SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 is available for free download now in 8 languages and makes a huge list of new functionality available to a wider testing audience for the first time.
Please note that this pre-release version is still intended for testers only and might still show some problems in everyday use. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage users to help us by filing bugs.
In addition to the changes in the alpha releases, this version features the following new improvements:
- OpenSearch plugins are now supported and the default for web search.
- Data Manager now unifies cookie, permission, password, and form data management.
- Plugins now run in their own processes and don’t take down the browser any more if they crash.
- JavaScript is faster than ever with the new JägerMonkey engine.
- Direct2D Hardware Acceleration is now on by default for Windows 7 users, hardware accelerated layers are available on all platforms with known-to-work video drivers.
- The HSTS security protocol and the proposed Audio Data API are available.
We welcome any and all discussions on this alpha on our newsgroups, or you can even file a bug if you find one. Be sure to check our Known Issues prior to filing bugs.
SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 is available for free download on the SeaMonkey website. Once you have downloaded and installed this release, we’d like to encourage you to get involved in discussing and reporting problems as well as further improving the product.
Thanks for testing and helping us to make SeaMonkey even better!
So, if SeaMonkey is getting Gecko 2.0 features, why on Earth is it still called SeaMonkey 2.1 instead of SeaMonkey 3.0? This is not a +0.1 amount of improvement, even if much of it is coming from the shared codebase instead of new SeaMonkey-specific features.
Excellent! Are SeaMonkey 2.1 profiles backwards-compatible with SM 2.0.9? In other words, if I switch to SM 2.1b1 and run into a problem, is it likely I’ll be able to switch back to SM 2.0.9 and continue to use my same profile?