Category: Internet Suite — web browser, email, newsgroups, chat, HTML editor, address book
Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Mac, OS/2, Solaris and more
Price: Free
Once upon a time, Netscape was THE Internet web browser — and it was a commercial product. Then, along came the big bad wolf. He dreamed of world (wide web) conquest and so he wrote his own web browser; then, he gave it away with the operating system he sold. It was bad, but it was free and everyone got it whether they wanted it or not. And, his monopoly grew…
Netscape (the company) eventually sold itself and became a part of AOL, but not before they released a snapshot of the web browser source code to an open source foundation that they created. Thus was born the Mozilla Internet Suite.
Most people today recognize the name Mozilla and think of Firefox. For a long time, the development plans called for independent development of a next generation web browser and a next generation email & newsgroups program (often, this can be the same program with dual capabilities). After development, they would be merged into the Mozilla Suite to bring it up to date.
We saw Firefox born as the new web browser. Thunderbird was the next generation email/newsgroups program. But, the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on these two applications and stop development on the Mozilla Internet Suite product.
As usual when a product is dropped, there are a lot of unhappy users. In this case, and based on Mozilla’s own growth out of the earlier, proprietary Netscape web browser, a group of enthusiasts negotiated with the Mozilla Foundation. They managed to take over the maintenance and development of the Mozilla Suite.
They named their community-written project SeaMonkey.
Quoting the home page of the SeaMonkey project:
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as “Mozilla Application Suite”. Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have “everything but the kitchen sink” — and have it stable enough for corporate use.
SeaMonkey 2.06 was released on July 20, 2010. You can download the current (or older versions) from the SeaMonkey Releases web page.
You probably want the “Official Build” although there are other versions contributed by volunteer workers for different platforms (even OS/2) and versions in other languages. Get the Official Build labelled Windows (32bit) Full Installer.
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