captsolo weblog

« The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".

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. »

Mozilla Suite, which continues its life as SeaMonkey, is a browser I really liked. Combined with an excellent Multizilla tabbed browsing extension it was a pleasure to use (and had a better tabbed browsing support than early Firefox versions).

Switched to Firefox because the development of Mozilla Suite was kinda stalled and all the recent extensions were coming out only for Firefox. But still there were some things that were easier or more friendly Mozilla Suite: type-ahead search (was broken in Firefox, you have to press Ctrl-F before searching, in SeaMonkey you just type), a Composer (HTML editor, just say "Edit this page" and see it in edit mode), ability to just type a word in the URL bar and search for it (hate to have to switch to a separate Search input field), etc.

Good to know it is back on track and after SeaMonkey 1.0 there comes SeaMonkey 1.1.

Read What's new in SeaMonkey 1.1.

Sure, there are many good things in Firefox too. It is very strong on marketing (and creating evangelists) and liked by people. And its extension system is much better, making the development of XUL extensions easier producing a large number of Firefox extensions. I hope that soon one will be able to easily develop extensions for both of these browsers with minimum browser-specific code. For now it looks like Firefox wins in this field and you need to spend some additional effort in order to get your Firefox extensions work with SeaMonkey.

Future of RDF in Mozilla projects?

As DanBri said during the ExpertFinder 2007 workshop presentation Mozilla were the first to make real production use of RDF. This might have had an impact on Mozilla application architecture (in terms of information integration, etc.) but it also means that they started to use RDF when it was very raw and lacked the clarity and tool support that it has now. This may be a reason why there are talks about Firefox developers considering replacing RDF with something else.

Therefore the question - what is the future of RDF in Mozilla, will they continue using it and what interesting things may grow out of it? DanBri also mentioned adding SPARQL to Mozilla as an interesting possibility. Hope he will elaborate on that.