
Pale Moon Browser Continues Support and Development of XUL - ronsor
https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml
======
bubblethink
>*BSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free
software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official
Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems.

What a load of crap. Some guy in his free time tried to port palemoon to one
of the bsds (i think it was open), and they got all up in arms about use of
their name before the guy even published anything. He was hacking in his own
github repo, and these clowns created a scene there.

~~~
haolez
I've just read the thread and I agree with the Pale Moon devs. The
redistribution conditions were clear and the build system easily allows you to
disable the official branding.

The Pale Moon devs weren't super polite about it, but they were objective and
clear in their statements.

~~~
rhblake
It was a work-in-progress tree and they weren't redistributing any
binaries/sources from there. The Pale Moon devs were both wrong and remarkably
hostile.

~~~
snazz
Additionally, (pardon me if I misunderstood) the Pale Moon developers consider
it “normal free software development practices” to bundle libraries with an
application and use them instead of the system ones? This seems to be the
opposite of how most software libraries and prevents browser libraries from
being updated as usual through the package manager.

~~~
bubblethink
This is purely a trademark dispute. They want you to rename the browser if you
deviate from their franken-patchset of firefox + all the other weird old
libraries they use. Such a thing would obviously not fly in a security
focussed OS like openbsd (or any OS for that matter). So you can rename the
browser if an agreement is not reached, which is fine. The issue, however, is
that these guys are so protective of their name (really, who even has heard of
it?), that they thwarted a WIP attempt by someone to port this mess before the
ported product even saw the light of the day.

~~~
rhblake
The astonishing thing to me is that, as mentioned elsewhere, this mess in the
GitHub issue happened _after_ the person doing the port politely asked the
Pale Moon people about the right way to do things with regards to patches and
branding:
[https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=18256](https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=18256)

------
bepvte
Pale moon forums is full of conspiracy theories on how Mozilla has been taken
over by "SJWS." That, along with the horrible temper of the author, really
discourages me from using or trusting it.

------
sandov
The same browser that blocked an extension they didn't like.

[https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504](https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504)

on HN(2017):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524)

~~~
superkuh
Oh no! An about:config option has to be toggled from 2 to 3! Getting Pale Moon
set up to be user friendly is much easier than all the crap you have to do
with Firefox.

~~~
sandov
What things about Firefox are not user friendly? I'm genuinely asking, I'm not
defending Firefox. The only one I know of is that you have to go to
about:config to disable Javascript.

~~~
duskwuff
> The only one I know of is that you have to go to about:config to disable
> Javascript.

And I frankly don't see any problem with that.

The modern Web requires Javascript. Most major web sites will fail to work
properly without it, often in confusing ways. (For example, Youtube will just
display as a bunch of gray boxes.) Hiding a setting whose effect, for most
users, is effectively to "break" the browser, is entirely appropriate.

~~~
Nicksil
> The modern Web requires Javascript.

I disagree.

There is nothing about the "modern" web which necessitates the use of
JavaScript. I can understand the argument that, due to JavaScript's ubiquity,
interfacing with some websites may prove impossible. But even then, that
shortcoming isn't anything to do with the "modern" web; developers simply
chose not to engineer a system capable of gracefully degrading.

~~~
jscholes
> > The modern Web requires Javascript. > I disagree.

The argument was not that the modern web requires devs to over-rely on
JavaScript, forsaking all others and creating experiences which fail to
function without it. The argument was that for the majority of users to
interact with the majority of modern websites, JavaScript is required to be
turned on. Which it is.

~~~
Nicksil
I understood and addressed the argument in my initial reply.

> ... for the majority of users to interact with the majority of modern
> websites, JavaScript is required to be turned on.

This is a self-inflicted wound.

------
jchw
I still use Firefox rather than Pale Moon, despite Mozilla's recent slip ups.
One of the main reasons for that is that Firefox of today is surely a lot
faster and more secure than Firefox of the past, even if it's not perfect.
Innovations like WebRenderer and Quantum were part of the reason for the move
toward WebExtensions, no doubt. And the move toward WebExtensions definitely
did reduce some control for extension authors, but for it we trade more
stability and security.

I'm not sure if XUL and XPCOM really makes sense the way that it did when it
emerged sometime in the history of Firefox (or Mozilla or Netscape - I'm not
sure.) If I were to use a Firefox fork, I think the most I would ask is one
that is more defensive and less full of services I don't care about. I don't
trust studies or experiments anymore, and I don't care about Pocket.

