Long-term SeaMonkey project goals
Robert Kaiser
Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
the SeaMonkey project.
Note that this is NOT about any detailed features, this is about the
vision behind all that. For SeaMonkey 2, it's pretty clear what we are
aiming for (see e.g.
http://home.kairo.at/blog/2007-10/goals_for_seamonkey_2_my_view for my
views on that), as we're trying to migrate our suite to the modernized
Mozilla platform while keeping the product very near to what it was,
only beefing it up with a number of features others already have.
Once that's done and we'll be both very much the same as what SeaMonkey
was before but at the same time on nearly the same level as Firefox and
Thunderbird when it comes to new features, then the current immediate
goals will not apply any more. To not run out of a vision at that point,
we need high-level directions, goals that lead us like stars on the
horizon, they should not be tied to a version 2, 3, 4 or whatever but be
very much what the whole project is aiming for.
There are several questions that we can use to start our thoughts about
this, for example those I already mentioned on my blog:
Is conserving historic UI our goal? Is merely throwing copies of Firefox
and Thunderbird into the same process our goal? Is tight integration and
breaking up borders between browser, mail, chat and maybe even web page
creation our goal? Is overloading the UI with options almost nobody uses
our goal? Or having everything a power-user regularly uses available as
easily and fast as possible? Is a strict structure of predefined UI our
goal, or as fully customizable user experience? Is SeaMonkey relevant at
all in the long run? Why (not)?
I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey community
to take a few moments in a probably otherwise unused timeframe, let your
thoughts circle around this topic a bit, perhaps take notes, and try to
figure out where you want SeaMonkey to go in the long term, where you
see those visions and why.
We're trying to get a grip of what our core community thinks our
high-level vision should be, feel free to give us any input you like on
this. We want you all to take part in this, independent if you are a
user or developer of SeaMonkey yet of just someone watching us closely.
If we want to have a future with the project, we need to know where we
want to be going - even with the nice product we are building here.
It will be interesting to hear your thoughts and figure out where we all
will be heading in the future!
Robert Kaiser
[followups to mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey as this is probably the best
central place to develop such a vision that still is SeaMonkey-specific]
GerardJan
Dear Robert,
I am one of the /troublemakers/ in the support group, but i worked last
night till 1am and woke up again at 5am...
it was the trouble that i did not have an XP machine anymore on my
workstation and my goal is to come up with a good virtual machine and i
want to have an windows or apple machine in it, not a linux clone.
i will do my best on it, it should not be so difficult now any longer,
but i promise no time schedules, i am 60, so the braincells are somewhat
slower...
goal: with the /kvm/ virtual machine you can run seamonkey everywhere !
sincerly yours
--
GJ
Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo
> I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey community
I thought I was part of the SeaMonkey community, but in
December 2007, according to Gerv I have no business
whatsoever in participating in this sort of discussion,
since I don't file bugs on bugzilla, and that the
Mozilla community is for people working on the Mozilla
project.
--
*IMPORTANT*: Sorry folks, but I cannot provide email
help!!!! Emails to me may become public
Notice: This posting is protected under the Free Speech
Laws, which applies everywhere in the FREE world,
except for some strange reason, not to the mozilla.org
newsgroup servers, where your posting may get you banned.
Peter Potamus & His Magic Flying Balloon:
http://melaman2.com/cartoons/singles/mp3/p-potamus.mp3
http://www.toonopedia.com/potamus.htm
Asrail
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>
>> I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey community
>
> I thought I was part of the SeaMonkey community, but in December 2007,
> according to Gerv I have no business whatsoever in participating in this
> sort of discussion, since I don't file bugs on bugzilla, and that the
> Mozilla community is for people working on the Mozilla project.
>
The "Mozilla project" is not the same as the "SeaMonkey community".
Ed Mullen
> Hi,
>
> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
> the SeaMonkey project.
>
> Note that this is NOT about any detailed features, this is about the
> vision behind all that. For SeaMonkey 2, it's pretty clear what we are
> aiming for (see e.g.
> http://home.kairo.at/blog/2007-10/goals_for_seamonkey_2_my_view for my
> views on that), as we're trying to migrate our suite to the modernized
> Mozilla platform while keeping the product very near to what it was,
> only beefing it up with a number of features others already have.
> Once that's done and we'll be both very much the same as what SeaMonkey
> was before but at the same time on nearly the same level as Firefox and
> Thunderbird when it comes to new features, then the current immediate
> goals will not apply any more. To not run out of a vision at that point,
> we need high-level directions, goals that lead us like stars on the
> horizon, they should not be tied to a version 2, 3, 4 or whatever but be
> very much what the whole project is aiming for.
>
> There are several questions that we can use to start our thoughts about
> this, for example those I already mentioned on my blog:
>
> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
I think it should be. Gor me, and only for me I speak, I am loyalto the
SeaMonkey software and project because of my loyalty to the concepts
embodied in this application:
Integration
Multiplicity of application
Availability of user configuration
Customization
If I wanted to be shielded from life I'd choose Firefox and Thunderbird.
If I wanted to live in a dumbed-down world, likewise.
What do I want?
1. Security.
2. Configurability.
3. Documentation - how does it work?
4. Extensibility. I would hate to tell the many users I support that
"You're on your own." But, honestly, if you you make such major changes
to the profile that it destroys untold numbers of users' bookmarks,
history, cookies, etc.? You've lost me.
4. Love. Ok, this is silly, I admit. Still, think about it. What is
it that keeps us SM users here? Keeps us coming back? Well, hell, ok,
maybe not love, but, still, look. This is all a Quixotic quest, eh?
We're all tilting at windmills. I just really like your quest, I like
your windmills. Until you spin the blades and make some huge change
that makes the wind of my yesterday not spin the blades today.
Look, if you decide that you must abandon us users of yesterday's
technology, ok. Just understand that we, in huge numbers, won't come
along with you.
I read. I sit and ponder.
And one day I will have to decide.
I have decided before. And I have abandoned software that I used for a
decade or more because it became a nuisance. I'll be sad but I'll do it.
Look, you do what you have to do given what you know. We users do this,
we place our trust in you, we trust that you will make intelligent
choices, we trust that you will examine our issues, we trust you. Do
what you will, do what you must. Just don't screw us up. Well, ok,
unless you must. Just know that, if you do, well, there is Google. I
will find some other solution.
By the way.
Robert. Thank you so much. Altruism is a rare commodity. I appreciate
it more than you can know.
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.
David E. Ross
I think a good start would be to find out why people use SeaMonkey and
not Firefox. It's not just the bundling of browser and mail/news.
I use SeaMonkey because Firefox has "features" that are really not well
designed for end users. As a result, there are UI bugs against Firefox
that do not apply to SeaMonkey.
On the other hand, I'm using Thunderbird for this reply. If I change
SeaMonkey profiles (I actively use three different profiles), I don't
close my mail/news application. Perhpas a looser integration with
stronger borders might be an improvement (separate profiles for browser
and mail/news).
"Is conserving historic UI our goal?" Look at what happened when "new
Coca Cola" was introduced. Better yet, think about Kikkoman soy sauce;
the same company has been making the same product for over 300 years.
Change for the sake of change is not necessarily good. I'm using the
Classic theme for SeaMonkey; I much prefer it over the Modern theme. I
don't bother to look at other themes.
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
Go to Mozdev at <http://www.mozdev.org/> for quick access to
extensions for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and other
Mozilla-related applications. You can access Mozdev much
more quickly than you can Mozilla Add-Ons.
Chris Ilias
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>
>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>
> I think it should be.
I disagree. Changing legacy UI does not equal adopting
Firefox/Thunderbird UI. One of the things SeaMonkey users prefer about
SeaMonkey is the fact that the UI is more in-depth. The UI can be
changed to tailor to that preference. For example, what if the
Preferences window had a panel for about:config? Perhaps the Plugins
section of the Add-ons window can include info like MIME-types and DLL
locations.
John Doue
Robert,
This is quite a challenge, and I really appreciate your giving us a
chance to voice our views. Given the difficulty of formulating clearly a
vision, have you considered posting a template which could be completed,
to give some structure to our reflexion, or do you think this might
constrain our thoughts?
Anyway, I certainly will do my best to bring positive thoughts, while
trying to stay away from fads.
Best regards
--
John Doue
asmpgmr
and add some further thoughts
****
I'm a SeaMonkey user and used Mozilla Suite before that and Netscape
Communicator before that. SeaMonkey is the true evolution of this
lineage and its UI should remain basically the same. I also appreciate
the fact that it has an integrated email client. There should always
be at least one major browser suite which provides in all-in-one
solution though it should also allow users to select which components
they install (mailnews, editor, chat) and allow them to be added
later.
As for prefs, it's always better to expose as many prefs as possible
via the prefs UI in addition to using about:config. SeaMonkey seems to
be more of a techie-oriented browser than Firefox and as a senior
software engineer I appreciate this. SeaMonkey should always allow
users to choose how they do things and never force users to use a
particular way. These are two areas where Firefox fails miserably, it
seems the Firefox people are catering to the lowest common denominator
with their simplistic prefs UI and forcing major UI changes like the
awfulbar upon people despite numerous complaints is just wrong. Worse
they appear to simply not care about user choice, a perfect example is
bug 407836 where they removed a pref to change the urlbar dropdown
appearance for no reason at all. Manually reverting this patch
restores the pref and works just fine (I tested this with Firefox
3.0.3). The SeaMonkey devs should never go down the path of not
listening to its users.
Also does SeaMonkey need to copy everything from Firefox and
Thunderbird ? Obviously the Mozilla people control Gecko and the
backend toolkit but SeaMonkey shouldn't simply be an integrated
version of Firefox and Thunderbird, it should be its own entity.
Copying things like the awfulbar without prefs to get the existing
urlbar behavior, its frecency algorithm, combined back/forward button,
any of Firefox over-simplified pref UI, the places system, bookmarks
manager, download manager, etc. are a cause for concern for SeaMonkey
users who don't like these features or don't see the benefit of them.
Remember many SeaMonkey users probably like the way things are and may
not want Firefox's way of doing things.
The biggest problem I see with SeaMonkey is that its always behind
Firefox and Thunderbird. Firefox 3 is already on Gecko 1.9.0 while the
release version of SeaMonkey is on 1.8.1. SeaMonkey 2.0 which uses
Gecko 1.9.1 will likely come out months after Firefox 3.1 does (which
is slated for the end of the year). Is there any way to close the
gap ?
Finally has the SeaMonkey council considered some sort of campaign to
increase SeaMonkey's profile ? I've found that while most people know
of Firefox, few know anything about SeaMonkey.
****
As for the future (SeaMonkey 3) here's a radical suggestion: how about
going back to native OS interfaces as opposed to XUL to gain a degree
of independence from Firefox ? Netscape Communicator used native OS
interfaces for the OSes it supported. While this would require some
extra work, a lot of the coding effort would only have to be done once
for each OS and perhaps some of the work done in K-Meleon (Win32) and
Galeon (Linux/Unix) could be used in the effort. Also using native OS
interfaces would result in less overhead and allow a higher degree of
user customization of the UI. K-Meleon which is a Win32 specific Gecko
browser is probably the least resource intensive and most configurable
Gecko browser of them all. You can easily customize the menus,
toolbars and accelerators via simple text files and it has a powerful
macro facility allowing you to do things which would require an
extension in other Gecko browsers. Better ability to customize the UI
elements, a macro facility and less resource usage would definitely be
nice things to see in the future.
Philip Chee
> Finally has the SeaMonkey council considered some sort of campaign to
> increase SeaMonkey's profile ? I've found that while most people know
> of Firefox, few know anything about SeaMonkey.
Yes, what we really really need is a dedicated SeaMonkey Marketing Team.
