All of Mozilla products? Why are they hidden?
I have to wonder about the mental logic of the tech industry. Here we have Mozilla. You'd think the first thing they would do on their home page would be to show what products they offer. Do you see Thunderbird here? Do they have other products? Why is there not a clear list? I google Sea Monkey and can find no site that just states what it does, what its function is.
I see this over and over in the tech community. Here we have people brilliant in their field yet communicate in an extremely poor and ill thought out manner. This really needs to change. To you developers out there: Wake up and make things clear. We are not telepathic. If you don't tell us we may not know.
Does ANYBODY have a list of Mozilla products and their function? The best I can see now is they focus now on Firefox and Thunderbird. Camino and Sea Monkey were browsers? I have no idea. All the pages I went to that offer downloads don't even offer to tell you what the software does. Brilliant.
It looks like Camino is a browser for OS X. Isn't Firefox a browser for OS X? Thanks for the clarification. It looks like Sea Monkey is a browser. Why do they make 2 browsers? It looks like they have a Calendar called Lightning. They don't say what Sunbird is.
Can you imagine if techies made signs? They'd all be blank. We are not telepathic. Inform us.
Modified by moz2u
All Replies (8)
Hi moz2u !
Over the past few weeks I've been following your posts with great interest, and I can't help but wonder:
Why doesn't he (or 'she', whichever the case may be) apply for a job at Mozilla HQ ?
Seriously: why don't you ?
Greetings from Happy112.
This is a support forum, and the volunteers here do not design the Mozilla website.
Short answer, Thunderbird and especially SeaMonkey are not Mozilla products as they are being made by their communities.
The SeaMonkey suite is a continuation of the discontinued Mozilla suite since 1.7.13 by a community. http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
The Camino web browser for Mac has been discontinued with the last release 2.1.2 back on March 14, 2012.
The desktop Firefox is for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX (49.0 will require OSX 10.9 or newer). www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/ .There is a mobile Firefox for Android and much more recently the Firefox shell for iOS 8.2 or newer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey
Modified by James
There is a page showing clearly the products we support on this forum
- The Support Home page : support.mozilla.org
- Mozilla Home Page mozilla.org
You need to understand that Mozilla products are open source, so even if Mozilla no longer supports them they may still be available and supported by community members. They tend to fade away slowly rather than dying suddenly.
Thundebird at present is still supported here, but it is in fact in community ownership.
Pages do show what the software does. Main ones are
- mozilla.org/firefox/products
- mozilla.org//thunderbird
- webmaker.org
- mozilla.org/firefox/os
- Persona | Identity identity.mozilla.com
- seamonkey-project.org
- caminobrowser.org Camino see;
- Don't forget the Sumo forum software too, that's on its way out github.com/mozilla/kitsune
> Why doesn't he (or 'she', whichever the case may be) apply for a job at Mozilla HQ ?
Because I'm not good at techy stuff. I'm much more of a communicator. The answer to these problems is letting communicators and techies work together so the end product is technically competent and is interpreted well by the average public, like myself. I'm not trying to put people at Mozilla down. I'm trying to aspire them to something much better. Something they have a foot in now but are not addressing nearly as well as they could. Lethargy is rampant in any field and tech is no exception. This is an area that needs much work. The benefits of this would be enormous.
> This is a support forum, and the volunteers here do not design the Mozilla website.
But this is where people point out deficiencies and hopefully these questions/comments are read by someone at Mozilla. If they aren't.....well....that ain't so good. One can only hope.
> Short answer, Thunderbird and especially SeaMonkey are not Mozilla products as they are being made by their communities.
I bet very few people out there know that. I certainly didn't. And of course when people think of Thunderbird they immediately think of Firefox/Mozilla as associated groups. Nothing I saw on the Mozilla home page indicates otherwise.
So was Sea Monkey a browser that is now discontinued and replaced by Firefox or does it have other browsing features that some people find useful?
Here is a perfect example of very poor information dispersal. http://www.seamonkey-project.org Do you see anything on this page to indicate why someone would opt to use Sea Monkey instead of Firefox? Isn't this the first and foremost question most readers unfamiliar with Sea Monkey have?
