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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)

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SeaMonkey

This will be short and might not be completely technically accurate, as this browser has too many flaws for me to bother with it. As expected from FF offshoots, it spies on you.

First, we have it connecting to Mozilla's location services, who then obviously learn your location. Then a bunch to SeaMonkey's own site. The shavar thing has something to do with Google's Safe Browsing, and can only be disabled from the dumpster known as about:config. Later, the actual download of the Safe Browsing lists that comes every 30 minutes. Updating addons through Thunderbird's (Mozilla's) site; hey, I don't care to be telling Moz what browser or OS I'm using, okay? Why not use your own site for updates? Downloading blocklists again from Thunderbird's site, this time telling Moz whether you use Pulseaudio or not. For some reason SeaMonkey connects to a firefox.settings domain...fuck it, I'm tired of this. The only justifiable requests are those to SeaMonkey's own domains for update lifting, but even they should be disabled by default. SeaMonkey clearly doesn't care about user privacy too much, though it's miles better than vanilla FF in that it doesn't track your specific movements.

SeaMonkey uses XUL (like Pale Moon), so FF addons are incompatible with it. Though the rendering engine is actually Gecko, so you get Firefox's website compatibility. In terms of the addons, however, it seems somehow different in the internals than Pale Moon, because PM addons don't work with it, either. So extensions have to be specifically coded for SeaMonkey support, and it seems not many people care about that. No uMatrix here, my friends! Therefore, effectively, this browser becomes minimal-like at least in terms of content blocking capabilities. Even if all the addons worked, this browser requires you to add obnoxious custom about:config entries so that they are actually allowed to be installed. Can I get a browser that doesn't treat me like a Down's syndrome patient and exposes all its functionality through the UI? Even better, just take off all blockages by default and I'll deal with any eventual breaks, thank you very much. SeaMonkey also includes an IRC client, RSS client, and mail client inside it, which is just pointlessly duplicating stuff I already have. But I guess some people like it all in one place, so if you're one of those, SeaMonkey will be right up your alley. And you can use only the web browser part if you want to. RAM usage is 120mb, similar to IceCat. GTK3 is required, and a cursory look tells me this browser doesn't really have a lot of support at all. It seems that the only semi-positive of SeaMonkey is that the UI is still old school, with separate menus and many options. But that's surely not enough and Pale Moon is still way superior.