Surprising results with SeaMonkey Web Browser / Email Client

[S.W.B.]

Hi,

I got the idea to try out the SeaMonkey web browser after reading 
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html .  The article mentioned 
that "Mozilla 1.8" builds are faster in most respects than Firefox 1.5.  
So I downloaded the latest stable version, which is now SeaMonkey 1.0.1.

I must say I am very impressed.  SeaMonkey starts up faster than 
Firefox, seems to use less memory than Firefox, and the best part: It 
has an excellent built-in mail client and an excellent WYSIWYG HTML 
editor.  Although Firefox, Thunderbird, and NVU are excellent apps on 
their own, they each have a HEAVY memory footprint individually, and 
trying to run even two of them together on my old laptop with 128MB of 
RAM absolutely brings it to its knees.  But SeaMonkey integrates all of 
these together in one binary, so memory usage is MUCH MUCH less.  And 
they integrate very well, better than the above mentioned 3 
applications.  Here's another link where people mention memory usage of 
just FF compared to SeaMonkey: 
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7815

I had used older Mozilla Suite versions in the past, but I always felt 
like they lacked functionality and ease of use compared to the next 
generation FF/TB/NVU.  But now, the best features of FF and TB seem to 
have been backported into SeaMonkey, and it's a real pleasure to use.  
The mail client in SeaMonkey is so much improved compared to the old 
Mozilla; they've put a lot of work into bringing it up to par.  It is 
much easier to use, and MUCH more powerful than Sylpheed claws, in my 
opinion.  It has built in, easy to use Bayesian spam filtering, and even 
better, a powerful address book that can be used as a standalone contact 
and information manager.  SeaMonkey also brings a few features (like a 
nice Sidebar and a Roaming Profile Manager) that are not even available 
in FF / TB.

The downsides of SeaMonkey: Many (but not all) common extensions for 
Firefox don't work with SeaMonkey.  A notable exception is Adblock, 
which does officially support SeaMonkey.  Some of the commands and 
shortcuts are different on SeaMonkey.  I am indifferent to these 
changes.  Most notably, if you want "Find as you type" searching, just 
start typing and watch the bottom of your screen, and hit F3 or Shift+F3 
to search next/previous.  Another problem is that the default SeaMonkey 
theme is terribly ugly.  But you can quickly solve that with 
http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&content=c_linuxseamonkey.php 
which makes it look and feel a lot like FF/TB. 

All in all, I realize it's late in the devel cycle to change this, but I 
strongly suggest replacing Firefox and Thunderbird and Sylpheed with 
SeaMonkey as the default browser/email client on Xubuntu, because of the 
performance increase.  Almost all users need web browser and email open 
simultaneously, and it's just not possible using FF and TB, they are too 
resource intensive, and Sylpheed doesn't go over well with many new 
users.  SeaMonkey is a very nice solution.

Any thoughts?