Adventures with Seamonkey
I think it’s time to face it: Seamonkey is the ideal browser for Puppy Linux and pretty much any small distro. It’s stable as Firefox but feels slightly faster and comes with pretty much anything needed for typical internet usage.
However, Seamonkey’s biggest weaknesses are the slower development and the compatibility; it uses Gecko and XUL just like Firefox and it’s compatible with most Firefox 3.x addons. Another weak spot of Seamonkey is its low popularity.
Despite of these, Seamonkey runs exceptionally well with Puppy Squeeze, the revived dpup, a community-built Puppy built from Debian Squeeze binaries. It already has its own artwork and most applications, but the Debian package quality already shows its benefits: Seamonkey is faster than any other browser and its XUL-rendered interface isn’t quirky as in other distros or Mozilla applications.
At the moment Puppy Squeeze has Seamonkey 2.0.7 but three people reported the mail client doesn’t work and two reported the browser does not show the traditional Puppy welcome page.
I have a theory that Seamonkey needs to be packaged with a default profile and that’s why it doesn’t open the welcome page; it opens the 2.0.7 introduction and “what’s new” page instead, as it does on any fresh Seamonkey installation or upgrade.
Regarding the mail client, Seamonkey needs to be recompiled. At the moment I’m trying to get Puppy Squeeze installed on my netbook so I can work on it on-the-go, I hate being tied to one desktop computer.
I also want to package the statically-compiled binary distributions of both Firefox and Seamonkey to see whether they provide any performance boost. Even if they do, the Seamonkey package won’t be ideal, because the HTML editor is not really needed on Puppy; Geany can do HTML too. The extra size the static linking can be dangerous and every bit counts.
Let’s hope we get Seamonkey to work well on Puppy Squeeze, as a full browser is one of the best features of Puppy Squeeze, in my eyes. Most users will be more than happy with a snappy browser that is fully compatible with and similar to Firefox.
