Seamonkey vs. Firefox & Thunderbird - what's your mileage?

animeresistance · 09-11-2012, 01:05 PM

hmmm ... firefox and claws for me ...

yilez · 09-13-2012, 09:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ReaperX7

My 2 cents...

SeaMonkey is the main project for Mozilla. It's the same as FireFox and Thunderbird with Mozilla's IRC chat client built in, all one convenient package. You really have a choice. An all-in-one package or a split project package? I've used both, but I find myself any more only needing the Web Browser portion rather than anything else. Because of security issues, I do not use a mail client and since I rarely use IRC, I don't need it.

I thought SeaMonkey was developed by the SeaMonkey Council and not the Mozilla Foundation. It is based on FF and TB, but not an official Mozilla product.

Or that is my understanding of it.

el chapulín · 09-13-2012, 09:48 AM

Yes what you quoted there is incorrect. SeaMonkey is not the "main product", it is not even a Mozilla product. It was based on the old original Mozilla Suite (which was in turn based on the Netscape browser). Nowadays it's based on Firefox as far as I know.

ruario · 09-13-2012, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwizardone

IIRC, Opera "invented" tabbed browsing along with many of the "features" you see today in other browsers. You can add "speed dial" to the list in the article at the link below.

You are correct with regards to Speed Dials being an Opera invention. However, we were not the first to offer tabs. The earliest was probably Netcaptor (an IE shell).

We were the first to use a MDI (multiple document interface) in a browser (see screenshot), allowing you to keep all your browsed pages within one window. A "Window" menu entry used to be enabled by default, though it actually showed all the pages within a Window in a list going down. It wasn't that hard to switch between them and not massively different than tabs. You could also switch with keyboard shortcuts or (if they weren't maximised) the mouse. The other browsers at the time all used a SDI (single document interface). If you wanted a new page you needed to open a new window. If you wanted to open lots of pages you needed lots of windows!

I think we can take a lot of credit for being the first to realise that it was more sensible to keep web pages in groups. It makes it much easier to manage having lots of pages open at once, even without the tabs (I remember cascading, tiling or arranging them 'just so' to make browsing really efficient), along with it being lighter on resources.

Clearly this was a great idea as all browsers do it now, albeit using tabs to make selection particularly convenient. The advantage (improvement) of tabs is you don't have to click (or use Alt+w) to see what pages were open when everything is maximized.

P.S. We are still one of the few who have an MDI with pages that can be resized, cascaded or tiled and not just fixed size tabs within a window. Not that you see many people using this functionality these days.

cwizardone · 09-13-2012, 05:40 PM

IIRC, for many years Opera was the only browser that let you enlarge text AND IMAGES by hitting the + key on the number pad. Firefox would let you enlarge text, using the ctrl and + key combination, but images remained at their original size. Firefox finally added images to the process in the not too distant past.

yilez · 09-13-2012, 05:50 PM

When I used to pay attention, Opera was always on the ball when it came to introducing new features which would take a while to filter down. If I remember correctly, it was also the first to pass the acid2 test.

I never got on with it though. I tried using it, but this was around the time they added a load of stuff like bit torrent into the browser and I didn't want a bloated browser with tonnes of stuff I didn't use.

ruario · 09-14-2012, 02:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yilez

I didn't want a bloated browser with tonnes of stuff I didn't use.

Bloated in what sense? Yes, it has a lots of features including stuff like built in bittorrent, IRC, mail, etc. but you can just ignore these features if you don't want them. Opera has always been and remains a relatively small browser:

Code:

$ wget -q http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1202/opera-12.02-1578.x86_64.linux.tar.xz http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/2.12.1/linux-i686/en-US/seamonkey-2.12.1.tar.bz2 http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/15.0.1/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-15.0.1.tar.bz2 http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/i386/google-chrome-stable-21.0.1180.89-154005.i386.rpm
$ tar xf opera-12.02-1578.x86_64.linux.tar.xz --xform 's/opera-12.02-1578.x86_64.linux/opera/'
$ tar xf seamonkey-2.12.1.tar.bz2
$ tar xf firefox-15.0.1.tar.bz2
$ rpm2cpio google-chrome-stable-21.0.1180.89-154005.i386.rpm | (mkdir chrome; cd chrome; cpio --quiet -id)
$ du -hs --apparent-size opera seamonkey firefox chrome | sort -n
35M     firefox
42M     seamonkey
43M     opera
113M    chrome

So we are 1Mb bigger than Seamonkey and 8Mb bigger than Firefox but Chrome includes 53 translations in their package and we include 60 translations, while the Seamonkey and Firefox packages I downloaded have just 1 each (en_US). These bundled translations account for a large percentage of the package sizes.

