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This Mozilla Wiki section covers documents about the SeaMonkey Project, which develops an "all-in-one internet application suite", based on code of the previous Mozilla Application Suite.

For quick answers to common questions, please explore the SeaMonkey FAQ!

Status

The SeaMonkey project released SeaMonkey 1.0 in January 2006 and continues development and releases of that internet application suite in three ways:

• Firstly, SeaMonkey 1.0.x releases are security and stability updates to SeaMonkey 1.0. (This work takes place on the so-called "Mozilla 1.8.0 branch".)
  • 1.0.1 released April 2006
  • 1.0.2 released June 2006
  • 1.0.3 released July 2006
  • 1.0.4 released August 2006
  • 1.0.5 released September 2006, see its Release Notes
• Secondly, we are adding some new features (bug 315312) to the suite without changing the basis that SeaMonkey 1.0 built upon. The result of this work will be released as SeaMonkey 1.1, which will look and feel the same as 1.0 except for the newly added features. (This work takes place on the "Mozilla 1.8 branch".)
  • SeaMonkey 1.1 Alpha released September 2006, see its README for what's new
• Finally, we are working on migrating the entire application to the new backend framework used by our close relatives Firefox, Thunderbird, etc., and are even moving toward using the new XULRunner architecture. At the same time we're looking to restructure the SeaMonkey-specific code, aiming to have this code live in a more sensible structure in one common location. This work will mean less development differences between Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and will result in lots of new possibilities, such as having the new Extension Manager, a better localization framework ("source L10n") and a theme rework, but it will also mean some bigger changes in how SeaMonkey's backend behaves. Despite this, we'll try to retain the feel of the well-known suite as much as possible. The current working title for a release from that work is "SeaMonkey 1.5" (subject to change) with a release not to be expected before 2007. (This work takes place on "Mozilla trunk".)

(Global:1.9 Trunk 1.8 Branch Plan explains the trunk and branches.)

History

In 2005, the Mozilla Foundation released a "transition plan" for the Mozilla Application Suite, in which they announced that there won't be any more official releases of the Mozilla Application Suite. At the same time they promised to still provide the newly created, mozilla.org-hosted, SeaMonkey project with needed infrastructure to do further development on the suite code and release it under the project's new name.

The team

A group of very active SeaMonkey developers make up the SeaMonkey Council, which is responsible for project and release management.

That doesn't mean we don't need an even bigger group of developers working on the product or taking responsibilities of certain areas in the project. We also need people doing QA and regular testing on our product. The development community of SeaMonkey is structured into project areas which cover different parts of the SeaMonkey project. Many of those still need help from more developers; if you want to lend us a hand there, please contact seamonkey-council@mozilla.org.

Here is a page with a list of the currently known supporters.

How to help

Our Project Goals document describes where the project is basically headed.

You can help by working on SeaMonkey QA as you use SeaMonkey. We need help testing changes for SeaMonkey 1.0.x, SeaMonkey 1.1, and SeaMonkey 1.5.

To get started with the project, join in the developer discussions in or mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey or #seamonkey.

Development

In preparation for "SeaMonkey 1.5", the first step is that we have to get SeaMonkey to use the infrastructure of the new products (for example the toolkit which is discussed in bug 255807), preferably up to the whole XULRunner thingy. We also should port a few features of the new apps back to SeaMonkey, but retain what makes us like the suite.

The SeaMonkey:Toolkit Transition document describes what's planned for that big transition.

The SeaMonkey:New for 1.5 document details the new features we should be picking up for 1.5, these are mainly as a result of the toolkit transition.

We also have a SeaMonkey:Suite Directory Layout document that describes how the new mozilla/suite/ directory in the CVS repository should be structured.