The roads I take...

I just realized that my SeaMonkey download stats page didn't count auto-update downloads for 2.x version but only those for the normal download links.

When I looked at the original data and included the auto-uploads in my lists, numbers jumped up significantly, as expected. So far, so good.

What makes me wonder though is that we had closely over 17k downloads of 2.0a1 but slightly over 22k auto-update downloads for 2.0a2 (next to nearly 15k normal downloads for that milestone). How can more people be automatically updated to the second alpha than those who downloaded the first milestone that supported this system at all?
That looks kinda strange to me, at least. The only explanation I find is that a significant number of people downloaded 2.0a1 over direct FTP but got served the auto-update via the official channels when we released 2.0a2.

In any case, once we sum up normal and auto-update downloads, 2.0a1 has more tracked downloads than 1.1a and 2.0a2 already overshot 1.1b, even though we are still in alpha stage.

And SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 had about 1.7k downloads per day in its first 8 days (a total of about 13.6k, 4.6k normal + 9k auto-update downloads) - not bad for an Alpha of a niche product, I think.

I'm very excited to tell you all that we just have shipped SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3.

This latest milestone ticks off a good number of features we wanted for SeaMonkey 2, the major ones being:

• Places history, which switches the storage backend from mork to SQLite, makes us able to store a much larger amount of visited pages, and gives us the frecency-driven algorithm for autocomplete when typing in the location bar, searching in both URL and title (yes, that's what's attributed as "awesomebar" elsewhere).
• New password manager, which also now uses SQLite for storage and increases the amount of code we share with other Mozilla products. It also avoids modal dialogs popping up in the face of users, using notifications bars and form autocomplete instead.
• Browser toolbars are now fully customizable. This means that users can easily e.g. move the home button to the navigation toolbar, the throbber to the menubar, or the location bar to its own, new toolbar if wanted. Also, extensions can make their toolbarbuttons available for customization, so that the user can place them wherever he wants.
• Session restore (crash recovery) has been added shortly before we wrapped up this milestone. When SeaMonkey crashes or needs to be restarted, say after installing an add-on, we restore all open browser windows and tabs now. Also, users can select to restore their previous open session on every launch.

There's many more noteworthy changes in this version though, as listed on the SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker.

Help us testing this alpha release, reporting bugs in Bugzilla and crashes through the included crash reporter tool - but keep in mind that this is a testing version that is not considered ready for production use yet, so make sure your profile data is available from a backup in case this version might screw up something.

That said, I hope this release shows off well where SeaMonkey 2 is going and will impress everyone out there who chooses to test it!