~~~
duskwuff
And pledging to continue supporting NPAPI definitely doesn't make sense.

NPAPI is dead. There are no longer any mainstream browsers which support it;
as such, upstream development of NPAPI plugins has largely ceased. NPAPI
plugins present a significant attack surface, _especially_ ones which
interpret code like Flash and Silverlight, so continuing to support them
presents a significant risk to users.

~~~
andrepd
That's true, but it's just a shame for the _millions_ of pieces of content out
there in flash that risk becoming lost.

~~~
duskwuff
That may be true, but it needs to be dealt with in some way that won't expose
an outdated and insecure plugin to potentially malicious content. (Especially
since plugins aren't even sandboxed in these browser forks.) If there's really
interest in preserving old Flash content, then perhaps people need to work
into forward-looking ways of preserving that content, like a JS-based viewer.

~~~
sanxiyn
We really need to resurrect Shumway:
[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway) At
this point I consider Shumway to be a retro console emulation project.

~~~
kbrosnan
Shumway is in a spot where they need ActionScript 3 support to play more
complex content. ActionScript 3 is based on ECMAscript 3. ES3 has support for
some depreciated features such as E4X. To do this someone would need to
compile the Tamrin AS/ES engine using something like WebAssembly.

[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/wiki/Intro](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/wiki/Intro)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Tam...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Tamarin)

[https://webassembly.org/](https://webassembly.org/)

------
protomyth
_BSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free
software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official
Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems._

Anyone got the story on this one?

~~~
Ashymad
Yeah, but rather than "resistance from BSD community" I would call it "Pale
Moon developers being huge d* * *s" [https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-
wip/issues/86](https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86)

~~~
reaperducer
Wow, that got out of hand quickly. Like in a matter of minutes.

At first I was thinking, "Oh, neat. A browser I know nothing about. Maybe I'll
give it a try."

After reading how multiple Pale Moon people acted in that thread, I'll pass.
I've worked with people like that in the past, and I don't want to support
them in any way, or validate their work.

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WallWextra
It wouldn't be worth dealing with these people even if they were developing a
_good_ technology, but XUL???

~~~
WalterGR
Do you think they’re doing it because they love XUL, or because of the number
of extensions that require XUL and no longer work in Firefox?

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jcranmer
Hmm, funnily enough, despite saying they're not going to support DRM... they
seem to be doing exactly that:
[https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/962](https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/962).

------
jccalhoun
Best of luck to them but it is an uphill battle. The number of addons that are
still updated for the pre-webextension system is really small. The last time I
tried to use Pale Moon for an old extension I found that it wasn't worth it
because so many other extensions were either out of date or just unavailable.
I keep Waterfox around for the rare times I need to use an old extension since
it can also use current ones as well.

------
pmoriarty
I used to use Pale Moon because Pentadactyl still worked on it. But then it
broke even in Pentadactyl, and I moved back to Firefox with Trydactyl (which
is nowhere near as good as Pentadactyl, but it's better than nothing).

I've also tried qutebrowser, which is nice, but it's missing uMatrix/NoScript,
RequestPolicy, and uBlock Origin-like extensions. So I'm stuck with Firefox
for now.

------
Multicomp
Waterfox - it's like Pale Moon but started as a 64 bit version of Firefox.

They can pry my NPAPI plugins out of my bare hands.

~~~
syntheticcdo
Out of curiosity - what NPAPI plugins are you using?

~~~
antisthenes
I can't speak for the OP, but personally - DownThemAll, Classic Theme
Restorer, Session Manager among others.

These 3 are the main reason I still have a semi-legacy browser (Waterfox)

~~~
sebazzz
Aren't those XPCOM / XUL extensions? NPAPI is only for purposes of Silverlight
and Flash AFAIK.

