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SeaMonkey: The end of an era?

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eepee
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SeaMonkey: The end of an era?

#322779

Postby eepee » June 30th, 2020, 2:06 pm

I have been using SeaMonkey since about the time it was launched. Love the format, size and the integrated email client. It is also unpopular enough for it not to be attacked as the main browsers/email clients often are.

However of recent it has been misbehaving.

Of the three news sites I scan most mornings, Sky at 'https://news.sky.com/' loads the page but no further linking is possible. Their financial news page fails similarly.

No doubt Sky have made some changes to their page. No doubt they would say that SeaMonkey is an 'unsupported browser' though why they should think that to add pointless affectations to a basic news page is beyond me.

This morning, ITV at 'https://www.itv.com/news/' is coming up with a variation of the above. Clicking on a link comes up with 'Page not found'. However if I get rid of the 's' in 'https' or indeed the 'https://www.' the page does load! Needless to say, a click to another page promptly adds the preamble although I have set SeaMonkey not to do so - guess it is in the ITV script.

BBC, Sharecast et al work fine.

So why am I writing all this? I suppose in the hope that someone more knowledgeable will say something like "If in Settings you change the Double-Shovel Bracket to zero in SeaMonkey or Win7 everything will work fine". But I doubt it.

So bye-bye SeaMonkey. I think I'll use Brave on the PC and switch from Brave (which is quite slow and its security takes over the device) on my Android phone to Opera.

Regards
ep

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Re: SeaMonkey: The end of an era?

#322821

Postby didds » June 30th, 2020, 6:01 pm

I dont know anything about sea monkey but wrt to the http/https stuff all that means is the https sites are "secure" (without going into technical stuff). For basic information pages the "s" is likely superfluous - its real use is when you have pages dealing with taking payment, or displaying personal info etc. So if the page loads fine with http just carry on using that and update your bookmarks accordingly if needed.

As for the "you put http in but it moves to https" that is becasue somewhere on the webserver (again technical bits left out) there is a deliberate redirect so that any attempt to load the insecure page (http) is forced to instead load the https page. This is either a "lazy" catch-all approach, or because somebody thought that page did have info etc on it that needed protecting or becasue of the likes of google that have now decided IIRC that if a page isn't https but only http it cannot be trusted which then has repercussions for those using non google chrome etc browsers.

If you feel you do need to drop seamonkey anyway, IIRC its from mozilla who also have Firefox browser which may have similarities (I woildnt know) ?

cheers

didds

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Re: SeaMonkey: The end of an era?

#322824

Postby Stompa » June 30th, 2020, 6:46 pm

I know nowt about SeaMonkey either, but this:

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

implies that it's not been abandoned. Are you using the latest version?

There also appears to be a support forum here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=40

where I'm sure you could get sound advice about any specific problems.

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Re: SeaMonkey: The end of an era?

#322830

Postby Mike4 » June 30th, 2020, 7:51 pm

didds wrote:I dont know anything about sea monkey but wrt to the http/https stuff all that means is the https sites are "secure" (without going into technical stuff). For basic information pages the "s" is likely superfluous - its real use is when you have pages dealing with taking payment, or displaying personal info etc. So if the page loads fine with http just carry on using that and update your bookmarks accordingly if needed.

As for the "you put http in but it moves to https" that is becasue somewhere on the webserver (again technical bits left out) there is a deliberate redirect so that any attempt to load the insecure page (http) is forced to instead load the https page. This is either a "lazy" catch-all approach, or because somebody thought that page did have info etc on it that needed protecting or becasue of the likes of google that have now decided IIRC that if a page isn't https but only http it cannot be trusted which then has repercussions for those using non google chrome etc browsers.

If you feel you do need to drop seamonkey anyway, IIRC its from mozilla who also have Firefox browser which may have similarities (I woildnt know) ?

cheers

didds


I'm no expert but AIUI https is an encrypted connection between your computer and the web server supplying the page you are loading. Google has decided to try to influence the whole of the internet to switch to https connections 'for your security' and broadly, their method of forcing this is to put all the encrypted https sites at the top of their search results and all the plain http pages at the bottom. So as most web publishers care a LOT about being returned near the top in Google searches, they are all demanding servers that offer https, much to the chagrin of ISPs who as a result, see a tripling of the computing power needed to run their web servers as https is far more resource-thirsty. Or something like that.

You may ask why Google has decided to do this and you would be joining millions of people who can't see the point, when their sites serve up plain pages that don't need encrypting. Me for example.

Bit of a rant there, eh?

Edit to add:
Oh and the seamonkey problem is probably occurring now because although the developers probably decided long ago not to add the ability to establish an https encrypted connection to their browser, my guess is that Sky etc when switching to https servers probably continued serving up http plain pages in parallel during the changeover, and are only now turning off those old http servers. Just a guess though.


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