Forum: Weblog comments

Good luck to you, Robert, whatever road you take!

I think the question the SeaMonkey project needs to (regularly) ask itself is:

* Is the difference between

SeaMonkey

and:

Firefox + Thunderbird + Kompozer + Chatzilla + purpose-built addons for SeaMonkey features + a set of SeaMonkey themes + good desktop integration so they all work well together

big enough to be worth the amount of effort the team is putting into SeaMonkey?

I'm not saying there is no difference, but it's possible that the functionality of the individual apps, plus the capabilities of the addons and themes systems, plus the improvements in desktop integration hooks, might together mean that the difference is small compared to the opportunity cost of doing SeaMonkey.

Opportunity cost is where you can't do thing B because you are doing thing A. It's another way of saying that there are only 24 hours in every day. You've got a set of important priorities - "making the web more open, [improving] privacy and identity management for people on the Internet, [making] social contacts a story of freedom instead of walled gardens" - and at the moment, those things are B and SeaMonkey is A.

You might decide SeaMonkey might be better reconstituted as an "app bundle" which bundles the four projects above, a theme and some addons, plus some configuration work. Or you might decide to carry on as now. Or you might decide to wind things up altogether.

But I think you need to ask the question. What is the difference, and how big is it?

Gerv

Sounds like really promising. Wish you find the best path for your creativity. Maybe into Seamonkey project.

Thanks for that statement, Gerv, and you're absolutely right in the direction you're pointing, though it's IMHO not Firefox+Thunderbird+KompoZer+ChatZilla, it's Firefox + various add-ons and web apps that achieve the required functionality. We have been asking the question, and it looks like most of the SeaMonkey community is too tied to the separate product and project to go far enough in even thinking it over. Still, I'm willing to, and willing to question if the SeaMonkey product in its current form has a future at all. I can't answer that right now, but my difference in thinking here is one of the reasons why I'm not sure if my future still lies with SeaMonkey.

I agree with Gerv here. It's going to be harder and harder to keep Seamonkey up to date and able to cope with the new features of Firefox, Thunderbird, BlueGriffon and other standalone apps. The work of n teams cannot be integrated by one single team easily, or at least at same speed.
I understand perfectly your concerns about the future of Seamonkey. Many people (really *many*) insulted (really *insulted*) me when I said that I will not contribute to Seamonkey because I do believe the editor has to live as a standalone tool. I maintain that opinion and that's why I'm giving all my time to BlueGriffon w/o caring about a backport to Seamonkey.

Any, best of luck for the future. I know how hard it is to carry a project like yours and I understand perfectly what "lassitude" means. You rock, Robert...

Hi Robert,
I use Netscape since 1.0 and I also use the current Seamonkey version. So, it's sad when it vanishes. But on the other hand, what is the real use of it? It's nice to have a one-in-all app like opera but in the long run, you can't keep up the speed Mozilla, MS and Webkit currently have in their build system. So, my recommendation is to stop the whole thing even if you'll feel empty for a specific time. But in the long run you'll find something new which might be more compelling than hunting others trail.
Pete

On Gerv's question, I'd say that the differences between SeaMonkey and FF/TB are actually increasing rather than decreasing. Firefox is busy coping with its competitors MSIE, Chrome, and Safari, and I personally don't like the UX design either of those has been going (including FF 4.0). Thunderbird has to fight with Outlook and Apple Mail (and some of its own spin-offs) and growing webmail competition. Some of TB's UX-design and backend changes (which SeaMonkey didn't follow) haven't been well received, along with new search functions that conceptually sound good but turned out to be a resource hog and in some cases buggy.

Where does SeaMonkey fit into this mix? While it has to react to whatever happens in the core code, the current course of evaluating which feature is useful and what's not, thus retaining the basic user experience rather than making sudden changes while nevertheless benefiting from improvements, is just the way and want SeaMonkey to go. It has a solid user base which doesn't care about the pressure from what other browsers and e-mail clients do (and may actually catch former FF/TB users disagreeing with their course). Yes, that user base may be smaller than those for the mainstream-oriented applications, but it is strongly committed to the project and would certainly miss SeaMonkey if it wasn't there.

rsx11m: I can see those differences. The question is not "are there differences", but "are there differences which could be minimised by doing a new theme for e.g. Thunderbird"? Disable gloda by default, change the UI how you like it... and then does a big enough difference remain for it to be worth doing a whole separate software project, or do you say "OK, so the result isn't perfect, but wow, do I have a lot more spare time now!"

Gerv

Gerv, rsx11m, glazou:
It's good to have this discussion about the future of the SeaMonkey product or it's relevance, but note that the post here is and was purely about me personally - the SeaMonkey project will even exist if I may go a different way.
I for myself have a feeling that my targets might not align with SeaMonkey's as much any more as they did previously, and I'm still evaluating possibilities.
The project is taking a large and big step by itself, which I will help in the transition, but I'm not sure if I'll be with it in the mid to long term. SeaMonkey will go on though - even if I think the product also will need some changes if it wants to survive in the long haul.