Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1

Mozilla and the SeaMonkey development teams have released a first beta for version 2.2 of their "all-in-one internet application suite". SeaMonkey is the successor to the old Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Application suites and includes a web browser with advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support.

SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 is based on the same Gecko layout engine as the latest 5.0 branch of Firefox and introduces a number of the same features, such as support for CSS animations. Other changes include improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance, as well as updated standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas. Spell checking is also said to be improved for some locales. A release date for the final version yet to be announced.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

Further details about the beta, including a list of known issues, can be found in the change log and release notes. At the time of writing, an official announcement has yet to be made. SeaMonkey 2.1 Beta 1 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 14 different languages from the project's site or from one of its mirrors.

SeaMonkey binaries are released under the Mozilla SeaMonkey End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. The latest stable release is SeaMonkey 2.1, based on Firefox 4, from earlier this month.

See also:

• Firefox and Thunderbird updates patch security holes, a report from The H.
• Thunderbird 5.0 arrives in Beta channel, skips 4.0, a report from The H.
• Mozilla kills embedding support for Gecko layout engine, a report from The H.

(crve)