Author: Shirl Kennedy
The newest iteration of the SeaMonkey Internet application suite was released simultaneously with 1.0.9, according to developer Robert Kaiser, but “the project team strongly urges users to upgrade to SeaMonkey 1.1.2, as the old 1.0 series will not be maintained further.”
The 1.1 version incorporates new features, such as spellchecking in Web forms, and mail tags. Kaiser says the security patches in release 1.1.2 will keep Sea Monkey “at the same level of security as its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, which are issuing updates for the same problems this week as well.” For detailed information on the release, see the release notes.
SeaMonkey is a complete Internet application suite that includes a Web browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, the ChatZilla IRC chat client, and HTML editing. Official builds are available for Linux, Mac OS X and Linux (x86); and contributed builds are available for Linux/x86_64 and OS/2 as well as many localized versions.
The SeaMonkey team took over development of this suite after Netscape and then the Mozilla Foundation stopped working on it. Users of the old Mozilla Suite and Netscape 4, 6, and 7 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of SeaMonkey.
Says Kaiser, “Those software packages suffer from a large and rising number of security vulnerabilities because they are no longer being maintained. SeaMonkey 1.1.2 is a drop-in replacement, providing the same basic suite functionality plus additional features, without known security problems but with current updates.”
Shirl Kennedy is the senior editor of theDocuTickerandResourceShelfweblogs as well as the “Internet Waves” columnist forInformation Today. She has been writing about technology since 1992.
