SeaMonkey is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

, based on the same

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7. SeaMonkey was created in 2005 after the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

decided to focus on the standalone projects

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

and Thunderbird. The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the

. The new project-leading group is called the ''SeaMonkey Council''. Compared to Firefox, the SeaMonkey web browser keeps the more traditional-looking interface of Netscape and the Mozilla Application Suite, most notably the

XUL XUL ( ), which stands for XML User Interface Language, is a user interface markup language developed by Mozilla. XUL is an XML dialect for writing graphical user interfaces, enabling developers to write user interface elements in a manner sim ...

architecture. This allows the user to extend SeaMonkey by modifying add-ons for Thunderbird or the add-ons that were formerly compatible with Firefox before the latter switched to WebExtensions.

Components

SeaMonkey consists of a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

, which is a descendant of the

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

family, an

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

and

news client A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new a ...

program (SeaMonkey Mail & Newsgroups, which shares code with Mozilla Thunderbird), an

HTML editor An HTML editor is a program for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience and added functionality. For example, many HT ...

(SeaMonkey Composer) and an IRC client ( ChatZilla). The software suite supports skins. It comes with two skins in the default installation, Modern and Classic.

Mail

SeaMonkey Mail is a traditional e-mail client that includes support for multiple accounts, junk mail detection, message filters, HTML message support, and address books, among other features. It shares code with Mozilla Thunderbird; both Thunderbird and SeaMonkey are built from Mozilla's comm-central source tree.

Composer

SeaMonkey Composer is a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

descended from

Mozilla Composer Mozilla Composer is the free and open-source HTML editor and web authoring module of the Mozilla Application Suite (the predecessor to SeaMonkey). It is used to create and to edit web pages, e-mail, and text documents easily. It is compatible wi ...

. Its main user interface features four tabs: Normal (WYSIWYG), HTML tags, HTML code, and browser preview. The generated code is

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

4.01 Transitional.

Naming

To avoid confusing organizations that still want to use the original Mozilla Application Suite, the new product needed a new name. After initial speculation by members of the community, a July 2, 2005 announcement confirmed that SeaMonkey would officially become the name of the Internet suite superseding the Mozilla Application Suite. "Seamonkey" (with a lowercase "m") refers to

brine shrimp ''Artemia'' is a genus of aquatic crustaceans also known as brine shrimp. It is the only genus in the family Artemiidae. The first historical record of the existence of ''Artemia'' dates back to the first half of the 10th century AD from Urmia L ...

and had been used by Netscape and the Mozilla Foundation as a

code name A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial ...

for the never-released Netscape Communicator 5 and later the Mozilla Application Suite itself. Originally, the name "Seamonkey" was derived by Netscape management to replace "Buttmonkey", which their developers had chosen following an internal contest for the codename. The SeaMonkey Council has now

trademarked A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from others. ...

the name with help from the Mozilla Foundation. The project uses a separate numbering scheme, with the first release being called SeaMonkey 1.0. Despite having a different name and version number, SeaMonkey 1.0 is based on the same code as Mozilla Application Suite 1.7. For trademark and copyright reasons,

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

rebranded SeaMonkey and distributed it as Iceape until 2013.

History

On March 10, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would not release any official versions of

beyond 1.7.x, since it had now focused on the standalone applications

and Thunderbird. However, the Foundation emphasized that it would still provide infrastructure for community members who wished to continue development. In effect, this meant that the suite would still continue to be developed, but now by the SeaMonkey Council instead of the Mozilla Foundation. SeaMonkey was first released on September 15, 2005. SeaMonkey 1 was released on January 30, 2006. Core Mozilla project source code was licensed under a disjunctive tri-license (before changing to MPL 2.0) that gave the choice of one of the three following sets of licensing terms:

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the conce ...

, version 1.1 or later,

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

, version 2.0 or later,

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, version 2.1 or later.Mozilla.org
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Release history

Parts of this table are based on the SeaMonke
release notes
th

and th
meeting notes
* * *

References

External links

*Mozilla Foundation (March 10, 2005)
Mozilla Application Suite - Transition Plan
Retrieved March 10, 2005. *MozillaZine (June 6, 2005)

Retrieved June 6, 2005. *Adot's Notblog (June 6, 2005)

Retrieved June 20, 2005. *SeaMonkey Council (July 2, 2005)
SeaMonkey Project Continues Internet Suite
Retrieved July 3, 2005.
The SeaMonkey ProjectSeaMonkey Wiki
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