The roads I take...

The second alpha release for the upcoming SeaMonkey 2 just hit the virtual shelves!

SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 is our first release shipping an RSS/Atom feed reader as well as feed detection in the browser (welcome to the 21st century!) as well as the new per-toolbar icon/text mode controls, TraceMonkey turned on by default, the reworked FAYT, the geolocation notification bar (no geolocation provider though), lots of other smaller fixes, and of course, everything that's new in the backend we share with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 and Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 1.

With a small echo effect to the post about the latter by fellow project manager David Ascher, I'm inclined to say that in some ways, this is a typical alpha: There's a ton of new patches in this release, large code and functionality changes, and surely a handful of rough edges that need some ironing out until we arrive at beta or even final phases of this release cycle.

Continuing that slight echo, however, in some other ways, it's far from a typical alpha: We have lots of reports from people who consider our current alpha builds more stable and usable than the stable SeaMonkey 1.1 series, esp. on Windows Vista, where the current 1.9.1-based code understands much better how to talk to the OS. The core is stable enough that the Firefox team released their second beta based on almost the same Mozilla platform code, and Thunderbird released a lot of the code we share in their first beta. We're a bit more conservative in naming, as we still have a significant list of larger changes we want to get into SeaMonkey 2, including places-based history, really customizable toolbars, session restore, new download and password manager implementations based on the new Mozilla platform toolkit instead of the old Mozilla suite implementations, just to name the major ones. Due to this list, the next release will be another alpha, but we might only do a single beta after that one, before finalizing SeaMonkey 2.

This is an untypical alpha for other reasons as well: Contrary to what other Mozilla projects usually do, we're shipping automated updates to users of Alpha 1, if only complete updates, as this is the first time we can test that mechanism in SeaMonkey at all. Additionally, we're releasing "experimental" language packs in 11 languages to get wider-spread testing of the localizations provided by our contributors before we will be able to ship localized binary builds as well in the future.

Even though this is a mere testing preview of what's to come, SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 is surely worth a try and a strong signal of how much alive the SeaMonkey project is!