SeaMonkey QA

After nearly 9 hours of regular use (on and off), I've not noticed any problems. Extensions and themes are working fine, Mail/Newsgroups, no problems. Very PLEASED, I am. Excellent so far!

Good to see SeaMonkey reaching Release Candidate status! :)

I just thought I'd give this new Seamonkey a go, after having used Opera (and occasionally Firefox) for a long time.

In only minutes, I'm really surprised by a couple of things:

1) It insists on placing icons on my desktop and in the quicklaunch bar.

2) When opening, not only the Personal bar is opened by default, but also the sidebar. This sort of UI clutter has been abandoned by Firefox and Opera a long time ago.

3) To add insult to injury, both the removed Personal bar *and* sidebar keep appearing at every startup. I'm really not going to remove them manually every time I start the browser, so this alone is enough to stop using it. (This may have something to do with the Profile Hell I always experience when using any Mozilla based product.)

4) Newly installed themes don't appear in the View -> Apply themes menu. You have to restart the browser first, choose the theme and restart it *again* to apply.

5) When entering a URL for the first time, the top 2 pixels of the (empty) dropdown menu appear right under the URL field.

6) The splash screen and the throbber make use of the new Seamonkey icon, but the taskbar and the Alt+tab switcher use the old Mozilla icon...

Really, all Mozilla based browsers are built on a solid basis where standards support is concerned, please spend some time on refining the user interface some more before shipping this.

Fabian,
#1 has a bug already on file.
#2 and #3 is a bug that probably depends somehow on your profile.
My first shot at theme installation didn't work at all, but a second theme installed properly and showed up immediately in Apply Themes.
Could #5 be because you were using a 3rd-party theme?

Thanks for the feedback, Andrew.

After creating a blank profile, my problems 2, 3 and 5 are gone. Still, this is one of the main weaknesses of Mozilla IMHO. Normal users shouldn't have to take care of incompatible profiles if they happen to have had Mozilla or Firefox installed earlier (and that's quite likely). Chances are they'd never know how to solve these sort of things.

For the rest: thumbs up!

Fabian, if you still have your old profile and can identify what part of your profile caused #2 and #3 (I'm assuming #5 was from the theme, which we can't help) it's likely we could fix it for our next release (1.1). Not filing bugs for annoying problems is an excellent way to see them again in future releases.