Application Suites vs. Specialized Applications
Written by: Doug Jenkinson
Article
Just the other day, the Mozilla Foundation released Seamonkey. It's a "community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as Mozilla Application Suite;" which includes a browser, email client, IRC chat, and web authoring.
But with its release, I noticed two trends worth mentioning here:
- For starters, many people did not seem too fond of the idea of a suite. They clamored for a small application that did one thing and did it well. For example, just a browser or just an email client. The justification was that given the plugin module, the application could be extended at the user's whim, and not the designer's. The end result being a well-tuned application with a smaller footprint. It could just be that the comments I've seen on it are from a more tech-saavy crowd willing to use non-integrated complements to the suite (Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu, Sunbird, etc.) or that many still view the Unix-style programming paradigm (do one thing and do it well) as more important than what a suite could offer. The other nice thing about smaller packages means that releases tend to be more frequent. Since the developers are working with a smaller codebase, it's easier to develop and debug.
- I also seen quite a bit of confusion regarding what exactly is in the suite and how it differs from the standalone offerings. Seeing as Seamonkey is really just a community project, and the standalone application are the primary products of Mozilla, I can see why there is a lack of differentiation. But some side-by-side comparisons or explanations would be nice to see. I'm sure these will be put together by the community somewhere.
That being said, I did download Seamonkey and give it a test-drive. It works rather well. I'm not a big fan of the default UI (it's the same as Netscape Navigator). But overall, it was a nice package. The developers of Seamonkey should be proud, they have produced a fine package. Even if its not something I'd use - I still prefer Firefox/Thunderbird/Nvu.
Revisions
- v1.0 (3 Feb 2006) - Article published.
