SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta2 for OS/2 + eCS

September 15, 2009 by warpcafe@yahoo.de

As announced via the Warpzilla project page, Peter Weilbacher released a port of the latest beta version of the upcoming Seamonkey 2 for OS/2.

In case you are new to Seamonkey: This is the all-in-one application suite of Mozilla, containing the browser, email, chat and composer applications - a contemporary version of the Netscape suite so to say. Here's a short list of feature highlights for Seamonkey 2.0 in general:

• Tabbed Mail enables accounts, folders and even single messages to be opened in tabs inside the Mail & Newsgroups window. This feature also enables the Lightning extension to be installed into SeaMonkey for calendering functionality.
• Reopening closed browser windows (Undo Close Window) is now possible.
• Several improvements were made to the recently rewritten download manager.
• A large number of small improvements were made across the suite.
  

For the OS/2 port, the readme on the FTP download site states:

Support for the new downloadable font feature (also known as @font-face) has
not been implemented yet. HTML5 

Note that Seamonkey2 comes with a different, built-in font rendering unlike previous versions (it uses the Gecko 1.9 engine). Thus, if you test-drive this beta and have already installed/used a previous version of Seamonkey, make sure to either disable the (Innotek) FontEngine support for "seamonkey.exe" or rename the Seamonkey2 executable to a different name so it gets not 'snatched' by the font engine when launched.

Be aware that this is not a stable release (as the "beta" might indicate) and as such can have undesired side-effects. Thus, as always when talking beta, it may come in handy to

• have a working backup of your profile directory
• install Seamonkey2 into a blank new directory
• double-check environment settings for Seamonkey/Mozilla

prior to unleash Seamonkey2 on your system.

Whether or not it works for you (for me it did and it looked great so far), make an effort to give some feedback. Peters contact details are also contained in the readme file on the FTP server.

If you are interested in further tweaks, tips and tricks that apply to the Mozilla products (Seamonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird), in special with regards to their OS/2 and eCS versions, check out the Warpzilla tips page on os2bbs.com.

• Download, readme:
  http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/2.0b2/contrib/
• Warpzilla project website:
  http://www.mozilla.org/ports/os2/
• OS2BBS Warpzilla tips page:
  http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/Warpzilla.html