Since Firefox has gone down the same path as IE (bloated, trying to do everything, untrusted, slow-loading, and being so big that it just can’t, alone, be the “more secure” option anymore which, along with speed and trust, catapulted it up into contention with IE in the first place!), my loyalty to Firefox is entirely hinged on add-ons like NoScript.* This means I’m open to new tools that may be simple and get back to what I really want: speed, trust, simple, and reasonably secure largely through that simplicity.
I just read about SeaMonkey’s new release. While it’s a new option, I don’t like the idea that it is trying to be an “Internet suite” of tools (really, HTML editor?) with a browser, email client, news client, IRC client, etc. In that regard, I’m not tripping over myself to try it, but though I’d share the link in case it does become a legit contender as the new upstart (just like Firefox and Google once were…oh how the popular forget what made them popular). Besides, in trying to do all that stuff, can it ever possibly satisfy my security desires enough in any one part to best dedicated individual clients? Yeah, if I get around to trying it out, I’ll try it out. If not, I’m probably not missing much.
* Strangely, IE7 loads faster, at least in perception, than any instance of Firefox that I run anymore, Windows or Linux. But, I like that I can really reduce the toolbar footprint of Firefox down to like one bar, and it sucks that IE’s bar has gone the way of being a pain in the ass to customize in the same way. Still… really it’s NoScript that keeps me locked to Firefox.
Give this one a shot (it’s still in development, but it’s pretty good): http://arora-browser.org
Pretty much the same idea: http://nodereality.com/archives/24-Whats-a-browser.html
I think Firefox will reach a peak soon.
seamonkey is the project that mozilla was making *before* firefox. it was the evolution of netscape navigator, and when aol (after their acquisition of the netscape brand) wanted to put out a new version they’d take the then current version of seamonkey and add their specific branding to it. firefox was the browser component of seamonkey spun off into it’s own project, prompted by the lack of traction seamonkey was seeing (probably for the same reasons you’re not thrilled with it). i used seamonkey originally but as far as extensions go seamonkey users are basically second class citizens next to firefox users. that’s why i was eventually forced to switch to firefox.