«Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
And don't let the parting grieve thee
But remember that the best of friends must part, must part;
Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu, say adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you-u,
I'll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.»
Fare you well, Robert, it makes me feel good to know that in the Firefox team there'll be at least one program manager and extension developer who'll constantly remember, even without being told, that SeaMonkey exists, is a worthwhile product, and has actually much in common with Firefox (and with Thunderbird, but maybe that's more up Karsten's alley) — This very week I made one Firefox extension work in SeaMonkey by merely adding a SeaMonkey <targetApplication> section in its install.rdf. ^!^ No other change was needed. One shortcoming which I think SeaMonkey cures fast and forever is parochial thinking about the Mozilla codebase, and in that sense, maybe it was Mozilla's worst error when they dropped "official support" for SeaMonkey, error not in terms of its market share, which is tiny indeed, but of its central role in making all Mozilla "products" work together (the browser, the mailer, news reader and address book, the chat client, the javascript debugger, the calendar, the add-ons manager, all backend parts of course, and if you're serious about using it to the full, the crash reporting client and server, and the bug reporting application — maybe there are some Mozilla products which a serious SeaMonkey user may never meet or (even unknowingly) use, but I bet they're few and far between. Even if the "useless bells and whistles" that I see in Firefox (the "kiddie-toy" style of the Options UI, now the tabs-on-top and the URL-bar greying-in-and-out silliness) sometimes irritate me when compared with SeaMonkey's nice and efficient no-nonsense style, somewhere deep down I still know that Firefox and SeaMonkey are in the same family — indeed, sometimes I feel that Firefox is our little sibling or child — kindergarten vs. grown-up, if you will (or maybe the Firefox guys will call it young adult vs. doddering greybeard from a different point of view I suppose. )
And yes, the members of the SeaMonkey Council are indeed great people all, people who make me feel proud looking up to them, and that's no flattery (they are reading your blog I'm sure) but the plain truth as I see it. With them in charge of keeping the Suite in shape, and you putting grease on the wheels where some people seem to find fun in throwing wrenches nowadays, I think we stand a chance.
2011-07-02 07:30