Mozilla Build Of SeaMonkey

3 min readAug 19, 2018

SeaMonkey is built on the open source Mozilla Gecko engine, the same code which underlies the highly successful Thunderbird and is the base for the Firefox browser. SeaMonkey benefits from the cross-fertilization with these other projects, by gaining (and contributing) new features and the ongoing security updates which are a modern necessity. It contains an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users.

Hardware Requirements:

Recommended hardware requirements for Mozilla development are:

8GB of RAM
35 GB free disk space. A fast SSD is recommended; the Firefox build process is I/O-intensive.
High speed internet.

Installing build tools for Linux:

1.sudo apt-get build-dep seamonkey
2.sudo apt-get install zip unzip mercurial g++ make autoconf2.13    yasm libgtk2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libiw-dev libxt-dev mesa-common-dev libpulse-dev

Getting Started

Building SeaMonkey requires at least 2 GB of disk space and 256 MB of available RAM.

1. Get the source
 # for Aurora, use http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-aurora/ and   comm-aurora instead
 # for Beta, use http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/ and comm-beta instead
 # for Release, use http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-release/ and comm-release instead2. hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/
3. cd comm-central
4. python client.py checkout

# Set up a basic .mozconfig file5. echo 'ac_add_options --enable-application=suite' > .mozconfig                # let's build SeaMonkey...6. echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=/path/to/comm-central/obj-sm-release' >> .mozconfig

# Specify amount of parallel building. If the below is left out, a best guess will be taken automatically.
7. echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"' >> .mozconfig                     # ...Process happens quickly.

# Build!
# Note: This requires autoconf 2.13 (at least initially).

8. make -f client.mk

Running SeaMonkey

The SeaMonkey executable can be found inobj-sm-release/dist/bin/ and you will be directed to :

How to build again later

Execute the following commands:

1. cd comm-central 
# Get the latest source
2. python client.py checkout
3. make -f client.mk