SeaMonkey is a great program. The Web is rotting around it.
The developers of SeaMonkey deserve to be commended for keeping as much of the Web running in it as possible as Google and Mozilla fill the Web platform with garbage meant to turn it into some kind of crazy virtual machine with no real security model, like Microsoft ActiveX, only “cross-platform”.
When I got openSUSE Leap 15.5 KDE on my laptop due to the fact that Fedora is dying off and being murdered by IBM Red Hat, I was somewhat disturbed to find out that it was not only not the latest version, but that even the latest version doesn’t run my WordPress.com blog editor, again, even with WebComponents on and Palefill extension loaded.
I ended up getting the latest version by adding JUST the Mozilla repo and pinning it to a lower priority than the system’s so it wouldn’t go around clobbering OS files, and then pulling the updated 2.53.17 RPMs out of that with Yast.
openSUSE adds a layer of confusion, because ChatZilla, the IRC client, is missing, and it’s in another package called “seamonkey-irc”. I talked to the SeaMonkey developers on Libera about this, and they said that’s a bogus thing to do. Apparently, all it does is put the ChatZilla application (a XUL extension approximately 350 KB) into an RPM, which dumps it into /usr/lib64/seamonkey/extensions.
ChatZilla (which is NOT the one from Thunderbird Add-Ons, the one from SeaMonkey has a lot of updates) is a “special” extension that has access to XUL features that other extensions don’t, so just dumping it in with regular extensions will not work.
Most of the Web runs fine in SeaMonkey (especially well with ublock-legacy and NoScript, and WASMs off).
I can still pay my credit card bills, do online banking, and surf approximately 99.5% of the Web. The two pain points for me are this argle bargle diarrhea code in WordPress, and in the State’s electric company, ComEd, which has a corrupt Microsoft Azure deal. It feeds the browser bungled Chromeisms that they assume you’ll figure out by installing yet another browser on the machine.
Firefox ESR is not as pleasant to use as SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey’s user interface is fast, responsive, and it is a Suite of Internet (not just Web) applications.
There is no real replacement for SeaMonkey Mail in my opinion.
KMail is not as comprehensive and not as well maintained. Evolution is horrid and most GNOME distributions don’t even come with it anymore. (Its replacement, Geary, is some completely godawful gimpy Apple-like mail program with a few buttons and Webkit.)
Once you learn how to use SeaMonkey Mail (it’s kind of a groupware suite of sorts), it’s absolutely indispensable, especially in comparison to these bizarre “Web App” email programs, where the thing never works the same way twice, and someone on the other end can re-arrange the GUI to take features away or move the buttons around on you.
Some legitimate software, like Super Tux, now has a WASM (WebAssembly) version, and insofar as it is Free Software, I would say running it in a Web browser is fine, if somewhat pointless.
In openSUSE, I can just deploy it to my laptop in either RPM or Flatpak, and I have native code, which will always beat the performance of some “Web App”. So I fail to see why I should re-enable WASM. WASMs are more likely to be malware that runs without asking than something under a Free Software license and asks my permission (WASMs just load, nobody asks you permission, so this is a form of rape.).
SeaMonkey’s gaps in Web support are entirely the fault of stupid Web developers cluttering the Web up with things that Google and Mozilla vomit out on us without any sort of standardization process. They just immediately expose it to the Web platform and then sort of, as an after-thought, ask the relevant standards authorities (which they now have most of the seats on anyway) to write a standard around it.
This is how the WHATWG and W3C, which I used to support, they used to put out standards (and back when they were standards agencies, Microsoft was the offender in violating all of them to gain an “advantage”), operates now. It’s not an “open Web”.
You can’t standardize Digital Restrictions Malware modules like PlayReady, Widevine, and “Fairplay”, which threaten the user with felonies if they figure out how they work or use them to jailbreak encumbered “content”, and call yourself an authority on “open standards”.
The part that they allegedly standardized was a framework that does nothing on its own, except call a proprietary module that harms the user. This still is not “open”. Anyone could make one of these modules, but nobody (certainly not Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, etc.) would use it. Making an open source one would belittle your case because you’d have to tell the user how it worked.
That’s why I always disable and remove Widevine and set the browser to where it can’t even ask. SeaMonkey doesn’t come with one because Google won’t even talk to them. In this way, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are a cartel that uses DRM as a weapon against alternative browser vendors.
Going back to Web Apps, they’re quote often malicious software, like Office 365 is. You think you buy the hype around it, and then what they sell you is frustration and guaranteed failure. So use LibreOffice.
Even if a Web App is not malicious, as most of them are, they still perform at 7/10ths of the speed of a native program.
Someone actually bothered to port LAME MP3 to JavaScript. My laptop can go into “multi-vector assault mode” and spin up 8 LAMEs (64-bit, optimized for SSE4), and have an entire album converted to MP3 files in a matter of seconds. A lot of “Web Apps” seem to be a solution in search of an actual problem that I am not having.
The end result of this madness is that more and more “desktop apps” are actually a full copy of Chromium (the Web browser) which is not being updated with security fixes, to run one application, at 70% of the speed your system could if it was an actual program.
So again, this is not how I do my computing. I refuse.
WordPress says they have a “Linux desktop app”. I have not looked at it, but I can’t imagine that they went to any real effort. It’s probably more Electron junk and at this point, you’re better off actually having another browser that loads the Web version, as there’s no telling what will ride in on top of the “desktop app” which just loads one Web site (WordPress.com) and may not be getting security updates.
As for online banking… LANDLORDS!
It never ceases to amaze me how stupid landlords are. Like, I’m almost 40, these people are almost always older than I am. They paid with checks and balanced their checkbooks pre-Web, and now they act all “Duh Hey” when you hand them a check for the rent.
They want you to set up Zelle, which is not secure, deal with all of the Zelle fraud out there, and then when they’re too dumb to click on the “Ryan sent you this month’s rent.” and it goes back into my account, I actually had a landlord in Chicago named Joy (ironically) who bit my head off that I didn’t send the rent that month.
So ever since then it’s been “OK Boomer Landlord, have a check.”.
In fact, I mailed them one today. I record the clock on the wall at the post office in a video at the post office, then me putting the check in the envelope, sealing the envelope, and then walking it over and dropping it in the outgoing mailbox inside the lobby, all the way down the chute. That way they can’t accuse me of not mailing it, and I don’t have to pay an extra $5 per month to put Certified Mail on it.
I’ve even heard stories about people’s landlords demanding that they use PayPal Friends & Family to help the landlord cheat the IRS. Yeah, with checks they can’t start doing this to you. I’m not going to be pinched for Conspiracy so some asshole that raises my rent every year can commit tax fraud. No siree.
So far, none have asked me to do such a thing, but I’d much rather find a new apartment and report the landlord and all such messages to the IRS than be accused of a crime so that they can have a heated driveway for the Lexus. ⬆