Rubénerd!

So I wanted to to download the Firefox beta. I tried half a dozen times, and was either given a "connection reset by peer" error, or a stub file that's clearly too small to be a web browser. Well, links aside.

Fortunately, the public Mozilla FTP server works just fine, and seemed faster anyway.

For what it's worth, the Mozilla FTP server is fun just to browse in. There's a treasure trove of classic software there, including the original Phoenix browser us early adopters eagerly downloaded back in the day :).

Update: Typos pointed out by Clara.

A silly little hack I devised this afternoon if you run Gnome 3 and have the pretty (but unused) Contacts icon in your Applications menu. Open this as root:

/usr/share/applications/mozilla-seamonkey.desktop

And replace this:

Exec=gnome-contacts

With this:

Exec=seamonkey -addressbook

One of these days I'll fulfill my dream of writing an entirely XUL desktop environment. And it'll use the Walnut theme by default. Oh, you'd better believe it.

I got this irritating message on Firefox and SeaMonkey constantly, mostly because I don't have Flash. Fortunately, it's easy enough to disable.

Go to about:config and set this option to true:

plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin

Reading Mozilla's announcement of their new mobile OS had me quivering in my seat with excitement! Don't read to far into that.

Finally, an HTML5 phone?

From the official Mozilla blog yesterday:

Industry support is growing behind Mozilla’s plans to launch a new fully open mobile ecosystem based on HTML5. The operating system, which Mozilla today confirmed will use its Firefox brand, will power the launch of smartphones built entirely to open Web standards, where all of the device’s capabilities can be developed as HTML5 applications.

According to the post, Mozilla have signed up support with manufacturers, and a dozen or so global carriers. The part I was most interested in:

Device manufacturers TCL Communication Technology (under the Alcatel One Touch brand) and ZTE today announced their intentions to manufacture the first devices to feature the new Firefox OS, using Snapdragon™ processors from Qualcomm Incorporated, the leader in smartphone platforms. The first Firefox OS powered devices are expected to launch commercially in Brazil in early 2013.

Terms like "announce" and "expected to" trigger my vapourwear fear engine, but if these folks are serious and deliver something, I'll be onto it faster than a gecko sticking to a wall.

I can has sync?

I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix days, the Mozilla Application Suite before that, and Netscape before that. My pseudo-netbook ThinkPad runs SeaMonkey with my browser (which is the UI to my university note taking wiki), RSS feeds, email, newsgroups, SQLite interface, Sunbird calendar, contacts and tasks. I've run Thunderbird and Camino.

I've often joked on Twitter that SeaMonkey and Firefox are my OS, and that my Linux, BSD and Mac boxes largely exist just to support them running! If I could have this stack on a phone and have it sync reliably (something I can't do with Mozilla stuff and my iPhone without going through Google first, which I'd rather not), I would serve the developers in... unspeakable ways. By which I mean make tea.

Some other considerations

Originally, Android was sold as such a device. We were told HTML5 would be powering Android devices, and that native apps were just a stop-gap measure to compete with iOS. 5 years on, it doesn't seem like native apps will be going anywhere any time soon. It's perhaps a little ironic that it took Mozilla to deliver an HTML5 based mobile platform, rather than one being released by arguably the most influential internet-based company!

Speaking of Google, it's also no secret that Mozilla derives much of its funding from its partnership from Google for search. This phone could allow for some desperately needed income diversification, if it comes to pass.

And finally, the mockup picture of the phone had it in orange and red to match the Firefox logo. I'd go for a purple phone first, but something other than black, white or dark blue would be fabulous! :D

Installing extensions into a new SeaMonkey install this morning, I got quite a shock!

Simple Clocks :: Add-ons for SeaMonkey
This add-on has been removed by its author.

As someone with friends in multiple timezones, Simple Clocks was the simplest way to see at a glance whether or not I'd be waking anyone up with my tweets, newsgroup messages and the like. It's a shame the developer couldn't keep it going.

I guess it's back to FoxClocks; another excellent plugin but with extra features I don't really need.

I've had a surprising number of emails and tweets from people asking about my move to SeaMonkey, so I've decided to write a few posts about how I tweaked it to work for me. This is the first, on messing around with the interface :).

Simplifying the interface

Despite its modern core based on Firefox, SeaMonkey's user interface is still derived largely from Netscape Communicator. It can be easily tweaked to resemble contemporary browsers such as Firefox and Chrome though if you prefer.

1. Right click the Navigation toolbar and choose Customise...
2. Click Use Small Icons
3. Choose Icons from the Show listbox.
4. Drag the Search button off the toolbar
5. Drag on the Search box
6. Boom!

If you're a Chrome user, you can skip step 5 and use SeaMonkey's shortcuts for search! You can either type "g [terms]" into the navigation box for a Google search, or enter any terms and choose the "Search Google for [terms]" that appears.