Code:

$ du -hs --apparent-size opera/share/opera/locale chrome/opt/google/chrome/locales | sort -n
14M     chrome/opt/google/chrome/locales
16M     opera/share/opera/locale

Let's try that again with the the extra translations removed:

Code:

$ /bin/ls chrome/opt/google/chrome/locales/* | grep -v en-US.pak | xargs rm
$ find opera/share/opera/locale -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -Evx "opera/share/opera/locale(/en)*" | xargs rm -fr
$ du -hs --apparent-size opera seamonkey firefox chrome | sort -n
28M     opera
35M     firefox
42M     seamonkey
100M    chrome

Now we find that Opera is actually the smallest, despite having the most complete feature set out of the box.

P.S. I have no idea why Chrome is so big, especially when everyone is under the impression that it is so small and "lightweight". They do bundle the Flash plugin but removing that does not seem to account for the difference, since it is still more than double the size of Seamonkey and more than triple the size of Opera:

Code:

$ rm chrome/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so
$ du -hs --apparent-size chrome
87M     chrome

P.P.S. If you want further evidence of exactly how lightweight Opera is, consider also the dependencies. To start you off I should point out that Opera is the only "major", graphical Linux web browser that can run without any Gtk or Qt/KDE libs present.

yilez · 09-14-2012, 03:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ruario

Bloated in what sense? Yes, it has a lots of features including stuff like built in bittorrent, IRC, mail, etc. but you can just ignore these features if you don't want them. Opera has always been and remains a relatively small browser:

</snip>

Can you run the same comparison, but this time in 2006?

EDIT: FF 1.5= 22M, Opera 9.0=16M or 13M (depending on shared or static QT). As I implied before, Opera is very feature rich, but I never got on with it.

One thing I did like about opera was memory usage. But I didn't have my plugins that I like (maybe they didn't exist, maybe I just didn't look for them. We're talking about 6 years ago). I think it lasted about a month before I switched.

ruario · 09-14-2012, 03:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yilez

Can you run the same comparison, but this time in 2006?

I might if I get the time, though I almost certain we will still be the smallest.

ruario · 09-14-2012, 04:00 AM

@yilez: Here you go:

Code:

$ wget -q http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-1.5.tar.gz http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/900/final/en/i386/shared/opera-9.0-20060616.5-shared-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2 http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/900/final/en/i386/static/opera-9.0-20060616.1-static-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2
$ tar xf opera-9.0-20060616.5-shared-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2 --xform "s/opera-9.0-20060616.5-shared-qt.i386-en-344/opera9-shared/"
$ tar xf opera-9.0-20060616.1-static-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2 --xform "s/opera-9.0-20060616.1-static-qt.i386-en-344/opera9-static/"
$ tar xf firefox-1.5.tar.gz --xform "s/firefox/firefox1.5/"
$ du -hs --apparent-size opera9-shared opera9-static firefox1.5 | sort -n
11M     opera9-shared
16M     opera9-static
21M     firefox1.5

They were almost double the size of our shared version. Also, remember dependencies. Opera (shared) depended on Qt and Firefox on Gtk, Opera (Static) depended on neither.

yilez · 09-14-2012, 04:20 AM

hehe, I had also done the calculations. Go slightly different results (see my edited previous post)

I suppose I should give it another look. I never liked suites of software. Particularly web browser/email/irc/bit torrent. Did it also do emule, or did I imagine that?

ruario · 09-14-2012, 04:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yilez

hehe, I had also done the calculations. Go slightly different results (see my edited previous post)

That is probably because there were actually 2 Opera shared versions (opera-9.0-20060616.5-shared-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2 and opera-9.0-20060616.6-shared-qt.i386-en.tar.bz2). I picked 5 and you picked 6. The difference is that 5 was built with gcc3 and 6 with gcc4. If the rest of your distro was built with gcc3, you wanted the 5 and if it was built with gcc4 you wanted 6. This ensured that the dependencies were more likely to align with the rest of your system. Back in 2006, the current stable of Slackware was 10.2 and it shipped with with gcc3, so I made the assumption that package 5 was the correct one for Slackware users back in the day and hence I used it for my comparison.

EDIT: It may have been that the core of Slackware 10.2 was built with gcc2.95, in which case the static would have been the only package that worked on Slackware at the time. You will note that the static version has a 1 where the other packages have a 5 and a 6. This actually means it was compiled with gcc2.95. Confusing yes? A colleague of mine wrote a blog post about how to select the right package back in the old days.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yilez

I suppose I should give it another look. I never liked suites of software. Particularly web browser/email/irc/bit torrent. Did it also do emule, or did I imagine that?

No, it didn't support emule.

yilez · 09-14-2012, 04:53 AM

I was probably using Mandrake/Mandriva back then. So who knows!?

zrdc28 · 09-15-2012, 10:07 PM

Thunderbird will allow you to copy/paste photos, webpages, snapshot documents etc. where seamonkey will not. I like seamonkey but that limitation makes me use Thunderbird.

hitest · 09-15-2012, 10:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwizardone

I've tried Claw Mail several times and just don't see the appeal.

Claws-mail has enough features to keep me happy without using a lot of system resources like Thunderbird or Seamonkey. I don't need all of the bling to have a perfectly functional IMAP e-mail client.