Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1

Mozilla has released a first beta for version 2.1 of its SeaMonkey "all-in-one internet application suite". SeaMonkey is the successor to the old Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Application suites and includes a web browser with advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support.

SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 is based on the same Gecko layout engine as the 4.0 branch of Firefox and features a new "Paste and Go" option in the context menu of the location bar, improved JavaScript performance using the new JägerMonkey engine and the Data Manager now unifies cookie, permission, password and form data management. Plug-ins can now run in their own processes, improving application overall stability should one or more crash, and the HSTS security protocol and Audio Data API are now available.

SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 on Mac OS X. Other changes include Direct2D Hardware Acceleration for Windows 7 systems and support for OpenSearch plug-ins, now used by default for web search. Additionally, the 2.1 branch of SeaMonkey no longer supports Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger systems as it requires some newer features only available in 10.5 or later.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More information about the development preview, including a list of known issues can be found in the official release announcement, the release notes and on the SeaMonkey 2.1 wiki page. SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 8 languages from the project's site.

SeaMonkey binaries are released under the Mozilla SeaMonkey End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. The latest stable release of SeaMonkey is version 2.0.9, a security and stability update that addressed a total of 9 security issues, five of which Mozilla listed as critical, two high-level bugs and one rated as moderate.

See also:

• Mozilla officially drops support for SeaMonkey 1.x, a report from The H.

(crve)