14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta build of the upcoming SeaMonkey 2.2 has been released. SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 comes with several new features, compared to the recently launched SeaMonkey 2.1, the biggest change being the switch to the Firefox 5 Gecko rendering engine.
"SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 is now available for free download on the SeaMonkey website. We encourage testers to get involved in discussing and reporting problems as well as further improving the product," the SeaMonkey project announced.
Being that it's based on some of the same technology as Firefox 5, and that it shares a common heritage, it's no surprise that SeaMonkey 2.2 comes with some of the new features announced for the latest Firefox release.
SeaMonkey 2.2 adds support for the new CSS Animations standard, introduced in Firefox 5, but also comes with several performance improvements with HTML5 canvas, JavaScript, memory and networking.
Support for the latest web technologies, HTML5, XHR, MathML and SMIL has also been expanded. The new beta release comes with a fix in the WebGL implementation which no longer enables websites to load textures from other domains.
But there are some changes related to SeaMonkey alone, archive options can now be set from the Copies & Folders Account Settings tab. There are a few fixes for issues introduce in SeaMonkey 2.1 as well.
SeaMonkey is an independent project, backed by Mozilla, which carries on the legacy of Netscape and the later Mozilla applications suite. Besides being a web browser, it also incorporates an email client, IRC chat and other features.
SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 for Windows is available for download here. SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 for Linux is available for
download here.
SeaMonkey 2.2 Beta 1 for Mac OS X is available for download here.