Sun, 07 Aug 2011 12:12:48 +0100, /Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)/:
I agree that some of the critiques have lacked focus; but in
general, I believe that those who are most vocal in criticising
the current changes in Seamonkey development and release are
also amongst those who are most deeply concerned that Seamonkey
/should/ remain alive and usable : they are, in the main,
people who (for better or worse) have come to depend on Seamonkey,
and who are genuinely afraid that recent changes do not bode
well for the future.
The only thing I'm genuinely afraid of is that the last few people who
care about, and have enough knowledge to develop and maintain SeaMonkey
might loose interest because of so much unreasonable criticism going on.
From my point of view every change to the SeaMonkey 2+ versions is well
justified and reflects the capabilities of the SeaMonkey team. This is
what I've been trying to explain previously, and further below.
What we need (IMHO) is a genuine debate between users and
developers; a little less sniping, and a better appreciation
by each side of the wishes of, and constraints on, the other
side, would go a long way towards ensuring a viable future
for this most valuable suite of software.
Your reply leads me to think you don't really understand the status quo,
although you state so. Most of the features people vocally criticize the
SeaMonkey developers about are not written by the SeaMonkey devs
themselves, but by the core Mozilla platform team. The SeaMonkey devs
are far too few in order to provide maintenance of old code, they have
not really written, or to implement it anew, on top of the evolving
Mozilla platform.
The SeaMonkey devs try their best to preserve much of the original
Mozilla Suite features perceived as most important to people, but it is
not always possible because of major core changes introduced by the
platform. I guess this is something vocally criticizing people in here
can't really understand, being not interested in how the Mozilla
platform evolves, and then how it affects the SeaMonkey project, which
apart from some hardware infrastructure is not sponsored by the Mozilla
organization in any way (as far as I'm aware).
And finally, as Robert Kaiser have already pointed out,
innovation-resistance won't make SeaMonkey any better.
