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This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.

Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.

I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...

Enabling telemetry is what I do as well. When Microsoft or Google or Apple ask me whether I'd like to share the data so as to help them improve the OS, I check yes. How do I avoid their spying, you may ask? All my online personal habits - my banking, my shopping - I do on this PC-BSD laptop. That way, those guys get my data - but not any data about me.

I may look at Pale Moon to give it a shot, although my laptop has Chromium as well.

This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.

Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.

I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...

Enabling telemetry is what I do as well. When Microsoft or Google or Apple ask me whether I'd like to share the data so as to help them improve the OS, I check yes. How do I avoid their spying, you may ask? All my online personal habits - my banking, my shopping - I do on this PC-BSD laptop. That way, those guys get my data - but not any data about me.

I may look at Pale Moon to give it a shot, although my laptop has Chromium as well.

I think it was Windows-only in the past, but I just checked and nowadays there are also official Linux and Android versions too.

I think it was Windows-only in the past, but I just checked and nowadays there are also official Linux and Android versions too.

This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.

Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.

I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...

This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.

Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.

I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...

Hehehe. Either you just insulted all the intelligent boxes-of-rocks out there, or Moonchild is really fast to listen to users.

On the Pale Moon home page, RIGHT under the big Download Button it states:

Having trouble with the web installer or looking for other download options like an off-line installer, a package for a different operating system, Atom builds or portable version? Check the download menu at the top of this page!

I just did. Alas, I do not wish to download anything that only offers a so-called "web installer".

http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-win32.shtml
http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-win64.shtml

Ignore the "web installer" (I've never used it and never will). What you seek is under the "Download" tab.

Next to that, I thought that "pale moon" was ment to adress junk-inclusion issues. In that case, why than does version 25.7.3 (the latest) mention problems with servers offering something called "sync" being shut down ? What has "sync" (or whatever hides behind that name) to do with a webbrowser ? (and if someone thinks he wants/needs to use that feature not use a plugin for it ?)

Sync was some shit that Mozilla put into Firefox before people really gave a shit about bloat, and for whatever reason PaleMoon kept it in, but left it pointed towards the Mozilla servers, which finally got shut down. I've never turned it on, never will.

Happy Palemoon user here. It's not perfect, but it beats the shit out of the ruination that the UXtards have brought to Firefail.

I just did. Alas, I do not wish to download anything that only offers a so-called "web installer".

http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-win32.shtml
http://www.palemoon.org/palemoon-win64.shtml

Ignore the "web installer" (I've never used it and never will). What you seek is under the "Download" tab.

Next to that, I thought that "pale moon" was ment to adress junk-inclusion issues. In that case, why than does version 25.7.3 (the latest) mention problems with servers offering something called "sync" being shut down ? What has "sync" (or whatever hides behind that name) to do with a webbrowser ? (and if someone thinks he wants/needs to use that feature not use a plugin for it ?)

Sync was some shit that Mozilla put into Firefox before people really gave a shit about bloat, and for whatever reason PaleMoon kept it in, but left it pointed towards the Mozilla servers, which finally got shut down. I've never turned it on, never will.

Happy Palemoon user here. It's not perfect, but it beats the shit out of the ruination that the UXtards have brought to Firefail.

Pale Moon has a 64-bit edition.

Joke:
Instead of browser.pocket.enabled = false in Firefox,
browser.adult.supervision.enabled = true in Pale Moon.

Pale Moon has tools for backup and migration.

Adblock Latitude blocks ads. There are other Pale Moon ad-ons, and usually Firefox add-ons work perfectly.

"Pale Moon Commander ... provides a user-friendly interface to advanced preferences that would otherwise require manual editing of parameters, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming to do."

Pale Moon has a 64-bit edition.

Joke:
Instead of browser.pocket.enabled = false in Firefox,
browser.adult.supervision.enabled = true in Pale Moon.

Pale Moon has tools for backup and migration.

Adblock Latitude blocks ads. There are other Pale Moon ad-ons, and usually Firefox add-ons work perfectly.

"Pale Moon Commander ... provides a user-friendly interface to advanced preferences that would otherwise require manual editing of parameters, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming to do."

