Rubénerd!

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 :).

To test our English proficiency (allegedly to assign us to the right tutorials), UTS asked us to write 200 words on a technology that has profoundly affected us. Given the recent 20th anniversary of the first World Wide Web page, I felt compelled to select it!

Screenshot is of Rubenerd.com rendered in Netscape Navigator Gold 2.02 on Windows NT 4.0... because I could! Despite some unicode issues and a lack of CSS, it rendered surprisingly readable given my insistence on using <hr /> and image replaced <h1> elements! Well, it was mostly for lynx/links/elinks/dillo, but the point still stands! ^_^

My GeoCities neighbourhood was SiliconValley

When my family first moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s, we registered for a dialup plan with Pacific Internet. We paid a small fortune for a 56k fax modem over the midrange 33.3k models, and even registered a second phone line to separate the high pitched squeals from... modem signal noises. We felt so advanced and modern connecting to the World Wide Web for an hour or so to check the weather, update our GeoCities pages and play NeoPets.

Fast forward to today, and the World Wide Web is everywhere but the kitchen sink. Unsatisfied with being constrained to our desktops, it can be accessed from our laptops and tablets in coffee shops and airports, in our smartphones from anywhere with a signal (that rules out Earlwood, NSW) and from cars to aeroplane cabins. I can't help but wonder if Sir Tim Berners-Lee from 1991 could travel to 2011 what he'd think of the pervasiveness of the WWW, and if he'd be surprised the protocols and hardware were handling everything so well!

In its meagre 20 years existence, arguably the World Wide Web has facilitated the spread of more knowledge than the Gutenberg press, and has enabled more affordable communication than any phone companies or; perhaps by a logical stretch; airlines.

While I use it to do practically all my research, assignments and work now, what initially drew me to the web wasn't what I could glean from it, but rather the opportunity to contribute. I was more excited than a Yui with a graduating Ui that I could update a page and have my relatives back in Australia see it instantly. If we grant ourselves another fast forward (wasn't that a TV show?), today I have two blogs with thousands of entries, tens of thousands of tweets, hundreds of photos and dozens of domains.

Given my dad was mostly out of the country on business trips and my mum spent much of her time in hospitals and chemo wards, the WWW was fantastic escape. Netscape-sensei never mocked me for my disparate electronic and science fiction interests, never laughed at my innocent childhood questions about sexuality, and didn't marginalise me when I started questioning organised religion.

Calm down, Ruben

That's not to say the World Wide Web isn't without its challenges. Much as it took a while for books to spread to all corners of the globe after Gutenberg, much of the world still doesn't have [reliable] internet access. Internationalisation is not only a needlessly lengthy term (and i17n ranks among the world's dumbest abbreviations), but along with accessibility is still poorly covered. The web efficiently spreads malware in ways floppy disks can only dream of. We're running out of practical addresses. Internet Explorer still exists.

Then there are the legal challenges. Governments and businesses are rapidly realising the WWW's potential to expose corruption and malpractice, and aren't willing to cede this power to us without a fight. Industries too lazy to adapt to emerging technologies are punishing their customers with lawsuits and digital restrictions. ISPs are threatening to challenge net neutrality upon which the WWW thrived in order to throttle their customers and give preferential treatment to sponsors.

Still, as with every scientific and technological advance since we evolved and learned to rub two sticks together, it has the potential for Good and Evil. Ultimately, I'm confident the World Wide Web easily delivers the former in excess of the latter.

I couldn't live without it... could you?

I've decided to replace all the icons for my Mozilla browser installs with the icon from Netscape Navigator in a fit of nostalgia. Technically, it's not completely a falsehood, kinda.

If you want to as well:

1. Download this icon: firefox.icns
2. Right click your browser and Show Package Contents
3. Go to ./Contents/Resources
4. Replace firefox.icon with the downloaded icon

You might need to remove your browser from the dock and add it again for the changes to show.

First browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator Gold two point something, in primary school year five. Lots of numbers in that sentence.

A reference to Netscape still exists in the latest version of FreeBSD. How nostalgic ^_^.

You can use "whereis" to search standard binary, manual page and source directories for the specified programs. This can be particularly handy when you are trying to find where in the ports tree and application is.

Try "whereis netscape" and "whereis whereis"
-- Konstantinos Konstantinidis

The last time I blogged about Netscape was back in 2007 when I was reviewing the final version for Mac OS X, shortly before it was discontinued for good.

Anyone who used the internet in the 1990s would remember Netscape Navigator, the standalone web browser before Netscape Communicator that you originally had to pay for: the software that Microsoft was so successful in burying all those years ago in the first internet browser wars. I used Netscape Navigator, Eudora and ICQ... sniff, so many memories!

Well I'm now typing away on Netscape Navigator 9 for Mac OS X. After all those years of feature creep, slower speeds and bloated executable sizes, the new Navigator is lean, mean and noticeably zippier. It's based on Firefox instead of the former Mozilla Suite and it shows. Plus, it supports nearly all the Firefox plugins and themes too.

Aside from the obvious changes under the hood, the new Navigator has also been redesigned on the surface. The new toolbar icons are much clearer and instead of a separate search button next to the Address bar there's a dedicated search box. The toolbar, tabs and titlebar with these changes noticeably take up less space. Compared to Safari and Camino (my current primary browser) the difference is tiny:

Really I can't see enough compelling reasons to switch if you're already a Firefox user, but for me there's something so nostalgic and pleasing to grace my modern computer's dock and Applications directory with that venerable serif N on a black planet scape with the teal sky. I'm so sentimental (^_^).

North Korea launching seven missiles (Australia North Korea relations, Minster for Defense Alexander Downer), Ruben using a news voice (and failing), posts on Netscape News and using proxy servers in China.

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