Well I think I’m doing it. I’m switching to Seamonkey. To me it’s no point to use a diffrent program(s) for the same thing(s) just because it’s a diffrent operating system. Good programs are portable programs in my book and play nicly.
For Windows I’ve been using Firefox, nice browser and much more fun the Internet Explorer 5~6 was, althouhg I’m interested in seeing the changes in IE7. The only catch is I prefer Opera. While Opera is very nice and has awesome tabbed browsing support, good enough that I don’t mind a few quirks in it. The windows version of Opera is not so hot, on my system it also chews CPU time but rocks for BSD. Soo, I’ve returned to my old consideration.
I’m very adapt to Firefox and I use Thunderbird. Mutt I was hoping to learn but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble for the win32 port of Mutt. Konqueror is very Firefox like, lacks some of the extensions e.t.c. but is a great browser but doesn’t runon Windows. Since it’s a KDE app, it’s also a bloody nice file manager compared to explorer on Windows XP.
Seamonkey is the successor to the Mozilla application suite, which was kinda like Netscape Communicator on steriods you could say. (Netscape was before my time, we only got inet access around 2000). When the kitchen sink got EoL’d [End of Life] so they could work more on Firefox and Thunderbird the community picked up the app and she was reborn as the SeaMonkey [which Mozilla suite was code named Seamonkey]. It provides a browser (navigator in a very netscape like feeling) which is basically firefox, Mail/newsgroups (thunderbird for all intents and purposes), Composer a WYSIWYG html editor which I like for testing pages quickly [Nvu is basically an extended version of this], Adressbook, Chatzilla IRC client (Mmm maybe I’ll lay off X-Chat), plus a DOM inspector and some JavaScript stuff.
The mbox is the same as thunderbird so I can just point mail & newsgroups at my thunderbird local folders on my Lexar, no need to import. Plus SeaMonkey has Roaming support that lets me keep bookmarks/addresses/cookies e.t.c. sync’d the support is expiremental so it’s not very good but it seems a good start. Load times not much a bother on my desktop thanks to fast CPU and 2GB of reasonably fast DDR2 memory but on my laptop it’s a little slow. My latops got 512mb DDR and I run so much crap along with KDE 3.5.x that I use most of it but the system is still more responsive then windows under lighter loads for me, on the same machines. The program works great on my laptop, it’s just a little slow to start up. I suspect it’s because it takes awhile to load all the dep’s.
Pros:
Very good intregation
Open source
“Modren” theme is nicer compared to “Classic” theme or the generic Firefox/Thunderbird ones (same thing).
Most Mozilla Suite addons should be compatible
No E-Mail import needed for thunderbird users
A nice editor for web design [at least for when I’m lazy]
If it had an AIM/MSN/Yahoo/X-Fire client and a sweet PIM in it it’d be a very full web application suite imho.
More standards complient then Microsofts I.E. but not as complient as Konqueror or Safari.
Roaming support
Cons:
Takes a while to start on older machines
Uses a fair amount of memory when using allot of tabs/componants e.t.c. [just like Firefox]
Not every one may need all the features
Roaming support is not finished
Can’t right click on bookmarks in menu [have to open manage bookmarks]
Support is in the hands of the community, updates may take longer then Firefox/Thunderbird/Misc
All in all a very nice system, I figure I use Thunderbird and fire fox works ok for me (I prefer Opera but not Win32 ver) so the thing fits me well. I commend Mozilla for having created a kitchen sink and then deploying parts of it independantly so people could just use the parts they like if they don’t want every thing. [Mixing Firefox and outlook express comes to mind].