You mean to say it's shaping up like the real Mozilla?

With the roadmaps and dates, you have something of a point, but it's just a matter of interpretation. They set optimistic dates and then miss them - is that so much worse than setting pessimistic dates and then being early? The problem is that people take a vague guesstimate of a date and treat it as if it was a deadline. If it was me, I'd take people's expectations into account and allow extra time for things - who's going to complain if something is early?

And with Seamonkey - there isn't really a lot of work going on there. Looking at 1.8alpha1 release notes, the only Seamonkey-specific things I can see there are FTP upload UI (where it's mentioned in the bug that the work is a useful base for other things in future), improved keyboard accessibility in a couple of places, and a confirmation dialog for "close other tabs" - not a huge amount. The other 1.8alpha browser items also apply to Firefox; the "mail" things apply to Thunderbird, and the "under the hood" stuff is also code that's shared.

"One final thing: why the hell is work still going on in SeaMonkey? I doubt that is used very much anymore and with it being EOLed soon, there is a stupid amount of work that will more or less be wasted."

In case you haven't heard: AOL/Netscapehave renewed interest in Seamonkey and plan soon to produce a release of the suite branded as Netscape 7.2. Maybe they are tired of relying on I.E. as the basis to build their AOL browser since IE is so out of date. (IE has not had a significant update in several years.)

How do you know that SeaMonkey "is [not] used very much anymore"? You might come to this conclusion if you only hangout and read in the ThunderBird/FireBird forums at MozillaZine. If you also read the Mozilla Forum at MozillaZine you would know that there is a significant number of users who prefer the Seamonkey suite to the seperate applications ThunderBird/FireBird. Check out the form link below. In this thread users explain why they prefer Seamonkey to seperate applications.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=74414

here are a few of the reasons I prefer the suite: too many features have been stripped from the seperate applications. Too may preferences settings have been left out (and "about:config" is a very poor replacement for a well designs set of preference panels). I prefer using the sidebar in Mozilla/Seamonkey for bookmarks/history/searching using multiple search engines at the same time. A claim that Seamonkey is slow compared to FireBird: It is not slow on my Mac. I'm on bradband cable and sites pop up almost as soon as I click on a link. (I have not used SeaMonkey on dialup. Maybe Seamonkey is slow on dialup compared to FireBird--but as more users move to broadband dialup performance becomes less important.)

I also prefer the close integration between browser and mail and while browsing to not have to have another application open so I can be notified when an email arrives.

I hope now that AOL/Netscape has renewed its interest in Mozilla/SeaMonkey that the decision to EOL SeaMonkey will be reconsidered. I personally find the SeaMonkey suite superior in many ways to the seperate applications and SeaMonkey performs as well or better for me then the ThunderBird/FireBird combo.

Some prefer the seperate applications ('Birds") while others prefer the SeaMonkey suite. But I do disagree with you that "that [SeaMonkey] is [not] used very much anymore."

What is EOL???

Also, remember, Mozilla developers are actively working on reducing the size of Mozilla as well as improving it's performance. It is what is said in the Mozilla's roadmap in the last 6 months or so. So, once most of that work is done then there will be something different to work on. Not sure what they will be exactly but there was some talk of something about Mozilla and Gnome and XUL (as oppose to M$ XAML). Also, read the mailing list yesterday from NVU, there someone asked about the NVU development and the response is that there is a current process of merging the NVU back into Mozilla or whatever that mean. So, a possible outcome is some improvement to the Composer but it is only a guess from me, not something official or anything. Only time will tell.

Zook

First of all, what makes you think people are working on SeaMonkey (and what is "SeaMonkey" in this case?)

Second, if, hypothetically speaking, people feel like volunteering their time to work on SeaMonkey, who are you to tell them how they should spend their free time? I've never understood why so many people think they know what everyone else should be doing.

Are the slips a sign that the development teams are taking on more than they can handle within their estimates? I think so. Even when it was just "Mozilla" there were often these slips. Now they have several other products and it continues. I think they are trying to be too aggressive at times. These are all the tell tale signs of a software team that is pushing for too much too fast. Time to make the estimates more reasonable. And time stop trying to release too much in one release.

I think they are doing a great job overall and by far have the best browser available in Firefox, but there are some improvements that could occur in the development process.

"One final thing: why the hell is work still going on in SeaMonkey? I doubt that is used very much anymore and and with it being EOLed soon, there is a stupid amount of work that will more or less be wasted."

Speak for yourself.

I have current versions of Seamonkey, Firefox, and Thunderbird installed. The one I *use* on a daily basis is Seamonkey. Firefox is a nice product, but I prefer the Seamonkey browser to it.

And Seamonkey is the basis for several other products, including Netscape (which does plan to spin a new release off of Seamonkey code), Beonex, and others.

Seamonkey isn't going away any time soon, nor should it. ______ Dennis

To clarify, use TITLE for tooltips.

ALT is for ALTernative text, not [i]descriptive[/i] text.

I.e. it's for images if you use a text browser like Lynx, or if the server with the images is unavailable.

Double ugh on that last ugh. Funny how people want 'features' in IE that are really bugs. If I remember my HTML correct, the title attribute in a link is used to create a tooltip. Alt, well is for alternate viewing methods such as when you don't want or need images but you just want the description of the image without the download.

I am cruising around on Firefox 0.8+ GTK build on Fedora Core 2 (careful installing FC2 -- it can corrupt your partition table on double boot systems). I love the browser. It literally launches in about a second on my Athlon system running the 2.6 kernel. I stopped using the suite maybe about 3 months ago. The move away from the suite was a good move. On linux you have Evolution for mail and Pan for a newsreader; there really is no need for a bundled browser suite. With separate apps if you really like the Mozilla newsreader or mail a lot you can just add it in as an extension. I was just missing a light weight browser. Firefox filled in the hole nicely, less truly is more. Konqueror is okay but not great for surfing.