Pale Moon has a 64-bit edition.

Joke:
Instead of browser.pocket.enabled = false in Firefox,
browser.adult.supervision.enabled = true in Pale Moon.

Pale Moon has tools for backup and migration.

Adblock Latitude blocks ads. There are other Pale Moon ad-ons, and usually Firefox add-ons work perfectly.

"Pale Moon Commander ... provides a user-friendly interface to advanced preferences that would otherwise require manual editing of parameters, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming to do."

What you want is Pale Moon which is FF without the bullshit, NO Australis, NO Pocket, and NO ending the extensions, in fact they've been reaching out to ext devs to get them to support PM which now has its own user agent string and the ones who don't they are compiling their own version.

I've been using them a couple years and its a rock solid dependable browser without the politics and crap, try it I bet you'll like it. Oh and before somebody asks they've recently added a Linux build which you can either get with the installer or through tarball, your choice.

You might want to look into Pale Moon.

So switch to PaleMoon which has forked away from FF and has said they plan on keeping the extension framework, even going so far as to contact the extension devs to get them to support PM (which has its own UI string now) and they are compiling their own forks of the extensions that don't support PM.

I wonder if (Firefox fork) Pale Moon will drop support too... I hope not, I always install a nice dark theme because I hate the glare from the monitor. As someone mentioned above, Firefox doesn't adopt the desktop UI theme (which would be preferable), so complete themes on the browser is the only way to cut the glare. Complete themes are a lifesaver!

As someone also mentioned above, there are so many other features they could cut first that actually carry alot more bloat.

Well, if it comes to Firefox, I did:

1) Complain a lot for a while
2) Switch to Pale Moon
3) Donate once a year to Pale Moon

It's well worth it, having gone from feeling "Fuck!!! What have they broken this time!!" on every Browser update to "Hey, great, some little bugs have been fixed" on every Browser update.

Try Pale Moon.
https://www.palemoon.org/

For firefox you'd either have to choose one of their nightly 64-bit versions or settle with Waterfox which usually lags behind a few versions.

Not so. Pale Moon, my personal choice. They deliberately lag a few versions behind on the user interface rather than accepting the broken shit Firefox foists on everyone.

You'd need to ask the Pale Moon maintainer on his forum -- this is the only person who will "know for sure". The odds are 50/50, as unnecessary as that is to say. But here's why I say "you need to ask him":

The Pale Moon author has a tendency to backport changes from present-day Firefox *extremely* selectively. I read the PM Release Notes, and most things he isn't backporting at all. For example, for some reason he chose not to backport improved CSP specifications (Mozilla has long since implemented these) which in turn broke usability for at least one major site: Dropbox. Read the thread (see screenshots) for how this manifested itself -- end-users literally had no clue what was going on despite all troubleshooting available. Note that the forum post I linked to is from November 2014. It wasn't until Pale Moon 25.6.0, released August 27th 2015 -- 9 months after the report -- that the issue was fixed.

This is one of the biggest problems there is with Pale Moon -- it's continually behind Firefox in every way. Pale Moon is proclaimed on the Internet as "Firefox without the Dumb Stupid UI (Australis)", but it isn't -- it's literally "a fork of Firefox 24.9" that is in many regards (not all but many) stuck with the "technology" of Firefox 24.9. If you read the PM Release Notes slowly you'll begin to notice what I describe.

Similarly this is why add-ons (not plugins) that are for Firefox 25 or later won't install on Pale Moon. This sounds trivial until you realise how many Firefox add-ons require something more recent. A good example is the BTTV add-on for Twitch -- you're instead forced to install the UserScript version (missing features + ridiculously slow), which requires installation of Greasemonkey, which has its own weird problem (and that problem makes me want to never install Greasemonkey ever again, particularly due to this response from a maintainer (who's wrong in his statement -- the GM folks are who maintain the addons.mozilla.org entry for their software! It isn't some random end-user or Mozilla themselves!)). Instead, to get GM 1.5.1 installed, you gotta know exactly what URL to go to.

