Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by Jeff H. on Dec. 14, 2010 · permalink

When it was decided to split Mozilla apart into Firefox and Thunderbird, some of the Mozilla developers thought this was a bad idea. They formed a group that took over development of the old Mozilla comm suite, and re-branded it as SeaMonkey. As in the Mozilla (and Netscape) of old, the web browser, news/email client, and HTML editor in SeaMonkey are integrated into one app, where they all share the same Gecko rendering engine and other resources. There is no need to "launch" a separate web browser to follow a link in an email, because the browser is already there in the same app, and already running.

The existence and popularity of ThunderBrowse argues powerfully that the SeaMonkey developers were right. If you find yourself running both Firefox and Thunderbird constantly, and wanting to resort to an add-on like this so that you don't have to, maybe the answer is to install SeaMonkey instead, and to be grateful that someone had the foresight to keep the old Mozilla comm suite alive.