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Mozilla's SeaMonkey 2.0 exits cryptobiosis

Monkey SeaMonkey 2

Mozilla will let you browse the web like it's 1995 with the latest release of its "all-in-one internet application suite," SeaMonkey 2.0.

In the world of modern browsers, SeaMonkey is no shrimp*. It's the spiritual successor to the Netscape Communicator of yore, when things like newsgroup support, email, an IRC client, and HTML editing were all baked into the browser rather than hashed out as individual apps. In a nutshell: If Firefox and Thunderbird had a baby, it would be SeaMonkey.

Version 2.0 is rebuilt with the same internal platform as Firefox 3.5.4, bringing aspects like user interface, profiles, and functionality closer to what folks are familiar with in Firefox. The change also gives SeaMonkey an add-on manager in the same vein as Mozilla's popular browser for easier installation and management of plugins, themes, and extensions.

Other new features include session restore, an undo close window option, and toolbars that are now fully customizable.

The MailNews component includes support for reading RSS and Atom feeds, and Mozilla said retrieving email using IMAP protocol is faster.

A full list of the changes can be found in the release notes.

Official versions of SeaMonkey 2.0 are available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. But support for Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT 4 have been dropped, along with Mac OS 10.3 ("Panther") and 10.2 ("Jaguar"). GTK 2.10 or higher is required on Linux.

Mozilla said community volunteers are also contributing builds for other platforms if you swing a different way.

Those upgrading from SeaMonkey 1.x be warned that extensions may not migrate properly due to the major changes in the browser suite's architecture. ®

*I am so very, very sorry.

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