The Beta Has Landed

After somewhat more time than we had expected earlier, we finally have a great SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release available for you. This release really brings the suite up to modern standards, supporting feeds as well as HTML5 audio/video, managing add-ons in a comfortable way (as known from Firefox 3.5), having customizable toolbars in both browser and mail windows, and much more - and all that in more than a dozen languages right from the beginning.

In many ways this beta is much better than our stable 1.1.x releases, and it's probably not even less stable from most points of view, but it still has some corners that need smoothing and some features we want to add before calling it a final 2.0 release.

Pushing it out to the public today was one small step for a release engineer, but one giant leap for the project. One after after celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first human setting foot on a different celestial body, i.e. the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, this is our mission of exploration, boldly moving the well-known Internet suite where it has never been before - into a state where it fully fit for the challenges the Internet and web sets for us today and laying the base of where it can be tomorrow.

To echo what Buzz Aldrin said two days ago when asked if we can manage the challenges to go the way even further and step further out - in the case of space exploration, that's bringing humans to the Mars and beyond, in the case of SeaMonkey it's a 2.0 release and beyond - I fully agree with him paraphrasing a nowadays almost overused sentence:

Yes, we can.

(And you can join us in that task by testing this beta, reporting bugs, and if you're really bold, exploring possible improvements and writing patches. Yes, you can.)