Monday, March 20, 2006

Sea Monkey

Travelling in the fast lane
I've been using Netscape's Composer as my HTML generator/word processor for about a dozen years, and I'm used to it.  It hasn't changed much over the years, and some of the changes are unpleasant.  The auto-save feature disappeared some years ago, but on the plus side they added a spell checker, and CSS formatting options.  The biggest change though is stability.  With every passing day, changes in my overall software environment seemed to cause Composer to decay, until about the only way to close it (after it sat open for awhile) was to use Windows Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DELETE).

Last week I discovered this, from Mozilla,  The SeaMonkey Project.  It appears to pretty much clone the "Mozilla Application Suite" that included Composer.  It also includes SeaMonkey E-mail client, which I immediately swapped for the  Mozilla that I still use for my main E-mail (Thunderbird is better, and I use that for other stuff).  I never use the browser, but it's part of the suite..

Anyway, if you also like these old Netscape components, SeaMonkey 1.0 seems to handle memory, or page swapping (whatever the hell it is) much better, and so far it hasn't hung up on me.  If you're looking for an easy way to format your posts (tables, graphic placement, etc.), Composer is about as easy as it gets.    

3 comments:

Ralph Gizzip said...

I used to use Mozilla which is a suite containing E-mail, browser, and an HTML composer. IT worked great. Then I "upgraded to Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for E-mail. They work great, too. Check out Open Office (www.openoffice.org) if you really want to get away form Microshit. It's free and contains a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and an HTML composer. Gotta love open source code.

AnnoyedOne said...

Another free HTML generator is NVU. Its based on Firefox.

http://www.nvu.com/download.html

Rodger the Real King of France said...

NVU looks very very good Annoyed One. Thanks, I'm going to use it until I either give it my last name, ot send it back.

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