I intended to write a "history of my browser usage" post as part of a longer piece on the Chrome monoculture, but this blog is nearly 20 years old and it turns out I already did a history.
- https://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2008/09/a-history-of-browsing.shtml where I give a good account of my pre-Mozilla browser usage. The first HTTP browser I used was NCSA Mosaic on a DEC station in college, flirted with Opera a few times, before going Mozilla-land.
- https://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2009/11/the-firefox-anniversary.shtml Firefox had their fifth anniversary, and I walked through my changes in Mozilla-ish browsers.
I can't find when I permanently dropped SeaMonkey, but it was after 2010. I dropped SeaMonkey late 2013 (thank you stale profile directory with a date stamp) when it was clearly abandonware and I learned you actually could launch Firefox in parallel with multiple profiles (the
firefox -p --no-remotecombination was key). I stopped using multiple profiles when the Container plugin came out that did nearly everything separate profiles did. It turns out SeaMonkey is still getting updates, but it seems to be tracking the Firefox and Thunderbird Extended Service Releases.
For those of you too old to remember the original Netscape Navigator, it also came with a few tools beyond the browser:
- The browser, of course
- An email client, since this was before GMail and web-editors for email weren't really a thing yet
- An HTML editor (for pre-CSS versions of editor)
The reason I liked SeaMonkey and Opera is they both still shipped with an email client. It was pretty nice, actually. I kept Opera around as my email client way past when I stopped using it for general browsing. I'm fuzzy on what I did after Opera dropped their mail client, I may have grumpily transitioned onto Gnome Evolution at that point. Also, Gmail was out and I was quite used to web-based email clients.
So yeah, I've been in Firefox for over a decade at this point.