What's New in SeaMonkey 2.18

The SeaMonkey 2.18 release was skipped due to technical problems with the build architecture. The next stable release after SeaMonkey 2.17.1 will be SeaMonkey 2.19.

This document outlines a few of the new features implemented in SeaMonkey 2.18, important bugfixes and any new problems. Please note that these changes are relative to SeaMonkey 2.17.

New Features and Fixes

Major Changes
  • Basic Private Browsing support has been added (experimental for now).
    • Private windows never prompt even if normal windows are open (bug 846762).
    • Added an about:privatebrowsing page (bug 837493).
    • Add -private command line option (bug 837496).
    • Added a File/New/Private Window menu item (bug 837510).
    • Added an Open Link in Private Window context menu item (bug 841230).
    • Open Location has a Private Window option now (bug 841616).
    • Added basic private browsing support (bug 837492).
  • Added support for safe browsing which blocks potentially malicious websites reported as attack sites (malware) or web forgeries (phishing) (bug 477718).
  • Information like preview text, subject and sender can be shown in new mail notifications now (bug 404580).
Fixes after Beta 4
  • The new mail alert has been disabled for now since it could behave incorrectly (pref: mail.biff.show_new_alert) (bug 840474).
  • The Geolocation prompt no longer offers an action in Private Browsing mode if the action remembered permissions for more than a session (bug 870728).
Fixes in Beta 4
  • Lightweight themes crunched the window title bar on Mac OS (bug 864034).
  • The Print button was misaligned in the Composer and Message Composition toolbars with the Modern theme (bug 849359).
Fixes in Beta 3
  • Undo Close Tab did not work in private windows (bug 858825).
  • Video statistics have been fixed (bug 863008).
Fixes in Beta 2
  • Some parts of click-to-play did not work if doorhangers were disabled (Bug 860537).
  • The Open Link in New Window context menu item had stopped working in MailNews (Bug 860905).
  • The browser feed preview had been broken due to Private Browsing changes (Bug 856322).
  • Per-site click-to-play permissions had stopped working (Bug 854867).
  • An LDAP password was requested for each lookup even if it was saved (Bug 833971).
  • Creating/amending mailing lists in the Address Book had been broken (Bug 859068).
  • The tabbed browser uses the favicon service in a privacy-aware way now (bug 856406).
  • The Open Location dialog does not save the state anymore when opened from a private window (bug 844497).
  • Private downloads did not update (bug 849440).
  • Save As from the context menu did not take the privacy status into account (bug 851304).
  • Added icons for security notifications (bug 853268).
  • Fixed the browser feed preview to work with XBL scopes (bug 846763).
Features in Beta 1
  • Click-to-play plugin areas have a close box now (bug 837399).
Fixes in Beta 1
  • WebRTC has been disabled on MacOS X for now (bug 842918).
  • Fixed autosync not correctly detecting message offline status, resulting in poor Gmail IMAP performance (bug 854162).
  • Special mail folder icons (Inbox, Trash etc.) were not shown for shared IMAP folders (bug 840003).
  • Help has been updated for the redesigned Add-ons Manager (bug 652328).
  • The MailNews filter editor can now show the actual execution order of actions (bug 747284).
  • The Privacy & Security Preferences UI has been reworked (User Tracking and Safe Browsing preferences have been added and a Private Data sub-category has been introduced) (bug 835134).
  • First time after choosing to "Never activate plugins for this site", videos were still playing (bug 807664).
  • User-oriented labels for Strict Transport Security have been added to the Data Manager (bug 822535).
  • The Google search bar favicon has been updated (bug 834692).
  • Base64-encoded attachments are now detected irrespective of the case used (bug 805620).
  • Saving messages to disk could fail silently (bug 723497).
  • Some dangerous file system folders are now disallowed to be used as the Local Directory for mail storage (bug 750781).

See Firefox 21.0 Beta Notes for the corresponding Firefox release.

New Issues