Firefox has a (paid) team, and I think Mozilla Messaging (Thunderbird)
has something in the plans. Our current problems are basically that we
are a very small, and *unpaid* group of developers. None of us has any
marketing nor PR skills. We need a separate Marketing team in charge of
Evangelism, PR, and Marketing with experience and skill in these areas.
Now Firefox/Mozilla Com can afford to hire professional PR and marketing
people. Now we obviously can't match this but can an unpaid volunteer
community effort organize at least something? I would prefer this
hypothetical team to be more on the non-techie side to better understand
the user mindset. For example you and I had this flame war recently
because I'm a sad anorak who doesn't understand the concerns of end users.
> As for the future (SeaMonkey 3) here's a radical suggestion: how about
> going back to native OS interfaces as opposed to XUL to gain a degree
> of independence from Firefox ? Netscape Communicator used native OS
> interfaces for the OSes it supported. While this would require some
> extra work, a lot of the coding effort would only have to be done once
> for each OS and perhaps some of the work done in K-Meleon (Win32) and
> Galeon (Linux/Unix) could be used in the effort. Also using native OS
> interfaces would result in less overhead and allow a higher degree of
> user customization of the UI. K-Meleon which is a Win32 specific Gecko
> browser is probably the least resource intensive and most configurable
> Gecko browser of them all. You can easily customize the menus,
> toolbars and accelerators via simple text files and it has a powerful
> macro facility allowing you to do things which would require an
> extension in other Gecko browsers. Better ability to customize the UI
> elements, a macro facility and less resource usage would definitely be
> nice things to see in the future.
Oh, The Horror! The Horror! Please let us not go back down that path.
The reason for moving to the current Gecko/XUL framework was the
constant nightmare the Netscape engineering team faced in maintaining
(at least three) separate code paths. And they were a large group of
*paid* engineers. The current small group of volunteers would never be
able to do this (and we'd all quit first!)
*Secondly* this would basically kill off all the Firefox/Thunderbird
extensions I've painstakingly ported to SeaMonkey. You have no idea how
enraged some of my users will be at you for just suggesting this.
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Vuja De - The Feeling You've Never Been Here
* TagZilla 0.066.6
Simon Paquet
> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog
> post, I want to get some input here about your thoughts of
> long-term goals of the SeaMonkey project.
>
> Note that this is NOT about any detailed features, this is about
> the vision behind all that. [...] To not run out of a vision at
> that point, we need high-level directions, goals that lead us
> like stars on the horizon, they should not be tied to a version
> 2, 3, 4 or whatever but be very much what the whole project is
> aiming for.
This is a great topic to which I hope I can add some thoughts, but
I want to make it clear beforehand that I'm not a SeaMonkey user
at the moment (I use Firefox and Thunderbird), but look at SM with
a fond eye.
I think the overarching question is, do you want SeaMonkey to change
or do you want it to basically stay the same and just add a few
features here and there?
For me the answer is, that SeaMonkey needs to change, it needs to
adapt to the evolution on the web and in the messaging sector and
a product that was basically designed back in 1996/1997 (when
Netscape 4.x appeared) will not provide the answers to all those
needs. If the product does not change, it will become irrelevant,
because there will come a time, when your current users die out and
won't be replaced by new users.
In a nutshell, change is the only constant in this business.
With that being said, this does not automatically mean, that change
means following the example of Firefox or Thunderbird in every
aspect. To the contrary, just following Firefox or Thunderbird will
make you irrelevant even faster, because you will never match their
development speed and users will move away to those products, if you
try that.
So you need to define a definite identity that is unique to
SeaMonkey and a vision of your target audience. Especially the latter
is rather fuzzy right now and basically is
"old time Netscape/Mozilla Suite users, which do not like the
direction that Firefox or Thunderbird are going"
That is not enough.
> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
I believe that being a bit more conservative in your UI decisions
is totally fine and fits well with your current userbase. Still,
being conservative does not mean being reactionary and change
nothing at all.
What I would propose is forming a group of 1-3 UI experts (as
Firefox, Sunbird and Thunderbird have done) and establish a process
that will look at all of the current UI every 18-24 months and decide,
whether certain UI elements are still relevant in the current
environment, whether UI elements can be removed or whether new
UI elements should be added.
That could basically result in throwing out 20 current pref settings
in the pref dialog and replace them with 15 new settings, which were
only accessible via about:config until then.
> Is merely throwing copies of Firefox and Thunderbird into the same
> process our goal?
With CPU power and memory becoming more and more a non-issue on
current computers, this is definitely a non-goal.
> Is tight integration and breaking up borders between browser,
> mail, chat and maybe even web page creation our goal?
This should definitely be a goal and also be something, where you
could really be innovative. Right now the advantage of using
SeaMonkey instead of a FX/TB combo is pretty minimal. One could
certainly think of a lot of potential features here, that you
could add to the product, which would be much harder to replicate
in single apps like Firefox or Thunderbird.
> Is overloading the UI with options almost nobody uses our goal?
It really shouldn't be. See my thoughts on the general UI question
above.
One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
and the choices that they've made.
You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
I hope that helps and I would appreciate some feedback as well.
Simon
--
Thunderbird/Calendar Localization (L10n) Coordinator
Calendar website maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
Manuel Reimer
> On the other hand, I'm using Thunderbird for this reply. If I change
> SeaMonkey profiles (I actively use three different profiles), I don't
> close my mail/news application. Perhpas a looser integration with
> stronger borders might be an improvement (separate profiles for browser
> and mail/news).
You *could* use SeaMonkey twice with different profiles on the same
machine. I don't know if this is what you want.
CU
Manuel
Benoit Renard
> increase SeaMonkey's profile ? I've found that while most people know
> of Firefox, few know anything about SeaMonkey.
I've done my part by linking SeaMonkey in my signature on several
message boards. Look for "SeaMonkey - surfing the web has never been so
suite" with Google. I seem to be the only one doing so.
> K-Meleon which is a Win32 specific Gecko browser is probably the least
> resource intensive and most configurable Gecko browser of them all.
That's not really true. Because it isn't based on XUL, it's not so easy
to change the interface radically. It also prohibits most extensions,
because most of them overlay the UI through XUL.
Benoit Renard
> Firefox, Sunbird and Thunderbird have done) and establish a process
> that will look at all of the current UI every 18-24 months and decide,
> whether certain UI elements are still relevant in the current
> environment, whether UI elements can be removed or whether new
> UI elements should be added.
No, this would be horrible. It's one of the things that keep many of us
away from Firefox and Thunderbird. It's too big a chance from one
version to another, and will drive complaints.
Robert Kaiser
> Integration
> Multiplicity of application
> Availability of user configuration
> Customization
> 1. Security.
> 2. Configurability.
> 3. Documentation
> 4. Extensibility. [...]
> 4. Love.
Sorry to challenge you on this, but what does any of this have to do
with conserving historic UI?
This is not to say that your input wouldn't be good, I agree with almost
everything you say with those points in principle, but not with you
deriving that this means conserving historic UI ;-)
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> Change for the sake of change is not necessarily good.
I fully agree - but then there are things one can and should change and
there are things that shouldn't be changed. For example, I'm pretty sure
Coca-Cola uses different production techniques and different marketing
than in earlier times. Actually, even the product itself is far from
what it was when it was invented, e.g. not containing Cocain or Alcohol
nowadays ;-)
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> This is quite a challenge, and I really appreciate your giving us a
> chance to voice our views. Given the difficulty of formulating clearly a
> vision, have you considered posting a template which could be completed,
> to give some structure to our reflexion, or do you think this might
> constrain our thoughts?
The latter. As a first step, I want to have a very unconstrained,
largely free flow of thoughts - it probably will get more ordered once a
number of thoughts, ideas and proposals come up.
(And I think we all already share some set of common goals there, we
usually tend to disagree on details - but I want to see if there are new
ideas and ways of formulating those goals out there)
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> Also using native OS
> interfaces would result in less overhead and allow a higher degree of
> user customization of the UI.
Actually, it would greatly reduce the available degree of user
customization by not allowing the flexible, cross-platform extension
mechanisms the XUL allows.
Apart from that or other feasibility thoughts on this, I'm sure we would
not have the manpower to even get this done for even one platform alone.
Robert Kaiser
David E. Ross
That doesn't seem to work on a PC with Windows.
I have a default (not THE default) profile (call it A), which is used
when I normally launch SeaMonkey. If I then switch that instance of
SeaMonkey to another profile (call it B), attempting to launch another
instance of SeaMonkey for profile A instead gives me two windows in
profile B. If I then attempt to use Profile Manager to switch one of
those instances back to profile A, I do get profile A for that instance;
but the other instance shuts down.
Robert Kaiser
> Robert Kaiser wrote on 31. Oct 2008:
>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>
> I believe that being a bit more conservative in your UI decisions
> is totally fine and fits well with your current userbase. Still,
> being conservative does not mean being reactionary and change
> nothing at all.
Right. Change is definitely something we need or we just wouldn't need
to develop at all. We need to drive evolution of the suite - the
question is just the actual direction to go, the guidelines behind this
change.
I'm sure we will lose some users along the way, and we will win some
users along the way. That's only natural. Some will disagree with
changes, some will believe we won't survive without them. That's how the
world is running all the time.
The important thing we need to get out of this discussion is to know by
what goals we should weigh those changes, what the vision is that tells
us which of those changes are fulfilling it and which are going against
it. I intentionally asked questions is very different directions in the
initial post, as we need to find a set of values and visions that make
it much more easy to answer those.
I'm describing myself as a progressive conservative often enough - my
own believe is that SeaMonkey needs to be the same: Keep what's good,
change what can be even better, try to get a step nearer to your vision
every day.
> What I would propose is forming a group of 1-3 UI experts (as
> Firefox, Sunbird and Thunderbird have done) and establish a process
> that will look at all of the current UI every 18-24 months and decide,
> whether certain UI elements are still relevant in the current
> environment, whether UI elements can be removed or whether new
> UI elements should be added.
This is definitely worth looking at, but for me, a bit too much
in-detail for what we need to find out right now, and that is against
what goals such a group, community effort or whatever should actually
compare what they are looking at.
>> Is tight integration and breaking up borders between browser, mail,
>> chat and maybe even web page creation our goal?
>
> This should definitely be a goal and also be something, where you
> could really be innovative. Right now the advantage of using
> SeaMonkey instead of a FX/TB combo is pretty minimal. One could
> certainly think of a lot of potential features here, that you
> could add to the product, which would be much harder to replicate
> in single apps like Firefox or Thunderbird.
I agree that there's a lot of potential in this, but it also could mean
some radical changes. I wonder what other people are thinking about that.
> One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
> think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
> perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
> their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
> and the choices that they've made.
>
> You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
> and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
We're trying very hard to get there. Most of the core community is
actually very much there, as you probably know. I tend to recommend
Firefox and Thunderbird to novices and SeaMonkey to advanced users and
people who want more integration between browser and mail. We profit
from work being done with Firefox and Thunderbird in mind every day, and
we're trying to help where those projects can profit from what we have
done and are doing. We're all proud members of the Mozilla community
after all.
There was a time, when there was a high degree of animosity of many
Firefox people against SeaMonkey, and this still hasn't faded
completely. To some part because of that, to another because of other
reasons, there was quite some of that in the other direction as well (I
think neither was as large on the Thunderbird side at any time). We're
trying to fight that in all directions. It's respect and cooperation
that helps all of us, makes us stronger as partial and common
communities and in the end improves all our products.
With a clear vision for SeaMonkey it probably will be even easier to
make this clear to everyone as it will clear up where the products and
project target different markets and where it makes sense to cooperate.
Robert Kaiser
Old Sarge-John Boyle
and as nothing more than a user, I say there should be one guiding
principal, and that is K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Silly. Just because
some other program has all kinds of bells and whistles does not mean ALL
others have to be the same, that is exactly what is stopping Vista, and
has, I am sure, done in many another program that no longer exists! Of
course, that is just my opinion!
Tony Mechelynck
> Hi,
>
> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
> the SeaMonkey project.
