The roads I take...

Just before flying off to California and in the middle of packing, I could make yet another addition to the SeaMonkey 2.1 feature list:

SeaMonkey now supports OpenSearch through toolkit's search service!



We're late into this compared to Firefox, but this is one of the last, maybe even actually the last, item we needed to pick of from "the toolkit". The good thing is that now, all the search plugins that work for Firefox and possibly other browsers also do work for SeaMonkey. The bad news is that the special feature we had, the scraping of search results into the sidebar, is gone now and we don't have a clear idea if it would even be possible to get it back.

Also, we don't have a search bar available yet (it's planned to have it as an optional item through toolbar customization), the sidebar does some of its job for now, but even things like detecting site-specific engines or search suggestions are not available there yet.
The current state is a first step to get this feature in at all for SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1, now further steps can be taken to refine and improve it for the second beta and the final release.

After fast JavaScript and Plugin Crash Protection, here's another major improvement that just came to SeaMonkey 2.1 code and will be in the upcoming Beta - and this time, it's a SeaMonkey-specific invention:

Data Manager



I have reported about the add-on and on the features before, but now this idea I started working on four months ago has made one more step and is included by default in SeaMonkey, starting with manual builds from today as well as tomorrow's nightly builds.

Right now, you find it in the Tools menu or by entering "about:data" in the location bar and it's a pure addition to the other managers of the same data for the moment, until it can do everything those can do and we can remove them. There's a lot of work to do until then and the bug report has a long list of dependencies for those work items - help is appreciated there!

Once again, SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 in early October will be the first version we'll ship to a wider audience for testing this feature.

Some of you might have heard of "Plugin Crash Protection" or "Out Of Process Plugins", a feature that made its Mozilla debut in Firefox 3.6.4 and runs browser plugins like Flash and Java in their own processes outside the browser process so that in case of a crash they don't take the whole browser with them.

Since today's nightly builds, this is available in SeaMonkey 2.1 as well. This means that you'll find "plugin-container" processes running when you're using the SeaMonkey browser, those are the processes in which the actual plugins run in. Also, it means that a crash in Flash code will not take down your browser or even mail component of SeaMonkey any more!

We'll make this feature, just like the faster JavaScript and the Data Manager, available for more wide-spread testing in early October in our first beta.

Happy browsing with SeaMonkey 2.1!