I'll Never Cheat On SeaMonkey Again With a Cheap Pair of Floozies.

My Dearest SeaMonkey,

I admit it. I fell for a little Firefox for a while. You must understand, my sweet little SeaMonkey, you were dressed in your dependable and practical clothing that I had grown used to, the same clothing that had attracted me so long ago when you called yourself Mozilla. I began to take you for granted, while the new slut on the block had more 'plugins' than the Kama Sutra had pages.

I must tell you, SeaMonkey, she meant nothing to me. I know now as I knew then that I wanted not just some little hot flash to make things prettier, I wanted a full featured application. Before I knew it, Firefox had her little wandering crackhead friend Thunderbird. They were good together, but I kept having to call one, then the other, and I knew I could not go on like that... I had grown used to one application - you, my lovely SeaMonkey - to do all that I needed. You have been all that I needed, all that I wanted in an application... and though I hope you understand I needed to explore new horizons, I beg you to be for me all that you have been for me - and to allow us to grow together, despite my disloyalty. Please take me back.

Sincerely,
Your Humble User

Well, the good news is that SeaMonkey did take me back; the tacit agreement between us being private. I'm all integrated again, feeling Groovy. I tried Firefox for a while, and Thunderbird, but - let's get something clear: I don't see an email client and a browser as something that should be separate. I never have. If you're on the web, you probably have your email AND browser open, so the reasoning behind splitting the two into separate applications has always struck me as stoopid.

Firefox has lots of plugins. It has more plugins than you can wave a stick at. Some of them were sort of useful, but nothing I would die without - in fact, after using them for a while, I found things getting overly complicated.

Upgrading From FireFox and Thunderbird to SeaMonkey

Downloading 11.9 meg went pretty quickly, and the installation almost went without a hitch. Almost. I did run into a problem with my mailbox, and some hacking around found out why: When Thunderbird installed, it created it's own little profile and... copied everything from the Mozilla mail directory and copied it into a separate little directory. When I installed SeaMonkey, it checked the Mozilla directory, saw the old Mozilla stuff, and... showed me mail up to January 8th - the day I switched.

The casual user would be lost. This causal user checked the directory profiles, found the obfuscation that Thunderbird had left behind and copied the files back to the proper directory. For me, we're talking about about a gigabyte of email (thus, because I expected Thunderbird to do the right thing, I had *2* gigabytes of email on the hard drive). SeaMonkey wouldn't allow me to import Thunderbird's stuff... but then, after the way I kicked her to the curb, I had to expect a little bit of a rocky start.

This was fixed by copying the files over (and backing up the ones being replaced just in case). That, to me, is a SeaMonkey bug - but the right thing is to submit a bug. Someone beat me to it - Bug ID 306175; exhibit A.

After that, smooth sailing. I tried some of the plugins - most that were tagged for Mozilla didn't work. The truth is that I don't need them; as I was experimenting with all those FireFox plugins I was becoming a bit exasperated. You can waste DAYS looking at plugins (and there's no real sensible way to find useful ones - the popular ones are up top, but who says I want a popular one?

I don't have days to waste.

I am back to an integrated web application. I have my little email button to the bottom left that shows green when I have email. I have my HTML editor. I have my address book. I have my IRC client, Chatzilla.

I'm sorry, Firefox, but it's over. You and your cute friend Thunderbird were fun to have a fling with, but it just wasn't working out. It was just too complicated, and while I appreciate the cute outfits and the wild nights the three of us had together, I missed having one application that did it all.

My SeaMonkey took me back. I'm sure popular applications like yourselves will be OK, I'm sure that you'll have nice relationships... but as users mature, they require more in one package. Maybe as you two mature, you'll integrate into one... but having to deal with 2 applications that don't do the work of one SeaMonkey, well... I'm sorry, and I hope you understand. You both just don't add up to half of the application my SeaMonkey is. I just have to click too much to do the same things and keep both of you happy. I admit, I am getting older and lack the endurance to handle both of you...

We'll always have January, 2006. Please don't call or write, and enjoy your wild nights with the guys at the Mozilla Foundation who pimp you out more than love you.