The Ancient Mac Browser That’s Better Than Safari

Mac browsers have come a long way since the last century. There was a time when the browser world, Mac or Windows, was dominated by Netscape’s Navigator and Communicator. Then Microsoft pushed Internet Explorer on the world, which nearly killed innovation and web standards, not to mention the damage inflicted on security.

Along came Mozilla and Firefox and Apple and Safari, and the browser wars with Microsoft were renewed. Today’s browsers are feature laden and very fast. But they’re still browsers. Except for one lone holdout from the 21st century. A modernized relic from the past may be the best browser you can own.

A Field Of Dreamy Browsers

The Mac browsing experience has never been better. In typical Apple fashion, Safari is clean, uncluttered with feature overload, and the darling of Mac users, arguably the fastest browser on the planet.

Mozilla’s Firefox is the second most popular browser, almost loaded with features, adheres to web standards, has more add ons than all browsers put together, and rivals Safari for speed.

Google adopted Apple’s WebKit architecture (the guts of Safari) for the Chrome browser, Mac and Windows, which is also fast, leaner than Safari, and growing in usage every day.

Even better, most browsers today are stable, dependable, and tend to render web pages pretty much the same way. Oh, did I mention that they’re free. It’s good to be a browser user in the 21st century.

The Best Browser Money Can’t Buy

What makes a good browser the best browser? Speed? Features? Security? Dependability? Price? Add ons? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes, but the best browser for features may surprise you.

Taking everything into consideration, Mozilla’s SeaMonkey could easily be called the best browser for Mac or Windows users. The best?

Consider the differences between browsers. SeaMonkey is based on Firefox, so it’s fast, has plenty of add on extensions, looks good, works well, and is priced right. But how is it different?

SeaMonkey is also based on the remnants of Netscape Communicator, once the darling of browser users the world over. The latest version of the browser made by Mozilla’s SeaMonkey Project carries a package of functional relics from the 20th century, bolted on to add features not found elsewhere.

Features Past And Present

In an age when Microsoft ships Windows without an email client, SeaMonkey looks awfully feature rich with modern, built in features including email, IRC, newsgroups, an HTML editor, even web development tools.

Wait? A browser that does email? Yes, and it’s not web mail, like Google or Yahoo!, it’s an actual email client with tabs, junk mail filters, RSS reader, and even handles IMAP, and multiple email accounts.

Think of SeaMonkey’s email as Thunderbird Lite with return receipts, Address Book support, digital signing, color coded messages, and much more. Outlook it’s not. But the price is right and the feature set competent.

Wait! There’s more! SeaMonkey’s browser is nothing to sneeze at. Think of it as Firefox with a different icon. It includes tabbed browsing, just like Firefox. An Add On Manager, just like Firefox. And there’s a pop up blocker, an image manager, and session restore. Plus, themes, toolbar customization, a password manager, download manager, and web form autocompletion.

If you’re not new to the internet you’ll love all the developer tools (similar to what you find in Firefox, long the preferred browser for web development folks). If you’re new to the internet and want to create your own web pages, SeaMonkey has Composer, a powerful, built-in HTML editor with CSS support, table creation, and web site management.

Clearly, SeaMonkey is not your father’s web browser. No other major browser is so loaded with handy features, yet works so well, yet costs so little. I once thought of the SeaMoneky project as a relic from the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape wars of the 1990s, but there’s a difference between relic and heritage.

SeaMonkey brings the best of the past to the present. Along the way it picked up much of Firefox’s new technology to create a browser platform that is greater than the sum of the parts, and, arguably, a better browsing experience than Safari or Google Chrome or even Firefox.

If you want your browser to do more, SeaMonkey is the only choice. What other browser does all that SeaMonkey does?