SeaMonkey:Project Goals
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| SeaMonkey Homepage | ||
| FAQ / Help | ||
| Goals | ||
| Organization | ||
| QA | ||
| Supporters | ||
| Add-ons | ||
| Localization | ||
| Reasons | ||
| Branding | ||
| Release History | ||
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| Discussion | ||
| Suiterunner |
Primary Goal
The main goal of the project is to keep a suite which is similar from a user's perspective to Mozilla 1.7.x. We are not aiming to tie Firefox and Thunderbird together in some way, or make SeaMonkey drastically more similar to FF & TB.
We plan to move to toolkit/ for the sake of code maintenance - we don't want to end up with another Firefox and Thunderbird. The suite should continue to look and feel similar to how it always has. One of the major concerns here is random changes to toolkit that have occurred in the past; moving to toolkit is contingent on the Mozilla Foundation committing to a more stable set of widgets.
Target Audience
Our target audience consists of:
- people currently using the Mozilla Suite
- people currently using Netscape 4-7 who would like a product that feels similar
- people looking for an integrated suite of internet applications
- corporate users looking to deploy a single product
- advanced users looking for a sophisticated web client
- developers and web developers
Previous Releases
Details of previous releases have been moved to the SeaMonkey:Release History page.
Future Releases
Note: the SeaMonkey:Home Page Status has more recent information about three future development paths.
Future releases will see heavy changes though, mainly those should be a complete transition to toolkit/ code. This will entail a lot of backend grunt work, so feature additions will likely have to be lower priority. Once the transition to toolkit is complete, we want to move to XULRunner - being based on toolkit already should make this as painless as possible (which is still likely to be very painful). Embedders will not be happy. Additionally, in this process, we will pick up the Gecko transition to using the new cairo-based rendering once it happens. This may also mean dropping support for older systems such as Win9x (not sure about Unix GTK1 toolkit). The version numbers for those releases will probably start with 1.5, maybe a release fully converted to XULRunner might get version 2.0, but that's not been set in stone yet.
