though, since it doesnât support FTPS or SFTP, only FTP. (It also supports some kind of HTTP publishing, but it doesnât seem to be WebDAV. I havenât figured it out, and havenât gotten a clear answer either.)
Bottom Line
I want to like SeaMonkey. But the fact is that web tech has moved on. If I want to use modern web applications, I need to use something with up-to-date capabilities like Waterfox or LibreWolf, or at least Falkon. If I want to just view pages and Iâm not concerned about being totally up to date, Iâd rather use something small like Dillo or NetSurf.