Modern theme

Aside from having retro appeal that you'd be a fool to not take advantage of, I think SeaMonkey Modern it still has real class, particularly in the mail application.

1. Go to the View menu
2. Choose SeaMonkey Modern under Apply Theme
3. Restart, boom!

Using userChrome.css

Many of the userChrome.css tricks I blogged about for Firefox back in 2010 work with SeaMonkey too. If you haven't made a userChrome.css file yet and really want to customise SeaMonkey to an extreme:

1. Open your SeaMonkey profile folder
2. Create a folder called chrome (ironically enough!)
3. Create a file within chrome called userChrome.css

Below is my file. I err on the side of minimalism, so you may want to adjust to your own tastes!

/* RENDER PRIMARY FONT MORE COMPACT */
* {
    font-size: 10px !important;
}

/* MONOSPACE FONT FOR LOCATION BOX */
#urlbar {
    font-family: monospace !important;
}

/* MERGE STOP AND RELOAD BUTTONS
   STOP MUST BE PLACED BEFORE RELOAD TO WORK */
#stop-button[disabled="true"],
#stop-button:not([disabled]) + #reload-button {
    display:none !important;
}

/* HIDE SUPERFLUOUS ELEMENTS */
.autocomplete-history-dropmarker,
.search-go-button,
#star-button,
.tabs-closebutton,
.tabs-newbutton,
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-dropmarker,
tooltip {
    display:none !important;
}

All done!

Part two I'll be tacking importing and extensions, stay tuned! ^_^

In the spirit of @Jeorgina consolidation, I decided to see if SeaMonkey could also be used as a Google Reader replacement!

Many of these tips should also work in Thunderbird, but I haven't tested it. Feel free to leave a comment with your own experiences if you choose to try it out!

Setting it up for feeds

SeaMonkey Mail (SMM) works around the concept of accounts. Much as you would create a new email or newsgroup account, to subscribe to web feeds you create a special "Blogs and Newsfeeds account."

1. Navigate to File → New → Account
2. Choose "Blogs and News Feeds"
3. Give it any arbitrary name. I was boring and called it "Feeds"

In your SMM sidebar, you should now see an account with the familiar square orange web feed icon alongside your mail and newsgroup accounts. Consolidation and simplification to the MAX! ^_^

Subscribing to feeds

As I found with Google Reader, creating folders to organise your feeds is easier to do before you subscribe to feeds.

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "New Folder"
3. Give it a unique name, and optionally choose a parent folder. Yes, you can have a hierarchy, such as "apple" under "tech"! Take that Google Reader!

Then its simple enough to subscribe to feeds:

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "Subscribe"
3. Enter the feed URL, and choose a folder to download them to.
4. Optionally, you can also hit Import to download feeds from an OPML file, pretty slick!

Caveats

One thing that caught me out initially was that SMM downloads article from feeds into folders like email, rather than just displaying them in folders like Google Reader. As Mozilla notes:

Removing or changing the folder for a feed will not affect previously downloaded articles.

If you decide to change the folder for a feed, this just means you need to drag and drop any previously downloaded entries into the new folder as well.

Thoughts

I've been using SMM to read all my web feeds for about two weeks now, and so far it's been a more than capable replacement for Google Reader. Having my feeds in the same window as my newsgroups and email accounts has also been so gosh darn convenient!

Downloading and using SeaMonkey (or Thunderbird) just for web feeds might be overkill, but if you already use it, give it a try with your feeds. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself :)

Christmas has come early! Less than a week after reviewing my transition from Thunderbird and Firefox back to SeaMonkey, we've had a 2.6 and 2.6.1 update! :)

According to the release notes:

• Added support for the HTML5 "context menu" feature (contextmenu attribute)
• Added Print Preview support to Composer
• Added update channel indication to About SeaMonkey page (about:)

And under the "Mozilla platform changes" heading:

• Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
• Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
• Added support for font-stretch
• Improved support for text-overflow
• Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
• Fixed several stability issues

As MCBastos, Paul Bergsagel and I noted in the newsgroups, the a significant change has been an overall improvement in performance, not just in JavaScript, and especially on my venerable 2006 MacBook Pro.

Thanks to the SeaMonkey team for the present! I know a few of the developers are German, perhaps they're keeping with the tradition of giving and unwrapping presents on Christmas Eve instead ^_^.

As for the fact I'm unabashedly using a gigantic K-On picture with the SeaMonkey icon superimposed... um... Merry Christmas!

Having moved from the Mozilla Application Suite to Phoenix 0.2 in the mean old days, I'm giving SeaMonkey a try and am really liking it.

Sea-what?

Aside from those on Twitter who asked me why would you do that lol!111!!eleventy!, many didn't seem to know what SeaMonkey was. As well as an adorable aquatic critter, SeaMonkey is a web browser, email client, html editor, address book, IRC client, newsgroup client, RSS aggregator, positron accelerator, coffee machine and working implementation of the Haber Process. Believe it.

