On 2025-12-23, Dale wrote: [...] > > I don't claim to know the inner workings of Seamonkey. This is just my > theory. Remember when Firefox did a almost complete rewrite of its code > several years ago? All the add-ons had to be redone, being able to use > more than one CPU core was added and a whole lot of other changes. At > the time, most of us wasn't to happy with the change because some > add-ons never got updated and died. Still, Firefox made a huge change. > Seamonkey never did that. Even then, Seamonkey had only a small amount > of users compared to other browsers. My theory is this. If Seamonkey > is to survive, it would have to make some of the same changes Firefox > did several years ago. It would need the same add-ons that work in > Firefox to work in Seamonkey. There would be a lot of other changes > too. Basically, take Firefox and add email to it.
A similar argument can be made for the extension support in SeaMonkey being a *benefit*. While there have been changes that may require amending extensions before they can be used with SeaMonkey, at least it does support extensions which stopped working in Firefox. SeaMonkey already supports some "webextensions", at least dictionaries and langpacks. As for the inner workings, the whole idea is to keep backporting needed features, without changing the codebase beyond what's necessary, which, while based on the code as of Firefox 56, already has a lot of more recent features and at the same time retains e.g. extension support. (SeaMonkey 2.57, which has been built in the past has been surpassed in web compatibility by 2.53.) This is made less easy because of some changes that happened in the Firefox codebase, but once the current hurdles are dealt with, it'll probably become easier to backport newer JS featues. > I doubt there is enough devs working on Seamonkey to do that. Seamonkey > is a large program as far as what all it does. Given its size and the > likely small number of people maintaining it, I don't see any changes > coming that would keep it alive very long. After all, after the add-ons > stopped working when Firefox made its change, most users left > Seamonkey. I doubt they will come back even if Seamonkey was able to > pull off a major rewrite and get more up to date. The ongoing work on a separate branch, once done, will bring compatibility with a bunch of JS frameworks that insist in using incompatible syntax. The reason why it is being done separately and not on the main 2.53 code used in releases is that it requires removing support for other JS features that would break even more such sites (I think optional chaining is one of them). A larger team would help with this. A rewrite, not so much - if you see rewriting and reformatting changes in the SeaMonkey code, those are likely added to reduce differences compared to newer mozilla codebases, so that changes can be backported more easily. > I hate to see it go to but, I'm not surprised that it is going away. > I'm more surprised it lasted this long. I'm dreading the switch too. > You may want to monitor this thread and see what is a good option for > you. You may go the same way I do or someone may have a idea that works > better for you. (Again, the sole reason why it's possibly "going away" is Python, not SeaMonkey. 2.53.23 just came out on December 31, BTW.) -- Nuno Silva