Great. Now that I've read the other replies, I think I'm more ready to
voice my own opinions. I don't guarantee they'll be ground-breaking or
even original.
>
> Note that this is NOT about any detailed features, this is about the
> vision behind all that. For SeaMonkey 2, it's pretty clear what we are
> aiming for (see e.g.
> http://home.kairo.at/blog/2007-10/goals_for_seamonkey_2_my_view for my
> views on that), as we're trying to migrate our suite to the modernized
> Mozilla platform while keeping the product very near to what it was,
> only beefing it up with a number of features others already have.
> Once that's done and we'll be both very much the same as what SeaMonkey
> was before but at the same time on nearly the same level as Firefox and
> Thunderbird when it comes to new features, then the current immediate
> goals will not apply any more. To not run out of a vision at that point,
> we need high-level directions, goals that lead us like stars on the
> horizon, they should not be tied to a version 2, 3, 4 or whatever but be
> very much what the whole project is aiming for.
>
> There are several questions that we can use to start our thoughts about
> this, for example those I already mentioned on my blog:
>
> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
I don't think our goal is to frozenly apply a UI identical to that of,
say, Netscape 4.72. I believe our goal is to meet the challenges of our
times with a UI which is recognizably in the same "look and feel" as
that of Mozilla, and of Netscape before that. In particular what I call
the "no-nonsense" Preferences (others have said "in-depth") is IMHO a
GoodThing™ as opposed to what I would call the "kiddie toy" look and
feel of the Fx/Tb Options. Let's not act as our ancestors did, but let's
act in the same grand style they did, and hope to meet the challenge of
our times with the same success they met theirs.
> Is merely throwing copies of Firefox
> and Thunderbird into the same process our goal?
Suite integration is certainly central to what makes SeaMonkey what it
is, but I don't think we should aim toward producing an empty shell
within which Firefox, Thunderbird, ChatZilla, etc. would exist virtually
unchanged. In particular, as I said above, I believe SeaMonkey has, and
should keep, a distinctive look and feel. We should certainly re-use
what we think is useful in the Fx/Tb code, and I think here more of the
backend (which in general I esteem) than of the frontend (which,
especially in Firefox3, has elements I definitely don't approve of).
> Is tight integration and
> breaking up borders between browser, mail, chat and maybe even web page
> creation our goal?
I'm not sure.
> Is overloading the UI with options almost nobody uses
> our goal? Or having everything a power-user regularly uses available as
> easily and fast as possible?
The problem here is, how can you be sure that nobody uses a given
option? I'd rather have an option that I don't use, rather than have an
option I _do_ use taken away from me because some developer decided with
no serious market study that "nobody uses it", which in many cases is
just a pretty thinly veiled variant of "I don't use it, therefore nobody
should use it".
> Is a strict structure of predefined UI our
> goal, or as fully customizable user experience?
I think that customizability is one of the main advantages of Mozilla
products generally over, for instance, IE and Konqueror; and I believe
that the transition to a "decent" addons manager similar to that of
Fx/Tb when going from Sm1 to Sm2 was an enormous progress: if only
because of that, I won't ever be going back from Sm2 to Sm1 (if, $DEITY
forbid, the Sm addons manager were discontinued tomorrow, I would go
back to Fx+Tb rather than to Sm1).
I would say our goal partakes of both the aims in your question above:
IMHO plain-vanilla out-of-the-box SeaMonkey should, in the absence of
add-ons, have a well-defined and stable UI including a choice of two
basically constant themes; but at the same time it should offer to
add-on authors facilities comparable to those offered by Fx/Tb, which
would hopefully mean that users would in the long run have a rich set of
available extensions and themes which each user could install, or not
(and enable or disable at any time even if installed), according to
his/her own preferences however wild (or however old-fashioned).
In conclusion: I believe that SeaMonkey should be neither a chaos nor a
straitjacket.
> Is SeaMonkey relevant at
> all in the long run? Why (not)?
What do you call relevant? It is certainly relevant to the people who
use it, and I believe (rightly or wrongly) that it hasn't yet reached
its equilibrium market share. So, yes, I believe SeaMonkey is relevant
in short, medium and long term, but I might very well be biased in that
opinion.
SeaMonkey might become even more relevant in the future if it became
better known, but in the present state of affairs I don't see any other
means to that purpose at the moment than word-of-mouth advertising,
which is inherently slow. It has however the advantage of its low cost
and of its exponential growth, in the (present) initial stages at least.
(Exponential growth does not necessarily mean high speed, it all depends
on the basis. The doubling rate if you will.)
>
> I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey community
> to take a few moments in a probably otherwise unused timeframe, let your
> thoughts circle around this topic a bit, perhaps take notes, and try to
> figure out where you want SeaMonkey to go in the long term, where you
> see those visions and why.
> We're trying to get a grip of what our core community thinks our
> high-level vision should be, feel free to give us any input you like on
> this. We want you all to take part in this, independent if you are a
> user or developer of SeaMonkey yet of just someone watching us closely.
> If we want to have a future with the project, we need to know where we
> want to be going - even with the nice product we are building here.
>
> It will be interesting to hear your thoughts and figure out where we all
> will be heading in the future!
>
> Robert Kaiser
>
>
> [followups to mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey as this is probably the best
> central place to develop such a vision that still is SeaMonkey-specific]
Best regards,
Tony.
--
If Helen Keller is alone in a forest and falls, does she make a sound?
Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo
> From my sad experience with anything computer,
> and as nothing more than a user, I say there should be one guiding
> principal, and that is K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Silly.
Keep It Simple SeaMonkey!
Old Sarge-John Boyle
other browsers, Seamonkey, being as it is already a very good and very
stable program, should aim at only those changes that make it better,
and thereby making it the program to use regardless of all the bells and
whistles others may have. There is an old axiom called K.I.S.S. or Keep
It Simple, Silly that should apply. By adding all sorts of things to
their product, you see what has happened to Vista, and the fact that it
is already being replaced, plus how many other programs have simply
disappeared! Just my opinion, of course. :-)
asmpgmr
K-Meleon's UI is vastly easier to customize than any other Gecko
browser. To add, delete or change a menu entry it is a simple matter
of editing menus.cfg and specifying the menu text, browser commands
and/or macros. To add, delete or change accelerators is just another
text file (accel.cfg) and the same is true for toolbars. To do any of
these things in SeaMonkey you have to either write an extension or
modify .jar files (which has to be redone each release). If you want
to hide a menu entry that can be done via userChrome.css though you
have to get the DOM name or class of what you want to hide. How are
either of these methods (extension or userChrome.css) easier than
simply editing text files ? Also I think having this sort of user
customizable UI coupled with a macro facility would eliminate the need
for many extensions.
Neil
>On 10/31/2008 3:30 AM, Manuel Reimer wrote:
>
>
>>You *could* use SeaMonkey twice with different profiles on the same machine. I don't know if this is what you want.
>>
>>
>That doesn't seem to work on a PC with Windows.
>
>
It's certainly easier on Linux, but it's also possible in Windows.
SeaMonkey 2.0a already supports the -no-remote startup option which
turns off the process sharing logic. With SeaMonkey 1.x it's harder; you
have to set an environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 when launching (a
batch file is the easiest way to achieve this).
--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.
Georg Maaß
> I think a good start would be to find out why people use SeaMonkey and
> not Firefox. It's not just the bundling of browser and mail/news.
This bundle is one reason but not the only.
In a few words: SeaMonkey is more complete.
It provides the most necessary applications like browser, email and
composer together with useful tools arranged in a way to not bother long
where in the GUI to find the tool.
> "Is conserving historic UI our goal?"
The "historic" UI for existing features and tools is good and well
known. Changes cause additional learning for long term users.
A new UI replacing an existing one does not result in any benefit but
causes a lot of work just for resolving already solved problems with the
result of delaying new features.
Tony Mechelynck
This means, Manuel, that in order to start SeaMonkey 2 with a second
existing profile (named, let's say, "new"), you would invoke it in the
following way (from a Dos Box or from the "Execute" box called from the
Start menu):
seamonkey -no-remote -P new
If SeaMonkey is not in your PATH you may have to replace seamonkey in
the above line with something more or less like "C:\Program
Files\Mozilla\SeaMonkey\seamonkey" (with the quotes, and since I'm not
on Windows I cannot be 100% sure that's the correct path -- you may have
to experiment).
For SeaMonkey 1 you would have to do it as follows, and only at a
dos-box prompt:
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
seamonkey -P new
(add a full path as above if seamonkey.exe is neither in your PATH nor
in the current directory).
Best regards,
Tony.
--
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will
seriously cramp his style.
Simon Paquet
>> What I would propose is forming a group of 1-3 UI experts (as
>> Firefox, Sunbird and Thunderbird have done) and establish a
>> process that will look at all of the current UI every 18-24
>> months and decide, whether certain UI elements are still
>> relevant in the current environment, whether UI elements can
>> be removed or whether new UI elements should be added.
>
> No, this would be horrible. It's one of the things that keep many
> of us away from Firefox and Thunderbird. It's too big a change
> from one version to another, and will drive complaints.
Please note what I actually said. I was proposing to revisit all
UI elements in a 18-24 month timeframe and decide on their continued
existence. The outcome could very well be, that nothing could be
changed or it could be that nothing a feature should be removed or
at least be made less prominent.
The thinking behind this is, that the web and other parts of the
internet evolve continuously at a very fast pace and a decision
that someone made 2/4/6 years ago, that was right at the time,
may very well be totally wrong today.
Georg Maaß
> As for prefs, it's always better to expose as many prefs as possible
> via the prefs UI in addition to using about:config. SeaMonkey seems to
> be more of a techie-oriented browser than Firefox and as a senior
> software engineer I appreciate this.
Yes, for those persons it provides many useful tools builtin like the
debugger, but even with all of them it consumes less disk space than FF
an TB together and for simple users they have to maintain but updating
only as single application (SM) instead of two (FF + TB). So it is
easier for simple user to keep their most used software browser and mail
client up to date because they have to update only a single application.
> Also does SeaMonkey need to copy everything from Firefox and
> Thunderbird ? Obviously the Mozilla people control Gecko and the
> backend toolkit
toolkit development does not care about non FF causing other apps
depending on toolkit to break from time to time, if they did
implementation changes.
> but SeaMonkey shouldn't simply be an integrated
> version of Firefox and Thunderbird, it should be its own entity.
It has the power of both and more but presents it in familiar UI that
much better fits the needs of power users.
> The biggest problem I see with SeaMonkey is that its always behind
> Firefox and Thunderbird.
This has to do with toolkit not taking care for non FF and probably also
with less human resources doing the port from old technology to toolkit.
But when this port has finished, I guess the delay between FF and SM
will no longer so large but will reduce to few days.
> Finally has the SeaMonkey council considered some sort of campaign to
> increase SeaMonkey's profile ? I've found that while most people know
> of Firefox, few know anything about SeaMonkey.
When I explain something to pupils where to specify an URL I always use
the URL www.seamonkey.at as sample URL to explain how to specify an URL.
If there are any questions related to browser compatibility I also
mention SeaMonkey explicitly as compatible. This is, what each of us can do.
> As for the future (SeaMonkey 3) here's a radical suggestion: how about
> going back to native OS interfaces as opposed to XUL to gain a degree
> of independence from Firefox ?
This would mean not to user toolkit and would therefore decrease
development speed because of the limited human resources. I don't
believe this being a good idea. But toolkit should better use the OS UI
behaviours even in XUL implementations.
Completely stupid is to make dependent windows display inside the
related window (MacOS only), which causes big trouble if a dependent
modal window causes an other modal dialog to be displayed by the windows
it depends on. In such a situation the modal dialog is completely
covered by the modal window. So the user can not see it and can not
close it resulting in the application to hang, because he has no chance
to proceed. On Windows you can move the covering window to some where
else to access the modal dialog but on Mac OS you can not move the modal
dialog window. So the toolkit should change the implementation there to
keep windows always movable.