There are also several other commonplace behaviours on the web now that don't work in Pale Moon. One that still bugs me to no end is animated GIF playback stopping mid-way until you do something in the UI (like try to drag/move the GIF or something) which seems to fix it for that particular session. Odds are this is some weird Firefox bug that the PM author never backported (or possibly introduced himself through some other change, I have no idea).

Despite all the above and my overall negative tone, I am still an active Pale Moon user (it's my primary browser). I've tried twice to switch back to Firefox but there are still several things in Pale Moon which there are not replacements for in Firefox (i.e. all the UI tweaking and "classic" add-ons for present-day Firefox still can't get you the exact same UI as Pale Moon or older Firefox).

It's really too bad Mozilla turned their UI into an ugly mess.

I jumped ship a long time ago because of the kind of insanity that Mozilla started forcing down users' throats. Pale Moon's dev has managed to do a great job, if you ask me. Only issue I have is many addons are incompatible, but most of the more popular ones (e.g. ABP) have alternatives that work on Pale Moon (e.g. ABL).

If you want Firefox without a lot of the missteps, try Pale Moon. Any enforcement of extension signing will result in less stuff being available for it assuming an average weight of inertia for the extension developers, though.

The OP should be censured; It's the first thing it says on the Pale Moon webpage!

"Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser available for Microsoft Windows and Linux"

https://www.palemoon.org/

Why not just use the one at the official site http://palemoon.org?

@cbhacking: "it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install"

Seems pretty straightforward to me, download pminstaller-0.2.0.tar.bz2, extract into your home dir and type ./pminstaller.sh else use one of the Contributed builds of Pale Moon ...

@cbhacking: "it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install"

Seems pretty straightforward to me, download pminstaller-0.2.0.tar.bz2, extract into your home dir and type ./pminstaller.sh else use one of the Contributed builds of Pale Moon ...

You can get a Linux version of Pale Moon for Linux here ..

Also, I currently use PaleMoon fork of Firefox as my main browser, but there doesn't seem to be a Linux variant.

Pale Moon does work on Linux, just fine a I might add. You can even copy over your profile from windows to Linux and everything will continue to work:

http://linux.palemoon.org/download/installer/

So, you are saying you cannot purchase items on eBay using Pale Moon?

No, you can, but not out of the box, any more anyway. (long story short, set security.tls.version.min to 0 to enable the unsafe but necessary behavior...)

Pale Moon x64 is Firefox with adult supervision. With Pale Moon, use Pale Moon's own ad blocker, AdBlock Latitude.

Firefox is becoming less and less stable. It's so unstable that it often doesn't report crashes, so the crash reports aren't reliable, they show far fewer crashes than actually occurred. Mozilla Foundation needs better management.

Pale Moon x64 is Firefox with adult supervision. With Pale Moon, use Pale Moon's own ad blocker, AdBlock Latitude.

Firefox is becoming less and less stable. It's so unstable that it often doesn't report crashes, so the crash reports aren't reliable, they show far fewer crashes than actually occurred. Mozilla Foundation needs better management.

Last time I checked there was no OSX build.

Not officially, but I installed this build just last night.

I still consider the Linux build to be a work in progress, too since it's still not as easy to install as Firefox (as in -- it's just there as a package in the repositories).

If you care about your privacy, with none of the call-home-to-google-with-the-safe-browsing-garbage and social-media-media-junk-features-in-a-browser in a 'better version of Firefox', you need to jump ship and start running Palemoon.

... Firefox will be Chrome. Anyone who cared about extensive browser customization will simply abandon their addons. Why keep recoding them on Mozilla's whim?

For anyone who still cares about this stuff, the time to jump is most certainly NOW. I don't even think SeaMonkey is good enough - Pale Moon is a totally clean break.

I haven't used it much yet, but Pale Moon may be what you're looking for. It's a fork of Firefox. The development design choices favor privacy, user-control, and improving speed&stability by dumping rarely-wanted code. Examples: They removed the Parental Controls code, they're excluding the new Firefox DRM support, they dumped support code for obsolete CPUs, they dumped some of the code for handicap-accessibility, and they currently removing phone-home code for crash reports and other potentially privacy-violating telemetry.

