Back in the olden days where we were trying to flee from the tyranny of Microsoft’s bug-filled Internet Explorer, we found refuge in the resurrected ashes of our old friend Netscape, resurrected as the new Mozilla Suite. But sadly, things weren’t all good — even though Mozilla was much more trustworthy, stable, and most importantly, open-source, it was a huge, bloated browser that took up way too much memory and too many resources to be really useful. Mozilla decided to fix this by stripping away all of the bloat and extra features that weighed Mozilla down, and created a new browser named Phoenix, after the mythological bird that was reborn from its own ashes.
After two name changes, we now know that browser as Firefox.
Yet this once lean and mean browser has gained quite a bit of weight during its maturity, and now its bulk even overshadows its predecessor, which has apparently been learning from its child how to slim down and become lean and mean its own self, even with the extra modules (email, address book, and a web page editor) it carried along with it. As a part of this slimming down, Mozilla itself went through a name change to SeaMonkey, becoming an alternative to Firefox for those who want a more complete, all-in-one Internet suite.
To me, however, SeaMonkey has actually surpassed Firefox in terms of speed and ease of use, and now with Firefox 3 adding strange new features such as the new URL history bar and the inability to edit a File form field manually, SeaMonkey is starting to look much more attractive to me for my main browser. It even has the older (and my preferred) single download progress dialog rather than the download manager (although it offers that as an alternative as well), plus it can even use many of Firefox’s extensions (like my favorite, NoScript).
There are a few things I have to get used to, such as not being able to middle-click a tab to close it (it pastes-and-goes from the clipboard instead) and a few other missing features from Firefox like reopening closed tabs, but so far, the speed and relative stability seems to be worth the effort.