Georg Maaß
> In particular what I call
> the "no-nonsense" Preferences (others have said "in-depth") is IMHO a
> GoodThing™ as opposed to what I would call the "kiddie toy" look and
> feel of the Fx/Tb Options.
Yes that part of FF is kiddie and confusing. The preferences UI from NN,
Mozilla and SeaMonkey is more clear, it is for adults.
>> maybe even web page
>> creation our goal?
>
> I'm not sure.
A HTML document is not necessarily a web page, but a generally rich text
document in many cases enough and therefore often making MS-Word obsolete.
>
>> Is overloading the UI with options almost nobody uses
>> our goal? Or having everything a power-user regularly uses available as
>> easily and fast as possible?
>
> The problem here is, how can you be sure that nobody uses a given
> option? I'd rather have an option that I don't use, rather than have an
> option I _do_ use taken away from me because some developer decided with
> no serious market study that "nobody uses it", which in many cases is
> just a pretty thinly veiled variant of "I don't use it, therefore nobody
> should use it".
The options available actually in the preferences UI are a good choise.
People needing more can use the about:config. But if there is something
important missing in the preferences GUI, we can request for adding also
to the preferences UI instead of making it acessable only via
about:config. At the moment I do not miss any in SM.
> SeaMonkey might become even more relevant in the future if it became
> better known, but in the present state of affairs I don't see any other
> means to that purpose at the moment than word-of-mouth advertising,
> which is inherently slow. It has however the advantage of its low cost
> and of its exponential growth, in the (present) initial stages at least.
It also again become more relevant, when 2.0 is released stable. At the
moment I need for web development FF additional, but when I can use SM
2.0 productive, I can throw away FF.
Sledge Hammer
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
>> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
>> the SeaMonkey project.
Hi Everybody,
as another user, who just lurks here (I have never programmed anything for SM/MZ
and only ever filed a single bug) I would like to add my $0.02 to the discussion.
From my perspective these should be the priorities of the SM devs and
programmers (this view is worth exactly what you paid for it) :)
1) We must have a feature complete SM2 (a beta) before the year is out, or the
SM user base will continue to erode. That would be bad. Do not loose sight of
the importance of this. It cannot be overstated!
2) In the future (SM3 and beyond) the most important thing is to leverage the
Firefox and Thunderbird code base. I.e. no matter what user interface SM
presents and no matter how much configurability is offered to the user, SM MUST
be able to use FX and TB back end code. Only this will allow for the direct
usage and/or easy portability of extensions from FX/TB, ensuring the continued
survival of the Suite. SM does not have enough devs to do things like maintain
OS specific UIs and such. I would be madness to try that.
3) As a user I would like to see the continued gentle evolution of the UI as has
been done in the past. Put new stuff in where necessary, but keep the changes on
the low side.
4) Integration. The suites biggest strength and the main reason I have used it
and its predecessors all these years. The ability to click on a mail attachement
(say a .pdf) and have it open in a browser window directly is unbeatable. Its
the suites raison d'etre and obviously must be maintained and improved.
5) I also would like to have the option to get to the more advanced
configuration switches more easily. I consider myself a poweruser (which I
believe is the general target audience for the suite) and one of the things I
would like to see is a menuentry (maybe under help) that points to about:config
and about:config to be just a little more userfriendly and navigable. In general
I believe in making as many things a possible switchable and configurable ONCE
THE USER HAS GOTTEN USED TO THE BASICS. I think at installation the suite should
be both configurable (i.e. select what modules to install) and simple (i.e.
sane, safe and simple default prefs at first start), while the ability to
configure to your hearts content should only be one mouse-click away (i.e. prefs
and about:config; add-ons).
So there you have it. Any thoughts, replies and questions are appreciated. All
the best,
Hammer
Tony Mechelynck
> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
[KaiRo wrote:]
[...]
>>> Is overloading the UI with options almost nobody uses
>>> our goal? Or having everything a power-user regularly uses available as
>>> easily and fast as possible?
>>
>> The problem here is, how can you be sure that nobody uses a given
>> option? I'd rather have an option that I don't use, rather than have
>> an option I _do_ use taken away from me because some developer decided
>> with no serious market study that "nobody uses it", which in many
>> cases is just a pretty thinly veiled variant of "I don't use it,
>> therefore nobody should use it".
>
> The options available actually in the preferences UI are a good choise.
> People needing more can use the about:config. But if there is something
> important missing in the preferences GUI, we can request for adding also
> to the preferences UI instead of making it acessable only via
> about:config. At the moment I do not miss any in SM.
Neither do I; but I shudder at the idea of having maybe esoteric options
(but ones that I use) removed from the Preferences or, worse, from
about:config without warning, then, after someone belatedly complains,
maybe with a "regression" bug, get the reply: "Nobody used it, and
anyway it wasn't discoverable. In any case we removed it and we aren't
adding it back, that's final: RESOLVED INVALID", as happened more than
once at Firefox not so long ago.
>
>> SeaMonkey might become even more relevant in the future if it became
>> better known, but in the present state of affairs I don't see any
>> other means to that purpose at the moment than word-of-mouth
>> advertising, which is inherently slow. It has however the advantage of
>> its low cost and of its exponential growth, in the (present) initial
>> stages at least.
>
> It also again become more relevant, when 2.0 is released stable. At the
> moment I need for web development FF additional, but when I can use SM
> 2.0 productive, I can throw away FF.
Yes. Being retired, I'm not concerned with "professional use" questions
anymore, but, as is evident in the parts you snipped in my previous
post, it's SeaMonkey 2, not SeaMonkey 1, which I regard as relevant,
even in the short run and obviously even more so in the long run.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that I would throw away Firefox --
keeping several different browsers has its advantages and at the moment
I have Sm2, Fx2 and Kq3 all open on my desktop, and I keep Lynx where I
can easily get at it -- but with me Thunderbird has already gone the way
Outlook Express went when Tb1.0 was first released. I'm still following
some Tb RFE bugs though, they may have an influence on where we may want
or not want to steer SeaMonkey MailNews to in the medium term. The above
should not be construed as a slur against Thunderbird -- it is quite a
good mail/news client and in fact, if SeaMonkey MailNews is as good as
it is, it's because it shares most of its backend and some of its
frontend code with Thunderbird, hence mutual cross-pollination and
bugfixing teamwork.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
236. You start saving URL's in your digital watch.
Benoit Renard
> browser. To add, delete or change a menu entry it is a simple matter
> of editing menus.cfg and specifying the menu text, browser commands
> and/or macros. To add, delete or change accelerators is just another
> text file (accel.cfg) and the same is true for toolbars.
What about everything else? What if I want to add a fancy background
image to the main window? Or add a dropdown box with its own logic next
to the location bar?
What's programmed to be changed is easy to change. But anything else...
> To do any of these things in SeaMonkey you have to either write an
> extension or modify .jar files (which has to be redone each release).
The macro language can also change. I know it happened at least once.
asmpgmr
Benoit Renard wrote:
> > K-Meleon's UI is vastly easier to customize than any other Gecko
> > browser. To add, delete or change a menu entry it is a simple matter
> > of editing menus.cfg and specifying the menu text, browser commands
> > and/or macros. To add, delete or change accelerators is just another
> > text file (accel.cfg) and the same is true for toolbars.
>
> What about everything else? What if I want to add a fancy background
> image to the main window? Or add a dropdown box with its own logic next
> to the location bar?
>
content area ? What would be the point of that as it would be
obscured.
>
> > To do any of these things in SeaMonkey you have to either write an
> > extension or modify .jar files (which has to be redone each release).
>
> The macro language can also change. I know it happened at least once.
True but I think a macro facility is better than the existing
extension system which is esoteric and overblown. As it stands now
even simple UI changes require an extension unless you want to
modify .jar files and redo the mods which every release you install.
Also extensions have gotten out of hand where there a few good
extensions and a lot of pointless and mediocre ones and often times
users complain about extensions conflicting with one another and not
working after an update. I think anything that is considered
universally useful like controlling Javascript permissions on a per-
site basis should be integrated into the browser and configurable via
UI and of course about:config.
Neil
> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
I differentiate this from /preserving/ historic UI, which would mean
leaving it unchanged except when something breaks. So the new prefwindow
is a good example of our conservation effort.
Tony Mechelynck
Maybe you'd like the MR-Tech Toolkit extension. It is compatible with
Sm2 and, among many other poweruser-friendly tools, it includes a "Help
=> About => about:config" menuitem.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Ask Not for whom the Bell Tolls, and You will Pay only the
Station-to-Station rate.
Robert Kaiser
> On 31/10/08 17:08, Georg Maaß wrote:
>> The options available actually in the preferences UI are a good choise.
>> People needing more can use the about:config. But if there is something
>> important missing in the preferences GUI, we can request for adding also
>> to the preferences UI instead of making it acessable only via
>> about:config. At the moment I do not miss any in SM.
>
> Neither do I; but I shudder at the idea of having maybe esoteric options
> (but ones that I use) removed from the Preferences or, worse, from
> about:config without warning, then, after someone belatedly complains,
> maybe with a "regression" bug, get the reply: "Nobody used it, and
> anyway it wasn't discoverable. In any case we removed it and we aren't
> adding it back, that's final: RESOLVED INVALID", as happened more than
> once at Firefox not so long ago.
I don't think we'll remove about:config options unless backend changes
that have larger benefits don't allow those settings either temporarily
or even long-term. I hesitate to take away configurability anywhere, so
I'm not saying this lightheartedly at all, and we'll keep options _at
least_ in about:config for sure where we have control of the code. Due
to having a relatively small team, we should get rid of code that we
cannot maintain well and that has a better maintained equivalent in
toolkit (see places for example), which might even have feature we want
to tap into or at least provide for extensions to use.
With respect to UI prefs, I think we really should go and look at those
we have, and add some that are missing, maybe removing some from the UI
and make them available only through about:config when they are very
niche and not widely enough used.
I'm very much of the opinion that no normal user should really need
about:config, and UI prefs that actually explain values are better than
somewhat cryptic about:config is. In some cases though, UI prefs are
more confusing than helpful and overloading UI prefs too much makes it
easier for normal users to mess up their software and harder to find the
options they really need. IMHO, the "HTTP Networking" panel is
questionable nowdays, for example. That said, such details are not
actually what the high-level goals coming out of this thread are about.
Robert Kaiser
Robert Kaiser
> one of the
> things I would like to see is a menuentry (maybe under help) that points
> to about:config and about:config to be just a little more userfriendly
> and navigable.
I strongly believe if you have to go into about:config regularly, we
have a bug. Every such setting that triggers you to do that often enough
should probably be in UI prefs, feel free to file bugs on those.
Robert Kaiser
Michael Wolf
> I think a good start would be to find out why people use SeaMonkey and
> not Firefox. It's not just the bundling of browser and mail/news.
And I think a good start would be to find out why people use Firefox
(and Thunderbird) and not SeaMonkey. They use it though there isn't a
bundling of browser and mail/news. Why?
It seems that Firefox has much more users they use it than SeaMonkey.
Are there any statistics about the number of users for SeaMonkey and
Firefox/Thunderbird? Do all users who use Firefox use Thunderbird as
well? Or do they use Firefox because they have another mail client and
therefore don't need a suite with integrated mail client? Or are there
still other reasons?
I'm the localizer for Upper Sorbian and Esperanto. I have a little
questionnaire on my websites for Esperanto and Upper Sorbian where I ask
which of my localized programs are used. Unfortunately SeaMonkey is
very, very seldom between the answers. Why? I think one reason is the
marketing resp. information policy we do for SM generally and I do for
my translations. I think one reason is that SeaMonkey isn't much known.
Well, the little target group of Sorbian users is easy to overlook but I
think my observation is true of SeaMonkey in general as well.
