Mozilla Question: Seamonkey vs Firefox & Thunderbird...

[Brian Chabot]

Just an interesting question I've been ponderring that I thought I 
mmight gain some insight from the folks here...

I've been a long time user of Mozilla (SeaMonkey)... Recently I've been 
playing with Firefox & Thunderbird.

The new stand-alone apps look pretty and keep many of SeaMonkey's 
excellent features, but I'm rather dismayed at the lack of decent 
integration between them.

The problem I'm seeing is that before I had to run one huge, (some would 
say bloated) application and I got a browser, email, IRC, etc. in one 
application.  While browsing the web, I could hit a button to get mail 
and then close the mail window and it would keep checking for new mail 
while I continued to browse the web.

With Firefox/Thunderbird, these apps are seperate and in order to keep 
checking for mail, I need to have 2 windows open (or use a third 
application that minimizes to the task bar...).

I'm somewhat dismayed that the Mozilla organization went in the 
direction of seperate apps rather than making SeaMonkey more 
compartmental.  Sure you can install SeaMonkey and choose whether to 
include the Mail/News component or the IRC component.  This is great. 
All your settings are in the ~/.mozilla directory and everything works 
seamlessly.  With Firefox/Thunderbird, your settings are in different 
places and it takes an extension to tell Firefox to use Thunderbird for 
mail.

Now I have nothing against making these work as seperate apps, but the 
integration I find in the SeaMonkey version is one of the major reasons 
I use it so much.  To think that the developers are planning to devote 
most of their time to the individual components rather than the 
integrated whole has me worried that I'll be left behind as new 
improvements may not end up in SeaMonkey for some time.

Has anyone else had more experience with these and their differences? 
Anyone else have opinions on which would be better or on near-future 
plans to make things more seamless?

Thanks,

Brian


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