End of life for SeaMonkey 1.0 coming soon

The SeaMonkey project isn't as young any more as one might think, we're also counting years already rather than months. And there are some moments when one starts to realize that even more - for example, when the first stable release series is nearing its end of life.

The first major and stable version of our new incarnation of the internet suite, SeaMonkey 1.0, based on the stable Gecko 1.8.0 series, has been released on January 30th, 2006, and was followed by eight 1.0.x versions with important security and stability fixes to it in the almost 15 months that have passed since then, with up to almost 200,000 downloads of the main three builds (not counting localized, direct-from-FTP or similar downloads) per release.

SeaMonkey 1.0.9, which is scheduled to be released in sync with it "brother" Firefox 1.5.0.12, will be the last binary release that keeps security of the 1.0.x current, later security fixes will only be available as source from the SeaMonkey project, some Linux distributors may still ship binary updates from that source, but we won't offer any such updated binaries on mozilla.org any more. We have been maintaining 1.0.x for more than a year and think to have produced enough overlap with 1.1.x to retire the Gecko-1.8.0-based series in favor of the new stable series.

That said, also this SeaMonkey 1.1 series will be updated with current security and stability fixes in sync with SeaMonkey 1.0.9 and Firefox 2.0.0.4 (see the Firefox release schedule for exact planned dates). This SeaMonkey 1.1.2 release will fix all currently known security issues as well as some other small improvements (see this rough buglist for a list that should contain most of the fixed bugs).

We'll encourage all our users to upgrade to this new SeaMonkey 1.1.2 version once it officially will be released.

Candidate builds for testing both releases will appear soon and will be announced in our Newsgroups - as always, we badly need testers to do our basic release QA on those, please stop by on IRC and contact ajschult, our QA head, if you can help with this.