Regards,
Michael
asmpgmr
I normally run with Javascript restricted via a whitelist via the
following prefs:
capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled = noAccess
capability.policy.jsok.javascript.enabled = jsok
capability.policy.policynames = jsok
capability.policy.jsok.sites = <list of good sites>
If I ever want to turn Javascript on for a specific I have to go into
about:config and either add it to my whitelist or change
capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled to allAccess (and set it
back to noAccess later). Oh yeah and I have to edit config.js in
toolkit.jar to remove the ridiculous "avoid displaying private prefs"
code which hides the capability prefs for no good reason (bug 284673).
I don't mind going into about:config to modify my whitelist but it
would be nice if this was exposed in the UI (prefs panel or pageinfo
perhaps). What I would really like is a menu selection to toggle
Javascript on and off (change pref
capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled between allAccess and
noAccess). This is one of the things that can be done easily with K-
Meleon but not SeaMonkey or other Gecko browsers.
Also the CAPS stuff is largely unknown by most users because there is
no exposed UI for any of it and of course the annoying config.js code
which hides it from about:config. Shouldn't this stuff be exposed ?
Benoit Renard
No. Relatively few of them use both. Thunderbird actually isn't that
popular. If it was, the Mozilla/Firefox Corporation wouldn't have
dropped it.
> Or do they use Firefox because they have another mail client and
> therefore don't need a suite with integrated mail client? Or are there
> still other reasons?
Most users use webmail.
> I think one reason is that SeaMonkey isn't much known.
Bingo.
Benoit Renard
> content area ? What would be the point of that as it would be
> obscured.
No, the window that holds the content area. That it's pointless is
irrelevant. It's just an example anyway.
> Also extensions have gotten out of hand where there a few good
> extensions and a lot of pointless and mediocre ones and often times
> users complain about extensions conflicting with one another and not
> working after an update.
Is this what they call a strawman argument? Just because lots of people
make bad extensions doesn't make the extensions as a whole bad. There
are always lots of people doing things wrong.
Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo
> Most users use webmail.
speak for yourself. I have over 50 accounts and each
one of them is a pop account. I only know a few handful
of people who use webmail. Everyone else I know use a
mail program of some sort, mostly OE
Tony Mechelynck
> Benoit Renard wrote:
>
>> Most users use webmail.
>
> speak for yourself. I have over 50 accounts and each one of them is a
> pop account. I only know a few handful of people who use webmail.
> Everyone else I know use a mail program of some sort, mostly OE
>
I don't have that many accounts (only 4 of them, not including the
"Movemail" account used only for mail from software components running
on this computer) but they are all POP accounts too. I only use webmail
when I have to, e.g. in order to tell people from an Internet café that
my home computer is down. Otherwise I've been using Outlook Express,
Netscape Mail (was it 4.75 or already 6?), Thunderbird, and now
Seamonkey Mail. I have met people who use webmail a lot (and I include
the Google Groups in that category when accessed by HTTP) but personally
I hate webmail.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Bipolar, adj.:
Refers to someone who has homes in Nome, Alaska, and Buffalo,
New York
Benoit Renard
>
>> Most users use webmail.
>
> speak for yourself.
BZZT! I have one POP e-mail address that I access with SeaMonkey Mail,
and a Hotmail account for throw-away or less important stuff. I'm hardly
speaking for myself. Webmail is just really popular.
John Boyle
> Hi,
>
> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
> the SeaMonkey project.
>
> vision behind all that. For SeaMonkey 2, it's pretty clear what we are
> aiming for (see e.g.
> http://home.kairo.at/blog/2007-10/goals_for_seamonkey_2_my_view for my
> views on that), as we're trying to migrate our suite to the modernized
> Mozilla platform while keeping the product very near to what it was,
> only beefing it up with a number of features others already have.
> Once that's done and we'll be both very much the same as what
> SeaMonkey was before but at the same time on nearly the same level as
> Firefox and Thunderbird when it comes to new features, then the
> current immediate goals will not apply any more. To not run out of a
> vision at that point, we need high-level directions, goals that lead
> us like stars on the horizon, they should not be tied to a version 2,
> 3, 4 or whatever but be very much what the whole project is aiming for.
>
> There are several questions that we can use to start our thoughts
> about this, for example those I already mentioned on my blog:
>
> Is conserving historic UI our goal? Is merely throwing copies of
> Firefox and Thunderbird into the same process our goal? Is tight
> integration and breaking up borders between browser, mail, chat and
> structure of predefined UI our goal, or as fully customizable user
> experience? Is SeaMonkey relevant at all in the long run? Why (not)?
>
> I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey
> community to take a few moments in a probably otherwise unused
> timeframe, let your thoughts circle around this topic a bit, perhaps
> take notes, and try to figure out where you want SeaMonkey to go in
> the long term, where you see those visions and why.
> We're trying to get a grip of what our core community thinks our
> high-level vision should be, feel free to give us any input you like
> on this. We want you all to take part in this, independent if you are
> a user or developer of SeaMonkey yet of just someone watching us
> closely. If we want to have a future with the project, we need to know
> where we want to be going - even with the nice product we are building
> here.
>
> It will be interesting to hear your thoughts and figure out where we
> all will be heading in the future!
>
> Robert Kaiser
>
>
> [followups to mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey as this is probably the best
> central place to develop such a vision that still is SeaMonkey-specific]
S(whatever you want to fill in here, :-D ) because most software that
tended to get too elaborate has fallen by the wayside, witness Vista,
for example! Of course, that is my opinion, and I am only a computer
user! :-)
--
Old Sarge, prefer using voice dictation because of my arthritis!
Justin Wood (Callek)
> Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo, 30-10-2008 22:11:
>> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like everyone who considers himself part of the SeaMonkey community
>>
>> according to Gerv I have no business whatsoever in participating in this
>> sort of discussion, since I don't file bugs on bugzilla, and that the
>> Mozilla community is for people working on the Mozilla project.
>>
>
> The "Mozilla project" is not the same as the "SeaMonkey community".
>
Agreed, even if I disagree with [some of] your (Peter)'s views in other
venue's, I at least still care about them in this regard.
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Steve Wendt
> Please note what I actually said. I was proposing to revisit all
> UI elements in a 18-24 month timeframe and decide on their continued
> existence.
>
> The thinking behind this is, that the web and other parts of the
> internet evolve continuously at a very fast pace and a decision
> that someone made 2/4/6 years ago, that was right at the time,
> may very well be totally wrong today.
To put this in perspective, one example is the options for allowing SSL
versions 1 and 2; they are obsolete, because the protocols are obsolete.
Michael Ströder
> On 10/30/08 11:11 PM, _Ed Mullen_ spoke thusly:
>> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>>
>>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>>
>
> I disagree. Changing legacy UI does not equal adopting
> Firefox/Thunderbird UI. One of the things SeaMonkey users prefer about
> SeaMonkey is the fact that the UI is more in-depth. The UI can be
> changed to tailor to that preference. For example, what if the
> Preferences window had a panel for about:config? Perhaps the Plugins
> section of the Add-ons window can include info like MIME-types and DLL
> locations.
I think conserving historic UI does not preclude detail changes in the
UI. Your detail suggestions makes sense to me but as overall vision I'd
prefer not conceptually changing the UI.
Ciao, Michael. (also a user of the "Classic" theme)
Michael Ströder
> On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:32:38 -0700 (PDT), asmpgmr wrote:
>
>> Finally has the SeaMonkey council considered some sort of campaign to
>> increase SeaMonkey's profile ? I've found that while most people know
>> of Firefox, few know anything about SeaMonkey.
>
> Firefox has a (paid) team, and I think Mozilla Messaging (Thunderbird)
> has something in the plans. Our current problems are basically that we
> are a very small, and *unpaid* group of developers. None of us has any
> marketing nor PR skills. We need a separate Marketing team in charge of
> Evangelism, PR, and Marketing with experience and skill in these areas.
> Now Firefox/Mozilla Com can afford to hire professional PR and marketing
> people. Now we obviously can't match this but can an unpaid volunteer
> community effort organize at least something? I would prefer this
> hypothetical team to be more on the non-techie side to better understand
> the user mindset. For example you and I had this flame war recently
> because I'm a sad anorak who doesn't understand the concerns of end users.
I don't think that a separate marketing team is needed. All friends and
family members where I installed their PC are happily using Seamonkey
(~10 people, most of them on Windows XP, some on Windows Vista and one
each on openSUSE Linux and Mac OS X). So having good functional software
at hand to install on friends' PCs is enough marketing.
Ciao, Michael.
Michael Ströder
> One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
> think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
> perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
> their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
> and the choices that they've made.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
I for myself am using Seamonkey for my daily work. And I'm really
thankful that I can get my job done without all the Firefox/Thunderbird
bloat.
> You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
> and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
I am *for* security, privacy and choice of functionality.
Is that enough "for something"? ;-)
Ciao, Michael.
Michael Ströder
> We're trying very hard to get there. Most of the core community is
> actually very much there, as you probably know. I tend to recommend
> Firefox and Thunderbird to novices and SeaMonkey to advanced users
From my experience in both cases you have to help novices to get their
system up and running anyway. After that they can use Seamonkey as
easily as Firefox/Thunderbird.
Ciao, Michael.
Michael Ströder
Well, that's a very broad statement. In *one* customer project I have to
tweak network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris for SPNEGO/Kerberos SSO. I'm
pretty sure many people would consider a prefs UI for this option being
bloat.
Hmm, so it'd be helpful to have kind of an online help for about:config.
Right-clicking the option and choosing "Online-Help" taking you to a web
page where the option and its values are explained in detail. But that's
rather a common Mozilla project than a vision for Seamonkey.
Ciao, Michael.
Bill Davidsen
> David E. Ross wrote:
>> Change for the sake of change is not necessarily good.
>
> I fully agree - but then there are things one can and should change and
> there are things that shouldn't be changed. For example, I'm pretty sure
> Coca-Cola uses different production techniques and different marketing
> than in earlier times. Actually, even the product itself is far from
> what it was when it was invented, e.g. not containing Cocain or Alcohol
> nowadays ;-)
>
Not from the factory, at any rate. ;-)
--
Bill Davidsen <davi...@tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
Bill Davidsen
> Hi,
>
> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
> the SeaMonkey project.
>
harmonious package which provides all of the features I *need*, many which I
find useful, and which contains no glitches which piss me off frequently. Even
at the 1.1.12 level SM ..almost.. meets that description.
The benefit of nice coherent profiles for various needs more than outweighs the
marginal benefit of features in a pile of independent "best of breed" solutions.
And having said that, there are three things which *do* annoy me on a daily
basis, and which drive me to use something else to address one of them.
RSS: TBird handles RSS feeds like a newsfeed. I have a copy of TBird running,
because I track about 70 feeds. SM doesn't handle RSS at all, and none of the
aggregators really produces anything I find easy to use.
Watched threads: one of my most used features to help track things I find useful
(or interesting). I don't miss things I need to see, I can just looked at
watched threads if I'm in a hurry, and SM doesn't implement it in mail, where it
would have all the same benefits.
Saving of passwords: I understand all the drawbacks of having passwords in clear
text. Also the cost of reading them off a screen and typing them into a spread
sheet by hand. As long as there are clients and organizations who require this,
it is going to be necessary, and using extensions is not an answer, because (a)
they have to be vetted and (b) they stop working regularly. Oh and (c) it's far
easier to move a few passwords if csv format is supported for export and import.
Bill Davidsen
> I posted this on the blog but I'll repost it here for the discussion
> and add some further thoughts
>
> ****
>
> I'm a SeaMonkey user and used Mozilla Suite before that and Netscape
> Communicator before that. SeaMonkey is the true evolution of this
> lineage and its UI should remain basically the same. I also appreciate
> the fact that it has an integrated email client. There should always
> be at least one major browser suite which provides in all-in-one
> solution though it should also allow users to select which components
> they install (mailnews, editor, chat) and allow them to be added
> later.
