It seems like a lot of relative new-comers to Mozilla (and a couple of old-timers) believe that my only goal in life is to kill Seamonkey, seemingly because either I think it sucks or I think it threatens Thunderbird and Firefox. I thought I'd spend a few overly-defensive minutes and recount some of my history on this project with the hope that folks will see that's just not the case.
In the spring and summer of 1998 I was downloading binaries of the Mozilla Classic code. Back then, you couldn't get any binaries from mozilla.org so I had to hunt them down at a few ftp repositories that hosted semi-regular "pre-compiled binaries." (Anyone else here remember Mike Wynholds's FTP and poking npm.general posts nearly every day to see if he had a new binary?) Soon, Jason Kersey, now of Mozillazine fame, had started a very cool site called mozBin that attempted to maintain links to the latest of these early community builds, including Mike's, so me and the handful of other early "community testers" could get new builds pretty frequently.
I was a huge fan of the (now "classic") next-generation Communicator that was being developed and I spent more hours than I can count downloading binaries with my US Robotics Sportster 28.8 modem onto a Dell P100 with 32 MB of RAM. Not only was downloading a painful task but running the builds, even when I could score non-debug builds, was an exercise in both faith and patience (45 second start-up times :| When mozilla.org started providing binaries toward the end of 1998 and the transition to NGLayout and XPFE was starting to pick up steam, I was downloading at least a half dozen builds a week.
I loved Seamonkey. I loved the idea of XPFE and even the hard to love early Apprunner implementation. I spent hours and hours talking on IRC with developers about XPFE problems and trying to get early Messenger to work so I could wean myself off of 4.x completely. By M3 or M4 I was fully migrated to Apprunner nightly builds for browsing (not a great experience, let me tell you) and by M9 or M10 I was fully migrated to MailNews nightly builds. I don't think that anyone but a couple of Netscape Mail engineers had made that move as early as I did.
You couldn't have found a bigger fan of Seamonkey anywhere. You couldn't find a more staunch defender of XUL and XPFE (except maybe Chris and the one or two others that would take on Bruce at Mozillazine :-) I devoted the entirety of my evenings and weekends the following year working to build an open source community around the Seamonkey project -- Seamonkey had become a true labor of love.
By the time M16 and M17 rolled around, I had been hired and was working full-time for mozilla.org and it was becoming clear that the time had come for the Netscape 6 product and the mozilla.org 1.0 release to part ways. I became one of the original drivers@mozilla.org to help define the requirements for Mozilla 1.0 and to help drive releases on the road to 1.0 and beyond.
Since then, I've spent a significant amount of my time at Mozilla working long weeks and late nights, busting my butt to ship about 70 Seamonkey releases. Yes, 70 release cycles of building buglists, driving those buglists, assembling testing, shipping, collecting feedback and building the next buglist. I have been devoted to shipping high-quality Seamonkey releases for almost 5 years and I couldn't have done that if I didn't believe in Seamonkey, if I didn't love it.
Two and a half years after the release of Mozilla 1.0, most estimates of of marketshare put Mozilla 1.x between 2% and 3%.
I was very involved when Firefox was born (then m/b) and saw the potential for this new application to take the Mozilla project, the standards-based Gecko rendering technologies, and Open Source much further than Seamonkey had been able. I was quick to step in to help with project management and releasing and by the time we got to Phoenix 0.5, it was clear to me that this app was going to deliver Gecko to more desktops, doing more for the Mozilla project and our goals of preserving choice and building an open, standards-based, web than anything we'd done to date. I've spent the last three years working to make that potential into a reality -- while still fully committed to delivering great Seamonkey releases on a regular basis.
Firefox 1.0 shipped about 30 million downloads in the first 4 months it's been available and is achieving market penetration at about 15 times the rate that Seamonkey did over the last two and a half years. While Seamonkey leveled out at around 2-3%, Firefox has already gained about 6% and clearly has a momentum that Seamonkey never had and I don't believe could ever have.
I well understand that there are some long-time contributors and a non-trivial number of Seamonkey users who haven't yet made the migration to Firefox. I plan to do what I can to support them with regular security updates to the 1.7 release for users and assistance to the new team of contributors who want to take Seamonkey forward.
Like probably everyone else working on Mozilla projects, I'm already overloaded but that's never stopped me before from taking on additional work so I'll be doing what I can to work with the new team Seamonkey to help them get off the ground and develop their project and release planning.
I'm here to help all of the Mozilla efforts and that includes Seamonkey just like it includes Minimo, Camino, Bugzilla, and all of the other projects. My primary focus is on the Firefox and Thunderbird applications, but I put in lots of evening and weekend hours doing Mozilla work that isn't directly related to my primary responsibilities. I've talked with several of the folks emerging as early leadership in the Seamonkey project and as long as they want my help, and as long as I feel like it's appreciated, I'm here to give it.
If you still want to curse me in the comments or elsewhere, maybe you should consider whether it benefits Seamonkey to turn away one of it's oldest and most ardent supporters -- and the guy that knows more than probably any one else about how to ship successful Seamonkey releases.
