The roads I take...

The SeaMonkey project at Mozilla is excited to release its completely refurbished next generation of the all-in one Internet suite today: SeaMonkey 2.0, now available for free download, melds the ideas behind Netscape Communicator with the modern platform of Firefox 3.5 to create one of the most compelling open source products for advanced Internet users.

The combination of an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, that has already established a wide user base in its previous incarnations, has been rebuilt on top of the modern Mozilla platform, featuring world-class add-on management among other things. In addition, it has been improved with feed support (including an RSS and Atom feed reader in the mail component), a modern look, restoration of browser tabs and windows after crashes or restarts, tabbed mail, automated updates, smart history search from the location bar, faster JavaScript, HTML5 features (for example video and downloadable fonts), and even support for the Lightning calendar add-on (which will issue a beta for installation on SeaMonkey 2.0 in the next few weeks).

The Release Notes feature more in-depth lists of the improvements and known issues with the new version as well as installation requirements and instructions. Find even more information on SeaMonkey 2.0 and the SeaMonkey project at seamonkey-project.org!

Some of you might remember that I was planning for an OpenWebCamp in Vienna - that was planned for October 27 but it was downgraded seriously due to not having a real Mozilla community around here yet and me not being able to organize the event myself when driving a major release at the same time. Still, the guys from quintessenz planned to have us on board for a track of the Cyber Liberties Conference, and so I did sit down with them for a while this week to work out what we actually can get into this track (speakers still wanted, if you can come around to talk on open web topics in Vienna on short notice, please tell me, travel costs can probably be reimbursed).

In any case, I told them that we're planning to release SeaMonkey 2.0 final right on that day, and the guys were suddenly cheering! We could do an official release event right there, they claimed, we could add this into press releases - and, above all, this could finally the topic they have been looking for as a label for the party on Monday!

In the end, what we decided there is the following:

• October 26, 20:00: q/Treff Spezial @ q/uintessenz - Museumsquartier Wien: Seamonkey 2.0 Release Party
• October 27, Open Web Camp/Track @ Cyber Liberties Conference, with a number of talks on Mozilla and the open web - and with an official SeaMonkey 2.0 Release Event

If anyone reading this is from or near Vienna, I'd be very happy to meet you at any of those events next week!