>
...
> As for the future (SeaMonkey 3) here's a radical suggestion: how about
> going back to native OS interfaces as opposed to XUL to gain a degree
> of independence from Firefox ? Netscape Communicator used native OS
> interfaces for the OSes it supported. While this would require some
> extra work, a lot of the coding effort would only have to be done once
> for each OS and perhaps some of the work done in K-Meleon (Win32) and
> Galeon (Linux/Unix) could be used in the effort. Also using native OS
> interfaces would result in less overhead and allow a higher degree of
> user customization of the UI. K-Meleon which is a Win32 specific Gecko
> browser is probably the least resource intensive and most configurable
> Gecko browser of them all. You can easily customize the menus,
> toolbars and accelerators via simple text files and it has a powerful
> macro facility allowing you to do things which would require an
> extension in other Gecko browsers. Better ability to customize the UI
> elements, a macro facility and less resource usage would definitely be
> nice things to see in the future.
One advantage of this would be that the support for old operating systems
wouldn't be lost, once the interface was written.
And for a wild thought, have one "native" environment be XUL. That way any new
support added would immediately be available to SM, without needing extra effort.
The problem with this is that the user base thus served may be too small to be a
good use of resources.
Bill Davidsen
They probably cost nothing to maintain, and in a population the size of the
Internet, obsolete doesn't imply unused.
Justin Wood (Callek)
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Following the mentioning of this in my last weekly update blog post, I
>> want to get some input here about your thoughts of long-term goals of
>> the SeaMonkey project.
>>
> What I want from seamonkey, and perhaps the whole reason for a suite, is
> one harmonious package which provides all of the features I *need*, many
> which I find useful, and which contains no glitches which piss me off
> frequently. Even at the 1.1.12 level SM ..almost.. meets that description.
>
> The benefit of nice coherent profiles for various needs more than
> outweighs the marginal benefit of features in a pile of independent
> "best of breed" solutions.
>
> And having said that, there are three things which *do* annoy me on a
> daily basis, and which drive me to use something else to address one of
> them.
>
> RSS: TBird handles RSS feeds like a newsfeed. I have a copy of TBird
> running, because I track about 70 feeds. SM doesn't handle RSS at all,
> and none of the aggregators really produces anything I find easy to use.
Coming for SM2, definately on the "mailnews" side, and we have feed
discovery like FF. No preview/livemarks yet (as in Firefox) But I hope
to be able to complete that end of it before SM2 is released.
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Robert Kaiser
> It seems that Firefox has much more users they use it than SeaMonkey.
Sure, Firefox is a mass market product for novice users while SeaMonkey
is a nice market product for advanced and power users, so you can't
compare user numbers.
> Are there any statistics about the number of users for SeaMonkey and
> Firefox/Thunderbird?
There are stats of sorts for all products that use the new add-ons
system with the blocklist feature (the app looks daily for a new
blocklist) and stats can be created for all apps that have the
auto-update feature due to checking for updates daily - of course,
people who deactivate those features fly under the radar, but that's
usually a minority.
SeaMonkey 1.x has no such stats though, so it's hard to compare stuff.
> Do all users who use Firefox use Thunderbird as
> well? Or do they use Firefox because they have another mail client and
> therefore don't need a suite with integrated mail client? Or are there
> still other reasons?
I know that amyn people use Firefox as "their email client" through
webmail, and lots of people have only FF and no TB installed.
But SeaMonkey is not the same as FF+TB and IMHO should never try to be
that, as then there's no point in doing our own development.
Robert Kaiser
Simon Paquet
>> One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
>> think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
>> perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
>> their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
>> and the choices that they've made.
>
> I don't see what's wrong with that.
Yes, that is pretty apparent from the rest of your post, where it's
pretty clear that you misunderstood me.
> I for myself am using Seamonkey for my daily work. And I'm really
> thankful that I can get my job done without all the
> Firefox/Thunderbird bloat.
That's great. Congratulations. But this has nothing to do with what
I was talking about. I was talking about the attitude in some parts
of the SeaMonkey community, that says that pretty much everything
that FX or TB is automatically the work of the devil, but nothing
happens after that.
Nobody or just a few people stand up and try to show the FX or TB
crowd "how it's done right". That's my point. Being against something
because you think it sucks is pretty easy. But to stand up, take out
the few good ideas and make them not suck in the larger scheme of
things is way harder and that is an attitude, that more people in
the SeaMonkey community should adapt. Fortunately, the project
leadership (especially Robert) already get it.
>> You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
>> and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
>
> I am *for* security, privacy and choice of functionality.
That is not a vision. This is so generic, that pretty much every
browser or mail client producer could sign that statement. Because
nobody is against security, privacy and choice of functionality.
It only becomes a vision, if you specify more clearly how that relates
to SeaMonkey and how you plan to get there.
Simon
--
Thunderbird/Calendar Localization (L10n) Coordinator
Calendar website maintainer: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar
Calendar developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar
Simon Paquet
>>> Please note what I actually said. I was proposing to revisit all
>>> UI elements in a 18-24 month timeframe and decide on their continued
>>> existence.
>>>
>>> The thinking behind this is, that the web and other parts of the
>>> internet evolve continuously at a very fast pace and a decision
>>> that someone made 2/4/6 years ago, that was right at the time,
>>> may very well be totally wrong today.
>>
>> To put this in perspective, one example is the options for allowing
>> SSL versions 1 and 2; they are obsolete, because the protocols are
>> obsolete.
>
> They probably cost nothing to maintain
Every bit of UI costs.
- It costs eye movement, when a user opens up a dialog and scans it
for a fraction of a second, when he is looking for the right
setting.
- It also costs developer time, when a developer is working on the
dialog and has to wade through all the code that is unrelated to
the function he is looking for.
- And it also costs load time every time you load up the dialog.
It may only be a fraction of a second, but those fractions add
up over the years.
Nothing is for free, not even unmaintained UI code.
Steve Wendt
>> As for the future (SeaMonkey 3) here's a radical suggestion: how about
>> going back to native OS interfaces as opposed to XUL
>
> One advantage of this would be that the support for old operating
> systems wouldn't be lost, once the interface was written.
The support for older operating systems wasn't "lost" because of XUL, so
this wouldn't change anything.
Steve Wendt
>> To put this in perspective, one example is the options for allowing
>> SSL versions 1 and 2; they are obsolete, because the protocols are
>> obsolete.
>
> They probably cost nothing to maintain, and in a population the size of
> the Internet, obsolete doesn't imply unused.
What you probably fail to realize, is that these options no longer exist
even in Seamonkey 1.1.x, and yet no one is complaining they miss them.
Simon Paquet
> Are there any statistics about the number of users for SeaMonkey and
> Firefox/Thunderbird?
The ones I know say, that around 200 million people use Firefox, and
roughly 12-15 million users use Thunderbird.
No idea on SeaMonkey.. From what I've seen from the download numbers,
I would estimate the number of SeaMonkey users somewhere between
300,000 and 600,000 users. Robert may have better numbers, though.
> Do all users who use Firefox use Thunderbird as well?
No. Firefox is much more popular than Thunderbird, which in turn is
way more popular than SeaMonkey.
Simon Paquet
>>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>>
>> I believe that being a bit more conservative in your UI decisions
>> is totally fine and fits well with your current userbase. Still,
>> being conservative does not mean being reactionary and change
>> nothing at all.
>
> Right. Change is definitely something we need or we just wouldn't
> need to develop at all. We need to drive evolution of the
> suite - the question is just the actual direction to go, the
> guidelines behind this change.
I personally believe - and what I see in this thread validates this -
that unless someone (most likely you) comes up with a certain
guideline and sticks with it, there will be no such thing. This is
called leadership :-)
Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
I hope my post was a bit more helpful in this regard, even though I
have to admit, that at least parts of my initial reply where probably
also off-topic.
It is my firm opinion, that someone (most likely you) needs to come
up with a plan, a mission statement or maybe just a 3-liner, which
will cause people to rally behind you.
This is actually one of the major points that Firefox did right
from the start. They had clear leadership (unlike the Suite) and
you could see this already in the first pre-release builds. This
is one of the main reasons that Firefox became so successful even
before the marketing efforts started.
I see the same thing starting to happen in the Thunderbird community
right now (hopefully with the same positive outcome), so IMO this is
something that SeaMonkey needs to emulate.
Philip Chee
> RSS: TBird handles RSS feeds like a newsfeed. I have a copy of TBird running,
> because I track about 70 feeds. SM doesn't handle RSS at all, and none of the
> aggregators really produces anything I find easy to use.
On the way. Keep an eye on:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255834>
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Here Tag! C'mon Tag! Good Tag. Good boy!
* TagZilla 0.066.6
Tony Mechelynck
From what I see in various places (not only within this newsgroup),
Kairo's leadership is clear enough, even if (or maybe because) he tends
to be King Log rather than King Stork AFAICT. What SeaMonkey needs, and
what IMHO Robert provides, is "enlightened conservatism". A chaos of
constant innovation would, I think, be one sure way to frighten away a
large percentage of the current SeaMonkey community.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
Tony Mechelynck
> Simon Paquet wrote:
>> One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
>> think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
>> perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
>> their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
>> and the choices that they've made.
>
> I don't see what's wrong with that.
> I for myself am using Seamonkey for my daily work. And I'm really
> thankful that I can get my job done without all the Firefox/Thunderbird
> bloat.
I'm not really against Fx/Tb. I like SeaMonkey better though; maybe I
would say that I see in it an integrated model of what Fx & Tb ought to
be -- its developers were wise enough to avoid some of what I regard as
the worst blemishes of Firefox (especially Fx3) and Thunderbird.
>
>> You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
>> and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
>
> I am *for* security, privacy and choice of functionality.
> Is that enough "for something"? ;-)
>
> Ciao, Michael.
- I'm for stability (which should not be confused with a frozen denial
of progress). I believe SeaMonkey provides overall a good "recognizable"
tool for meeting present-day Internet-related challenges.
- I'm for a reasonably fast bug-fixing cycle. I don't think this is a
criterion for choosing SeaMonkey over Fx+Tb or vice-versa, since they
have a lot of code in common and any fix in that common code affects all
applications using it; but it sure is a criterion for choosing Mozilla
in preference to Microsoft-Megabucks.
- I'm for a good quality/price ratio. Again, MZ > M$.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
LEO (July 23 - Aug 22)
Your determination and sense of humor will come to the fore.
Your ability to laugh at adversity will be a blessing because
you've got a day coming you wouldn't believe. As a matter of
fact, if you can laugh at what happens to you today, you've got
a sick sense of humor.
Michael Ströder
> Michael Ströder wrote on 01. Nov 2008:
>
>>> One thing that I should add at the end is, that you should also
>>> think about a evolution in your community culture. From my
>>> perspective a lot of users in your community define themselves or
>>> their choice of SeaMonkey by being *against* Firefox/Thunderbird
>>> and the choices that they've made.
>>
>> I don't see what's wrong with that.
>
> Yes, that is pretty apparent from the rest of your post, where it's
> pretty clear that you misunderstood me.
>
>> I for myself am using Seamonkey for my daily work. And I'm really
>> thankful that I can get my job done without all the
>> Firefox/Thunderbird bloat.
>
> That's great. Congratulations. But this has nothing to do with what
> I was talking about. I was talking about the attitude in some parts
> of the SeaMonkey community, that says that pretty much everything
> that FX or TB is automatically the work of the devil, but nothing
> happens after that.
Maybe you misunderstood me? I'm not saying this in *general*. This would
be dumb. But the question was for a vision without going into the
details. And one of the reasons I prefer Seamonkey over
Firefox/Thunderbird is that I'm against the bloat and the changes in the
UI done there. I'm against taking away control over Internet usage from
the user.
>>> You should work towards a culture, where you are *for* something
>>> and IMO your vision post already reflects that.
