Cruz, Jaime wrote:
Your user agent says:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120909 Firefox/15.0.1
SeaMonkey/2.12.1
It's not lying. Seamonkey 2.12 is YEARS out of date (as is Firefox
15.0). I use the current version of Seamonkey and NEVER see that
message. Upgrade already.
There are some users of Mozilla products that seem to be determined to
avoid upgrades, at any cost. I can understand that with Firefox, and
the frequent changes to user interface. And I know that nearly every
time there's a new release, the support newsgroups see user complaints
of problems following the upgrade.
With Seamonkey, I know that I've seen at least a couple of users refuse
to upgrade from a particular version, because certain bugfix requests
haven't been responded to. I get that.
However, remember that nearly every Mozilla update does include security
updates, and refusing to update doesn't make the security risks go away.
I know that one of the fixes included in Gecko 34 (including Seamonkey
2.31) addresses the POODLE problem. A few of the truly security-paranoid
may do the work to manually disable SSL 3.0, but very few will, unless
it's done for them.
With Seamonkey, we don't have all the user interface tweaks that are
being thrown at Firefox users, and I believe that a significant portion
the updates that come in the every 6 weeks release cycle are Mozilla
platform updates. There are feature set changes, both to Gecko and to
Seamonkey, to be sure, but there's also a lot of stuff that's security
updates and bug fixes.
I won't discount that version upgrades can sometimes be disruptive, but
my experience with Seamonkey (as well as Firefox and Thunderbird -- I
use and support all three), problems are frequently related to issues in
the user profile. Sometimes, that's related to a specific extension,
but more often, I've seen some discernible quirk in the user profile.
Thus, I tend to advocate checking to see if something that's in the
profile that's causing problems. The fastest way to do that is via Safe
Mode, but it's also something that can be done by using the Profile
Manager to set up a new profile, where all (or nearly all) the settings
are default. To that end, in both Seamonkey and Firefox, I keep a "Bare
Metal" profile that is nearly entirely default settings, including no
installed extensions.
I won't pretend that safe mode or the bare metal profile will solve all
problems, but either is a quick way of distinguishing whether a problem
is a problem with Seamonkey or the Mozilla platform, or if the problem
is related to the user profile. In my own experience, nearly always,
the problem is in the profile.
I'm writing this one in response to a post by Jaime Cruz, and in the
last few days, I've interacted with him on this topic, in other threads.
For one of the problems he's having, I was quick to suggest Safe Mode,
but on further interaction, if he's running the Ubuntu Unity desktop,
then that might be the source of odd display-related behavior with
Seamonkey, especially if the problem isn't turning up in Cinnamon or KDE.
As for the original poster, I think what's happening is that Gmail
recognizes that he's running a really old version of Seamonkey (even if
it's giving a warning about Firefox), and as noted, there are some
number of security holes that have been fixed in subsequent releases,
and that's why Google is complaining.
Unless you have a specific, compelling reason to stay with Seamonkey
2.15 (e.g., a feature set change or an unfixed bug that began with
version 2.16), there is no good reason not to upgrade to something
considerably more current, if not 2.31.
If you're afraid of an upgrade "breaking" something, it's probably
possible to do semi-incremental updates by going to
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/#old_unofficial, and then
download/install older versions -- say, 2.19, 2.24, 2.29, before going
to 2.31. For any upgrade, always back up your profile, first, whether
copying the raw data, or using MozBackup. If a newer install shows
problems, re-launch in Safe Mode, to see what happens.
Smith
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