Thank you John99 for the summary. Now we need this on the Mozilla home page for all to see.
Question regarding Thunderbird: Are there Add-Ons for this email program available? It seems there are many little things email programs could do for some people that wouldn't be needed by the masses but for some, would be of great benefit.
We write most of the help articles here, and may influence and discuss what is shown on support.mozilla pages but as Jscher2000 explained we have nothing to do with mozilla's main pages. Very few Mozilla staff members will see any content on this forum. Those that do probably do so specifically in relation to this support site not Mozilla generally.
You would probably do better posting your comments elsewhere. Please have a look at the general Mozilla fora/mailing lists and see if you are able to find one where such a topic would be within their scope. If in doubt I suggest you could post a brief comment and ask where best it should be posted for attention, possibly stating where you have already tried. Potentially relevant fora include:
moz2u said
> Why doesn't he (or 'she', whichever the case may be) apply for a job at Mozilla HQ ? Because I'm not good at techy stuff. I'm much more of a communicator. The answer to these problems is letting communicators and techies work together so the end product is technically competent and is interpreted well by the average public, like myself. I'm not trying to put people at Mozilla down. I'm trying to aspire them to something much better. Something they have a foot in now but are not addressing nearly as well as they could. Lethargy is rampant in any field and tech is no exception. This is an area that needs much work. The benefits of this would be enormous. > This is a support forum, and the volunteers here do not design the Mozilla website. But this is where people point out deficiencies and hopefully these questions/comments are read by someone at Mozilla. If they aren't.....well....that ain't so good. One can only hope.
Point taken. Other suggestion: why don't you send all messages you have posted here to Mozilla HQ ? You'd have to do it of course 'the old fashioned way' (US Mail) ......... At least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you have done everything within your power ......... By the way: not every possition at Mozilla HQ involves 'techy stuff' as you put it ! Good luck !
moz2u said
So was Sea Monkey a browser that is now discontinued and replaced by Firefox or does it have other browsing features that some people find useful? Here is a perfect example of very poor information dispersal. http://www.seamonkey-project.org Do you see anything on this page to indicate why someone would opt to use Sea Monkey instead of Firefox? Isn't this the first and foremost question most readers unfamiliar with Sea Monkey have? Question regarding Thunderbird: Are there Add-Ons for this email program available? It seems there are many little things email programs could do for some people that wouldn't be needed by the masses but for some, would be of great benefit.
SeaMonkey is based on the Mozilla suite which has been around since oh 1999 even. Mozilla stopped releasing the suite as of Mozilla 1.7.13 in April 2006. A community then continued the suite as SeaMonkey starting at version 1.0 as it was like what the Mozilla suite 1.8 could have been like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_Suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is Not discontinued nor is it replaced by the Firefox web browser which is made by Mozilla since it started as Phoenix 0.1 back in Sept 2002 and not as Firefox 1.0 in Nov 2004 as some mistakenly think.
SeaMonkey does borrow much of the code from Firefox for browser and Thunderbird for email client part. This does not mean all changes that were made in Fx or Tb are made in SM also.
However the SeaMonkey community does run into difficulties sometimes as they are behind in Releases currently due to certain issues with the build system computers which has since been fixed I believe. The next SeaMonkey Release will be 2.45
Since Support.mozilla.org does not have a section for the SeaMonkey suite like Mozilla did in provideing a place for Thunderbird (since February 21, 2014, was at getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/ before since oh 2007) so a popular place SeaMonkey users can get support is at the independent forums.mozillaZine.org which has existed since Nov 4th, 2002. It was actually a forum Mozilla made use of for desktop Firefox until they finally got this support.mozilla.org/questions/ going back in 2007 ok in its earlier form for desktop Firefox. Some still occasionally mistakenly believe the independent mozillaZine forums is run by or a part of Mozilla due to Mozilla in name.
Yes there are Extensions for the Thunderbird email client as you can see at https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/
Note the general term Add-ons does not equal Extensions only. https://addons.mozilla.org/faq
Modified by James