>>
>> I am *for* security, privacy and choice of functionality.
>
> That is not a vision. This is so generic, that pretty much every
> browser or mail client producer could sign that statement.
I'm not so sure about that. Especially there are different views
regarding privacy. :-/
> Because nobody is against security, privacy and choice of
> functionality.
Well, Firefox claims to import my Seamonkey profile when started the
first time. But guess what? From what I can see cookie and image
permissions are silently ignored. So my work adjusting privacy is thrown
away. I guess the Firefox people don't want to bother the advertisement
industry. You think it's simply bad attitude to dislike that?
Additionally I'd like to see more UI elements around X.509 cert usage
making things more usable around using S/MIME. I could go into detail if
needed later.
Ciao, Michael.
Tony Mechelynck
[...]
> Hmm, so it'd be helpful to have kind of an online help for about:config.
> Right-clicking the option and choosing "Online-Help" taking you to a web
> page where the option and its values are explained in detail. But that's
> rather a common Mozilla project than a vision for Seamonkey.
>
> Ciao, Michael.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
Some options have their own article. You can see which ones by noticing
which option names are links in the above page, or you can try accessing
the option's own page and see if there is one.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Adore, v.:
To venerate expectantly.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Tony Mechelynck
[...]
> Saving of passwords: I understand all the drawbacks of having passwords
> in clear text. Also the cost of reading them off a screen and typing
> them into a spread sheet by hand. As long as there are clients and
> organizations who require this, it is going to be necessary, and using
> extensions is not an answer, because (a) they have to be vetted and (b)
> they stop working regularly. Oh and (c) it's far easier to move a few
> passwords if csv format is supported for export and import.
>
Have you tried using the Password Manager? "Tools => Preferences =>
Privacy & Security => Passwords => [x] Remember Passwords", then
whenever you type in a password by hand you're asked if you want to
remember this particular password, with three buttons (I don't remember
the exact text but they amount to Yes/Not now/Never for this site).
Best regards,
Tony.
--
I'll defend to the death your right to say that, but I never said I'd
listen to it!
-- Tom Galloway with apologies to Voltaire
Bill Davidsen
> Robert Kaiser wrote on 31. Oct 2008:
>
>>>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>>>
>>> I believe that being a bit more conservative in your UI decisions
>>> is totally fine and fits well with your current userbase. Still,
>>> being conservative does not mean being reactionary and change
>>> nothing at all.
>>
>> Right. Change is definitely something we need or we just wouldn't need
>> to develop at all. We need to drive evolution of the suite - the
>> question is just the actual direction to go, the guidelines behind
>> this change.
>
> I personally believe - and what I see in this thread validates this -
> that unless someone (most likely you) comes up with a certain
> guideline and sticks with it, there will be no such thing. This is
> called leadership :-)
>
> Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
> since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
> about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
>
Bill Davidsen
> From what I see in various places (not only within this newsgroup),
> Kairo's leadership is clear enough, even if (or maybe because) he tends
> to be King Log rather than King Stork AFAICT. What SeaMonkey needs, and
> what IMHO Robert provides, is "enlightened conservatism". A chaos of
> constant innovation would, I think, be one sure way to frighten away a
> large percentage of the current SeaMonkey community.
>
To some extent it depends on the form of innovation, at least in my experience.
If you add a new capability people will like it, or hate it, or use it, or not.
They will tend to ignore new things which don't appear useful, and within reason
will not be upset.
However, if you remove an old capability, or change the way it's used (unless
you hit the "that's the way it should have been" reaction), user become
polarized, they either like it or hate it, but they can't ignore it. And
depending on how much they hate it, they either don't upgrade, or they change to
another product.
So while I agree with you in general, you can add a lot of new features which
people don't have to use, and not get nearly the user reaction changing an old
feature would provoke. That's my view on keeping the user's happy.
Neil
>What I would really like is a menu selection to toggle Javascript on and off
>
Preferences - Advanced - Scripts & Plugins has a checkbox for the
javascript.enabled pref...
--
Warning: May contain traces of nuts.
Bill Davidsen
> On 01/11/08 15:46, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> [...]
>> Saving of passwords: I understand all the drawbacks of having passwords
>> in clear text. Also the cost of reading them off a screen and typing
>> them into a spread sheet by hand. As long as there are clients and
>> organizations who require this, it is going to be necessary, and using
>> extensions is not an answer, because (a) they have to be vetted and (b)
>> they stop working regularly. Oh and (c) it's far easier to move a few
>> passwords if csv format is supported for export and import.
>>
>
> Have you tried using the Password Manager? "Tools => Preferences =>
> Privacy & Security => Passwords => [x] Remember Passwords", then
> whenever you type in a password by hand you're asked if you want to
> remember this particular password, with three buttons (I don't remember
> the exact text but they amount to Yes/Not now/Never for this site).
>
passwords in a format a spreadsheet will accept, rather than the current method
which is to click "show passwords," enter the master password for the Nth time,
and then manually read the screen and type the data into a spreadsheet.
And while there is an extension to at least save them, this is the kind of thing
I'd trust more if it were part of the application. And if extensions didn't have
the habit of becoming disfunctional after upgrades.
I work with organizations which require this data to be in a spreadsheet, and
since I can't set their policy I can either work with them "their way" or not
work with them.
Tony Mechelynck
> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>
>> From what I see in various places (not only within this newsgroup),
>> Kairo's leadership is clear enough, even if (or maybe because) he
>> tends to be King Log rather than King Stork AFAICT. What SeaMonkey
>> needs, and what IMHO Robert provides, is "enlightened conservatism". A
>> chaos of constant innovation would, I think, be one sure way to
>> frighten away a large percentage of the current SeaMonkey community.
>>
> To some extent it depends on the form of innovation, at least in my
> experience. If you add a new capability people will like it, or hate it,
> or use it, or not. They will tend to ignore new things which don't
> appear useful, and within reason will not be upset.
>
> However, if you remove an old capability, or change the way it's used
> (unless you hit the "that's the way it should have been" reaction), user
> become polarized, they either like it or hate it, but they can't ignore
> it. And depending on how much they hate it, they either don't upgrade,
> or they change to another product.
>
> So while I agree with you in general, you can add a lot of new features
> which people don't have to use, and not get nearly the user reaction
> changing an old feature would provoke. That's my view on keeping the
> user's happy.
>
I'm totally with you there. That what I mean by enlightened
conservatism. Adding optional features is not really a problem unless
they make themselves too obnoxious, but removing an existing feature, or
significantly altering it, requires a compelling reason; it should never
been done on a whim. KaiRo wrote words to that effect somewhere in this
thread, in reply to one of my posts, and that's one more reason for me
to believe he's the right leader for the SeaMonkey Project.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Malek's Law:
Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.
Jens Hatlak
> Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
> since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
> about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
> This is actually one of the major points that Firefox did right
> from the start. They had clear leadership (unlike the Suite) and
> you could see this already in the first pre-release builds. This
> is one of the main reasons that Firefox became so successful even
> before the marketing efforts started.
The difference is that the Firefox guys set out to create something new,
radically breaking with the past. They made it very clear that at
least in the initial phase they didn't want anybody to meddle with
their baby. They had a vision, yes. But they didn't care whether any of
the existing (suite) users agreed with it. The success of Firefox
speaks for itself, at least when you look at the number of users, its
importance for a free and open web, innovation, man power, resources
etc. It's obviously appealing to many people but obviously not to all
who used Mozilla products from the beginning.
What I want to say is that when you want to lead SeaMonkey you have to
listen to the already existing user base or at least anticipate what
they want (and that's why I appreciate that Robert started this
thread!). You cannot just break with the past because that's where our
user base stems from.
That said I think SeaMonkey development is already on the right track.
We're integrating and porting new useful features and bug fixes as time
and resources permit (it helps that the relationship between
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey developers is so prolific). The transition to
Toolkit and the Mercurial repository shared with Thunderbird and
Calendar were and are necessary steps to create a sustainable
environment. But as Robert already said the question is what to do after
that transition has been done.
If you ask me there are multiple things that make SeaMonkey great. For
me the most important ones are integration, innovation, power, choice,
cross platform support and stability:
* Integration: Messaging and browsing need to be interconnected closely
in order to support my work flow
* Innovation: I like to see new useful feature getting introduced
regularly
* Power: I'm a power user and don't like software that limits my
options
* Choice: Everyone should be free to decide which parts to use and
which not
* XP support: I'm running both Windows and Linux and I can use the same
program to access the Internet on both OSs
* Stability: I started using Mozilla around M13 (around 2000) and
stayed with the suite ever since. Over the years I got
used to many valuable features. It's good to know that
those in charge of the project care about them as much as
I do and won't sacrifice them just because the general
user might not use them (wink).
Therefore my vision for the future of SeaMonkey is that the things that
make it great are preserved and extended. I'm looking forward to an
even better browsing and messaging experience, with added calendaring
and what else lies ahead.
Greetings,
Jens
--
Jens Hatlak <http://jens.hatlak.de/>
SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker <http://smtt.blogspot.com/>
Simon Paquet
> Simon Paquet wrote:
>> Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
>> since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
>> about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^ <-- Freudian slip? ;-)
Yes. I meant SeaMonkey, of course.
Sledge Hammer
> Sledge Hammer wrote:
>> one of the
>> things I would like to see is a menuentry (maybe under help) that points
>> to about:config and about:config to be just a little more userfriendly
>> and navigable.
>
> I strongly believe if you have to go into about:config regularly, we
> have a bug. Every such setting that triggers you to do that often enough
> should probably be in UI prefs, feel free to file bugs on those.
>
> Robert Kaiser
Hi Robert,
Nahh...I often just tweak those to see what happens. Rarely do I find one, thats
worth keeping. Though... now that I think about it, there seems to be a
continuing problem (with the 1.1.x branch) where some mail clients (like Eudora
or Outlook) cannot receive pdf files properly from SM, unless some obscure pre
(mail.attachment.binary=true?) to be set differently than in the default.
Anyway, mostly about:config is for my personal playing around with stuff. Thats
why I consider myself a poweruser. For Joe Sixpack this should not be a problem
(and your statement holds true).
Hammer :)
asmpgmr
Neil wrote:
> asmpgmr wrote:
>
> >What I would really like is a menu selection to toggle Javascript on and off
> >
> Preferences - Advanced - Scripts & Plugins has a checkbox for the
> javascript.enabled pref...
>
I did mention in detail that I was using a whitelist via CAPS and said
I want a menu item (not something in pref panels) to toggle
capability.policy.default.javascript.enabled between noAccess and
allAccess.
David E. Ross
> Are there any statistics about the number of users for SeaMonkey and
> Firefox/Thunderbird?
In a recent two-week logging of visits to an eclectic set of 20 of my
Web pages, I recorded 1273 hits by known browsers:
57.0% by IE
33.0% by Gecko browsers (29.9% by Firefox, 0.1% by Camino, 0.2% by
SeaMonkey, 0.4% by Netscape, 2.4% by browsers with strange or incomplete
UA strings but clearly Gecko)
1.4% by Google's Chrome
6.0% by Safari
1.7% by Opera
plus others
--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>
Go to Mozdev at <http://www.mozdev.org/> for quick access to
extensions for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and other
Mozilla-related applications. You can access Mozdev much
more quickly than you can Mozilla Add-Ons.
David E. Ross
> Robert Kaiser wrote:
>> Sledge Hammer wrote:
>>> one of the
>>> things I would like to see is a menuentry (maybe under help) that points
>>> to about:config and about:config to be just a little more userfriendly
>>> and navigable.
>> I strongly believe if you have to go into about:config regularly, we
>> have a bug. Every such setting that triggers you to do that often enough
>> should probably be in UI prefs, feel free to file bugs on those.
>
> tweak network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris for SPNEGO/Kerberos SSO. I'm
> pretty sure many people would consider a prefs UI for this option being
> bloat.