I haven't seen specific mention of it, but I'm certain there's no way in hell they will implement Mozilla's new policy of *prohibiting* you from loading any extension that hasn't been reviewed&approved&signed by Mozilla.

-

I changed to Pale Moon some time ago and it seems good. At least better than FF (it is a fork).

Pale Moon refuses to use the Australis UI (Chrome-esque). (Why the UI)

As for better, what's the metric? I had a bunch of FF addons that were no longer compatible back when they changed to making their version numbers race Chrome's, so no idea what GP is talking about there. Personally prefer the old style to navigate. Plus, my current 200 tabs open (yeah yeah, I'm bad) has a larger footprint in FF than when in PM (have a few browsers on this computer). YMMV.

It's disabled by default.

Integrated PDF reader. The code for this is still included for emergencies (i.e. when you need to read a PDF but don't have access to a reader) but disabled by default - you are always recommended to use a separate, up-to-date document reader for PDF files (as an external program, not as a browser plugin) for your own security, and to have documents displayed in their fully intended format instead of a stripped-down display in an in-browser reader.

https://www.palemoon.org/techn...

Please give your users the choice and control they deserve in Firefox.

Done: PaleMoon ;-)

Not seeing any hits on google for that one. Pale Moon?

https://www.palemoon.org/

The nicest thing I can say about FF is that it opened the floodgates, before Firefox/Phoenix/Mozilla Suite you had crappy IE, broken NS, and adware Opera.

Today there is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (hates the new version, went back to using presto) and on the gecko side there is PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and the QT framework...quite nice actually and of course Safari if you are into Apple.

I was using FF before it was called Firefox, and the Suite before that and....yeah, its just not very nice now. The UI feels like a bad Chrome ripoff and it still has "senior moments" where the entire UI can just "hang" for several seconds, which when you have 8 fricking cores and 16GB of RAM? is just inexcusable. I don't know what went wrong with Moz, but for the past few years they seem to have gone out of their way to just ruin the browser, do they no longer care? Has the UI team been taken over by Google? All I know is If I wanted Chrome I'd use Chrome and the current FF feels like a really bad Chrome knockoff, its the "Hipad" that looks kinda sorta like the real thing but once you use it? Yeah its just a knock off.

Unlikely, the maker of Palemoon doesn't like Australis as he explains on https://www.palemoon.org/layou....

No Auastralis is the main thing why most current Palemoon users use it instead of Firefox.

Luckily this isn't the bad old days where it was just IE and netscape, today you DO have options! There is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (boy is he still pissed they quit using presto) and on the gecko side there is Firefox, PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and QT.

The answer to the question that you did not ask is Pale Moon.

Wrong.

You want https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/privacy-and-security/adblock-latitude/

And here it is, the reality of popular open source software. People bitch just as much about it as they do proprietary software.

"You can change the source, you have the power!" Yeah, not so much... nobody is really going to do anything except complain. (Well, except that one guy who is now going to make it his life work to fork it into something he calls Freefox that gets used by around 53 people... but those 53 people are very happy about it.)

pale moon is already forked from Firefox/Mozilla

https://www.palemoon.org/

and has more than 53 users.

Netscape:Firefox
Firefox:Pale Moon

http://www.palemoon.org/

You're welcome.

"You can change the source, you have the power!" Yeah, not so much... nobody is really going to do anything except complain. (Well, except that one guy who is now going to make it his life work to fork it into something he calls Freefox that gets used by around 53 people... but those 53 people are very happy about it.)

Firefox has been forked already. More than 53 people are very happy about it. Pale Moon

Seamonkey is a pretty decent cousin. It's what Firefox itself was forked from!

There's also Pale Moon -- a browser based on FireFox, forked off before the 'rapid release schedule' craziness.

"You can change the source, you have the power!" Yeah, not so much... nobody is really going to do anything except complain. (Well, except that one guy who is now going to make it his life work to fork it into something he calls Freefox that gets used by around 53 people... but those 53 people are very happy about it.)

Firefox has been forked already. More than 53 people are very happy about it.
Pale Moon