SeaMonkey is the community driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite which Mozilla originally spun off Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird from. The Mozilla Application Suite in turn was based off the original Netscape Communicator, the dominant WWW client software for much of the late 1990s.

SeaMonkey Mail

I've been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, predominantly because it allowed me to easily import my existing Mozilla data at the time. Unfortunately, I've haven't liked some of the changes in the 3.x series. The new tab UI feels inconsistent and confusing. I preferred the old way of searching which quickly returned results in the same view, and without expensive indexes being constantly built. And so on.

SeaMonkey Mail reminds me of the Thunderbird 2.x series, which in my opinion was the best graphical email client since that one that was bundled with Cooee (whatever that was called) and the older versions of Eudora. It detected my Thunderbird user data, and had all my accounts and gigs of messages imported in a few short minutes. Understandable given they largely share a common codebase, but still impressive.

I've added all my email accounts from Thunderbird and [[re-]al]pine, subscribed to all my newsgroups from Pan, and have even replaced the now unusable (in my opinion) Google Reader with it for web feeds and whatnot. Four applications in one! ^^

SeaMonkey Navigator

Given I'm using SeaMonkey for my mail, I figured I'd try using it as my browser in place of Firefox as well. The current 2.5 release is based off Firefox 8.0, and as such supports the same HTML5 and CSS3 goodies.

I was impressed at how many of my critical Firefox extensions like NoScript, Ghostery and Simple Clocks work flawlessly in SeaMonkey. Unfortunately, Tree Style Tab doesn't, and currently I haven't been able to find an available replacement extension that puts my tabs on the side, ala Opera. For someone who has dozens of online docs open at a time, this is really important! I have a newsgroup thread and a post on mozillaZine about it, we'll see if anyone can help out.

Functionally, I've noticed no difference using SeaMonkey Navigator over Firefox other than perhaps in memory usage. SeaMonkey uses less memory than Firefox and Thunderbird combines, which again I suppose makes sense.

What are we up to now? Five applications in one! ^^

Conclusions

Over all (is what people wear on farms) I'm surprised by how quick I've taken to this software.

The minimalist in me likes that I've replaced two icons with one in my dock. I like that with a CMD-1 I can get to a browser, and CMD-2 I can read practically all my internet communications in one window. It even comes with the "Modern" theme from the old days, which contains so much retro win I have it set as my default theme for now.

I'll be keeping Firefox for now just in case, but I haven't launched it since last Thursday.

Heartfelt thanks to Philip Chee, Karsten Düsterloh, Jens Hatlak, Robert Kaiser, Ian Neal, Neil Rashbrook, Andrew Schultz, Justin Wood, and all the others in the SeaMonkey community for your tireless efforts :).

Just involuntarily updated my Firefox to 8.0. So far so good, though I may need to update my update regiment. Update my update... it's not good English to repeat the same word in the same sentence. Wait, just did it again.

The losing update battle

One of the many cronjobs I have running on my headless super duper Swiss Army Knife FreeBSD server is a script to check software updates on Mozilla's servers. Whenever a new version of Firefox or Thunderbird is released, the script downloads the latest en_gb dmg. I can then go around to all the Macs in the house and install the update.

In Singapore I didn't bother, but with download quotas here and on an ISP that doesn't have unmetered content, it saves a small bundle of transfer which I can then blow on an anime episode. Don't worry, I didn't mean that. True story.

With the latest rapid-release cycle adopted by Mozilla, it seems this "solution" will become increasingly unworkable, and I'll just have the applications themselves download the updates.

The actual update!

As for the update itself, I'm liking the more native-looking widgets on Mac, and it still fits in just fine on my KDE Fedora machines despite being a GTK import. Which reminds me, Fedora 16 needs to be downloaded and installed as well.

I'd also read the horror stories about how Firefox was going to be "hostile" to plugins, but my laundry list of mostly security and privacy related whatsits are running just fine. The only change was the add-on selection screen, which allowed me to disable ones I don't need when Firefox relaunched. Unsurprisingly, I didn't uncheck anything.

A trip down memory lane

For some fun, here are a small sample of posts dealing with Firefox over the years. With this new rapid-release cycle, I think the gap between 4.0 and 7.0 you can see below will become the norm not the exception!

• Thursday 30th March 2006: Universal Binaries for Mozilla Software
• Wednesday 20th May 2009: Testing Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4
• Tuesday 30th June 2009: Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is out
• Monday 14th September 2009: Firefox 3.0.14 and 3.5.3 announced
• Thursday 21st January 2010: Firefox 3.6 golden brown and delicious
• Tuesday 23rd March 2010: Firefox 3.6.2 fixes that zero day exploit thing
• Thursday 24th March 2011: Mozilla Firefox 4.0!
• Wednesday 28th September 2011: Firefox 7.0