>
> Hmm, so it'd be helpful to have kind of an online help for about:config.
> Right-clicking the option and choosing "Online-Help" taking you to a web
> page where the option and its values are explained in detail. But that's
> rather a common Mozilla project than a vision for Seamonkey.
>
> Ciao, Michael.
See bug #178685 at
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178685>. From the
discussion there and at bug #330858 at
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330858>, however, it
appears that Mozilla personnel are strongly against users touching
about:config.
Wasn't something done in Firefox 2 or 3 to make it more difficult to
reach about:config?
JoeS
>
>>> Is tight integration and breaking up borders between browser, mail,
>>> chat and maybe even web page creation our goal?
>>
>> This should definitely be a goal and also be something, where you
>> could really be innovative. Right now the advantage of using
>> SeaMonkey instead of a FX/TB combo is pretty minimal. One could
>> certainly think of a lot of potential features here, that you
>> could add to the product, which would be much harder to replicate
>> in single apps like Firefox or Thunderbird.
>
> I agree that there's a lot of potential in this, but it also could mean
> some radical changes. I wonder what other people are thinking about that.
I'm from the N4.x era and now use Seamonkey only occasionally
Some things that can't be done easily in FF + TB and might be easier here:
1.Mailnews html composition is severely impaired in TB >>"compose message with full composer"
(Believe it or not html mail/communications is in reality more popular than plaintext. I think this accounts
in a large part to the demise of newsgroups vs. blogs, and the rise of venues like Myspace)
2.Mail and more to the point, nntp rendering is encumbered by CAPS >>"open this message/post in a browser window"
(Not sure if Firefox can even use nntp anymore, but even better if the message would not need a re-download)
3.Open Links (in mailnews) for later viewing in a browser background window.
I think a good question to ask is "What can SeaMonkey mailnews do that Thunderbird cannot/willnot.
--
JoeS
Tony Mechelynck
We-e-ell... Aren't passwords which are "written down" in a spreadsheet
essentially insecure? Well, not my business I guess, as long as I don't
have to work for that kind of company.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
242. You turn down a better-paying job because it doesn't come with
a free e-mail account.
Ed Mullen
maybe you've snipped too much? Because I cannot, from your message,
figure out what options that are missing that you are talking about.
Might ones I care about.
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Ed Mullen
> Robert Kaiser wrote on 31. Oct 2008:
>
>>>> Is conserving historic UI our goal?
>>>
>>> I believe that being a bit more conservative in your UI decisions
>>> is totally fine and fits well with your current userbase. Still,
>>> being conservative does not mean being reactionary and change
>>> nothing at all.
>>
>> Right. Change is definitely something we need or we just wouldn't need
>> to develop at all. We need to drive evolution of the suite - the
>> question is just the actual direction to go, the guidelines behind
>> this change.
>
> I personally believe - and what I see in this thread validates this -
> that unless someone (most likely you) comes up with a certain
> guideline and sticks with it, there will be no such thing. This is
> called leadership :-)
>
> Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
Now there's a great way to win friends and influence people
> since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
> about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
Long term vision for THUNDERBIRD??? Huh?
Given the subject header,it's about SeaMonkey, not TB!
I don't give a rat's ass about TB's future. I care about SeaMonkey, the
ongoing Mozilla/Netscape integrated UI and application.
One day we afficiandos of that UI will need to make choice. We are in
the minority, I get that. But, we'll make a choice. Will we choose to
move to FF and TB? Not a chance in most instances.
Well go find something else. And we, who support a bunch of other less
astute users, we'll drag them along.
Look. Loyalty. No, not "old because we're old." Improvements "because
it makes sense."
The devs will do what they will, what they can do. In the case of SM?
The devs are hanging on the cross for us users.
Me? I'll do what I can to prop them up
It is a labor of love. Love is a good thing in this world. It is
altruistic. It is, at least, an example of labor for no reward other
than silly posts like this one of mine saying: Keep up the good work!!!
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere.
Ed Mullen
> Jens Hatlak wrote on 01. Nov 2008:
>
>> Simon Paquet wrote:
>>> Looking at this thread, 95% of all the posts therein are just crap,
>>> since they have no relation whatsoever with the topic that you asked
>>> about: the long-term vision for Thunderbird.
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^ <-- Freudian slip? ;-)
>
> Yes. I meant SeaMonkey, of course.
>
> Simon
>
That was a pretty HUGE slip. And, probably, telling us where you stand
on the SeaMonkey vs. FF/TB issue.
Look. the devs here (thank God!!!) are actually listening to us.
Let's not confuse them.
SeaMonkey. I love:
- the integration
- familiar UI
- longevity (I started out with Netscape ... I dunno ... 2.x or 1.x?)
- lots of UI options
I am a power user (at least). I support lots of other users who depend
on me to tell them what to install and use and then call me to ask about
problems. I depend on about:config to help them. I depend upon consistency.
Ok, fine, nothing is forever, I get that. But, when you change
someone's life you don't get a say in how they will choose to adapt.
So, if you force a change on SM users, some portion of them will just
opt out.
--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
Better living through denial.
asmpgmr
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178685>. From the
> discussion there and at bug #330858 at
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330858>, however, it
> appears that Mozilla personnel are strongly against users touching
> about:config.
>
Firefox devs are doing, all of this annoying dumbing down of things
and assuming that no one knows what they're doing. The whole point of
having prefs is for users to change them.
> Wasn't something done in Firefox 2 or 3 to make it more difficult to
> reach about:config?
>
They added a stupid warning message (which is even more stupid in
Firefox) the first time you goto about:config, a pref is set
afterwards as a flag to not display the stupid message again but I
have a problem with the message being there to begin with - stop
assuming people don't know what they're doing. This crap is really
annoying. Some of us have been using computers for a long time and
some of us are software engineers. How about catering to knowledgeable
users for a change ?
If someone changes a pref and it doesn't do what they wanted then
change it back, what's the big deal ?
Justin Wood (Callek)
Remind me [in this newsgroup] once SM2 final ships (or at least
freezes), and mention the ideal place{s} for such a menu-item.
I can probably whip up an addon to toss on Addons.mozilla.org quite
easily for that. As I doubt its useful for 99.9% of our users, but if it
helps you I can get it done.
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Tony Mechelynck
Well, I suppose that popup's title (and text) are supposed to be
humoristic: "This May Void Your Warranty" -- sure, especially on a
product where there never was any warranty to begin with.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only
nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter
what it does.
-- Will Rogers
asmpgmr
> Remind me [in this newsgroup] once SM2 final ships (or at least
> freezes), and mention the ideal place{s} for such a menu-item.
>
> I can probably whip up an addon to toss on Addons.mozilla.org quite
> easily for that. As I doubt its useful for 99.9% of our users, but if it
> helps you I can get it done.
>
Thanks but I have a good idea what needs to be done in order to
implement this. I haven't actually done it because it would be easier
to do by directly modifying the .jar files than writing an extension
and of course this would have to be redone with each new release.
The point I was trying to make was that the extension system as it is
now doesn't lend itself to small custom mods like what I want whereas
K-Meleon's much easier customizations and macro system does. Also say
I wanted to change a key definition, there's no easy way to do this
besides modifying .jar files whereas in K-Meleon this can be done by
simply changing accel.cfg. Note I'm aware that at one point there was
intended support for userHTMLBindings.xml in the chrome directory and
support for res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml but was never
implemented, why not ?
David E. Ross
Since the preference variables already exist, it should be possible to
do this now with PrefBar. PrefBar allows users to define their own
controls. This includes creating checkboxes, pull-down lists, buttons,
etc. I've already used some of those.
Chris Ilias
> On 11/1/2008 5:36 AM, Michael Ströder wrote:
>> Hmm, so it'd be helpful to have kind of an online help for about:config.
>> Right-clicking the option and choosing "Online-Help" taking you to a web
>> page where the option and its values are explained in detail. But that's
>> rather a common Mozilla project than a vision for Seamonkey.
>
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178685>. From the
> discussion there and at bug #330858 at
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330858>, however, it
> appears that Mozilla personnel are strongly against users touching
> about:config.
"Mozilla" is an over-generalization. *Firefox* personnel are against
suggesting about:config. Bug 178685, which is still open, is for
developer documentation. User-documentation is per-product; and policies
regarding user-documentation are up to the maintainers of each product.
As I said in bug 330858, "either file a separate bug for each product,
or pick one product. If it's SeaMonkey, move this bug to
SeaMonkey:Help." That way, it's up to the *SeaMonkey Council* to decide
whether or not *SeaMonkey* user-documentation should include an
about:config reference chart.
> Wasn't something done in Firefox 2 or 3 to make it more difficult to
> reach about:config?
http://www.pcmech.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/image6.png
--
Chris Ilias <http://ilias.ca>
List-owner: support-firefox, support-thunderbird, test-multimedia
Justin Wood (Callek)
> Justin Wood (Callek) wrote:
>
>> Remind me [in this newsgroup] once SM2 final ships (or at least
>> freezes), and mention the ideal place{s} for such a menu-item.
>>
>> I can probably whip up an addon to toss on Addons.mozilla.org quite
>> easily for that. As I doubt its useful for 99.9% of our users, but if it
>> helps you I can get it done.
>>
> Thanks but I have a good idea what needs to be done in order to
> implement this. I haven't actually done it because it would be easier
> to do by directly modifying the .jar files than writing an extension
> and of course this would have to be redone with each new release.
Just for reference, addons (extensions) in SM2 do _not_ need to be
reinstalled with each update.
Also doing this particular thing you want should be easy which is why I
volunteered to do it for you.
If you would rather simply modify .jar file[s] each time, then sure...
but also realize doing that will *break* incremental updates as well...
so you'll need to download full updates for SeaMonkey each time. (2.0
will be the first released version with incremental updates on our end).
--
~Justin Wood (Callek)
Philip Chee
> They added a stupid warning message (which is even more stupid in
> Firefox) the first time you goto about:config, a pref is set
> afterwards as a flag to not display the stupid message again but I
> have a problem with the message being there to begin with - stop
> assuming people don't know what they're doing. This crap is really
> annoying. Some of us have been using computers for a long time and
> some of us are software engineers. How about catering to knowledgeable
> users for a change ?
That stupid warning message patch was written by a SeaMonkey developer.
Well he was then, I think he's moved over to Firefox since then.
Phil
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.
* TagZilla 0.066.6
Philip Chee
> Well, I suppose that popup's title (and text) are supposed to be
> humoristic: "This May Void Your Warranty" -- sure, especially on a
> product where there never was any warranty to begin with.
In en-GB, it says "Here be Dragons".
Phil (it isn't always just color vs colour you know?)
--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
[ ]Sixteen gig, two monitors, and an attitude
* TagZilla 0.066.6
Benoit Renard
> Steve Wendt wrote:
>> On 11/01/08 08:03 am, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>>
>>>> To put this in perspective, one example is the options for allowing
>>>> SSL versions 1 and 2; they are obsolete, because the protocols are
>>>> obsolete.
>>>
>>> They probably cost nothing to maintain, and in a population the size
>>> of the Internet, obsolete doesn't imply unused.
>>
>> What you probably fail to realize, is that these options no longer
>> exist even in Seamonkey 1.1.x, and yet no one is complaining they miss
>> them.
>
> maybe you've snipped too much? Because I cannot, from your message,
> figure out what options that are missing that you are talking about.
> Might ones I care about.
He didn't snip too much. Look at the top quote. It clearly mentions the
options for SSL version 1 and 2.
Benoit Renard
>
> That is not a vision. This is so generic, that pretty much every
> browser or mail client producer could sign that statement. Because
> nobody is against security, privacy and choice of functionality.
Funny you should say that, as it is clear from the actions of the
Firefox team that they don't care about choice of functionality.
Benoit Renard
ARRRGH! It's /definitely/! It's scary how that misspelling is spreading
everywhere these days. :(