Quick note about how my growing frustration with the way
Firefox has been evolving finally reached breaking point with the latest v45, which consumes about 1GB of memory from the start and keeps stuttering on my Windows 7 x64 SP1. So I decided to give portable
Seamonkey (
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=2089) a whirl and I must say come out pretty pleased with the first results...
It should be said that the latest Seamonkey release (v2.40) is based on the Mozilla v43.x engine. Moreover, I have no need for a full program suite -- with mail and chat clients and HTML editor -- so I immediately started tweaking the PortableApps version to make it more amenable to my taste (you can judge the results by the screenshot below).
I intend to detail here the gist of my customizations, so I can return to it should I need it; also, it might be of use to someone else.
Let me start with extensions. On first look, most of
Firefox extensions aren't even compatible with
Seamonkey. To make the case worse, a lot of the extensions present in the official
Seamonkey addons page appear not to work with the latest version.
Fret not, succor is on the way. Back in 2013, user
robertcollier4 commented with a method to overcome this limitation (see
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=2089#comment24727) that, while doesn't guarantee 100% success, still works fine for many extensions.
Better yet, anyone wanting to make sure that an essential extension would work with
Seamonkey is advised to check the
Extension Compatibility Tables for SeaMonkey homepage, at
http://addonconverter.fotokraina.com/compatibility/ -- which also offers automatic conversion and installation services for compatible entries, should you be willing to trust the page (you shouldn't, by all means).
An even simpler (albeit completely counter-intuitive) route is available. If while going to be "
Mozilla Add-ons" webpage you get a message like the one displayed below, you can still go ahead and click the "
Download Anyway" link and follow suit to install it -- the worst that can happen is you will get a non-working extension, which you can easily remove via
Seamonkey's '
Add-ons Manager' interface.
That being cleared, there are two add-ons that were fundamental to get the familiar interface look shown above:
Sea Fox brings back the familiar interface to prior
Firefox users, while doing away with some weird behaviors.
Tiny Menu (attached to the top left big Seamonkey button, an icon readily provided by the PAF package in the '
App\AppInfo' sub-folder) gave me the vertical menu I was already using in Firefox -- one caveat is
Tiny Menu can't be placed next to the toolbar buttons, but all toolbar elements can instead be moved next to it.
There were many other tweaks, but I'll be stopping for now... To Be Continued.