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, 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 wo ...

, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and

Netscape 7 Netscape 7 is a discontinued Internet suite developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the seventh major release of the Netscape series of browsers. It is the successor of Netscape 6, and was developed in-house by AOL. It was re ...

. SeaMonkey was created in 2005 after the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on the standalone projects Firefox 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 Mozilla Foundation. 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 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 Add-on is the Mozilla term for software modules that can be added to the Firefox web browser and related applications. Mozilla hosts them on its official add-on website. Browser extensions are the primary type of add-on. In 2017, Mozilla enacted ...

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 on ...

, 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 onc ...

family, an e-mail 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 ar ...

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

HTML editor 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 w ...

. 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 JavaScri ...

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 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 c ...

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 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 D ...

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 Mozilla Application Suite beyond 1.7.x, since it had now focused on the standalone applications Firefox 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 concerns ...

, 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 (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

, version 2.0 or later, GNU Lesser General Public License, 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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