Mozilla ditches support for aged SeaMonkey 1.0

Mozilla has dropped support for version 1.0 of its four-year-old internet app suite, SeaMonkey.

The open source browser maker pushed out a second iteration of SeaMonkey last autumn, so 1.0's demise was all but inevitable.

Mozilla confirmed yesterday that its modern-day take on Netscape Communicator had moved on significantly enough since it first released the tool in January 2006 for its project developers to discontinue support for SeaMonkey 1.0.

"As the SeaMonkey 1.x series no longer receives security updates, due to resource constraints, the SeaMonkey team strongly urges users of that series to upgrade," said Mozilla.

"Additionally, the team continues to strongly urge people still using the old Mozilla Suite or Netscape 4, 6 or 7 to upgrade to the new SeaMonkey 2.0 version. All these older software packages suffer from a large, and steadily increasing, number of security vulnerabilities because they are no longer being maintained."

At the same time, Mozilla urged users on "reasonably modern operating systems" to make the switcheroo to SeaMonkey 2.0.

"For the few who can't afford that, a last 1.x release is available. SeaMonkey 1.1.19 does fix a few security issues, but not all known security vulnerabilities, some of which may even be grave," it said.

For those readers out there with short memories, Netscape Communicator offered newsgroup support, email, an IRC client, and HTML editing from within the browser instead of being offered as single apps. Mozilla likes to think of SeaMonkey as NC's natural successor. ®