Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3

Mozilla has issued a third 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.

Based on the same Gecko layout engine as the 4.0 branch of Firefox, SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3 features support for 3D graphics via WebGL and an easy setup process for SeaMonkey Sync (Firefox Sync). Under browser toolbar customisation, an optional search bar (including suggestions if the search engine supports it) is now available, as is an engine manager for OpenSearch. When started in Safe Mode, SeaMonkey provides users with a dialogue that allows them to permanently apply some of the safe mode changes. Users can also now enter Safe Mode directly from the suite's Help menu.

SeaMonkey 2.1 on Mac OS X. Other changes include the addition of support for tab switching using mouse scrolling, Windows 7 Jump Lists and displaying download progress in the Windows 7 taskbar. The developers note that outdated plug-ins are now detected and, if a plug-in like Adobe's Flash Player crashes, users are presented with several options, such as reloading the page. ChatZilla and the Venkman JavaScript Debugger are also said to be working again. The 2.1 branch 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.

Details about the development preview, including a list of known issues, can be found in the release notes and on the SeaMonkey 2.1 Wiki page – at the time of this posting an official announcement has yet to be made. SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 3 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 13 different languages from the project's site. However, at the time of writing, downloads for the Mac OS X version from the primary download site don't appear to work; Mac users can download it directly from one of the project's mirrors.

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 is SeaMonkey 2.0.13, a maintenance and security update from 23 March that updated the HTTPS certificate blacklist.

See also:

• Mozilla kills embedding support for Gecko layout engine, a report from The H.
• What's new in Firefox 4.0, a feature from The H.

(crve)