Pale Moon Devs Ponder Dropping Current Codebase And Starting From Scratch (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The developers of the Palo Moon browser are thinking of scratching their current codebase due to the fact that it doesn't support many of today's current Web standards, and because future Firefox plans will introduce incompatibilities within its codebase. The team plans to build a new browser from scratch, which they'll use to replace Pale Moon when it reaches a stable version. As with the old Pale Moon, the browser will keep Firefox's pre-Australis interface and still support many features removed in Firefox, like Tab Groups and full themes.

Comments

interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Cuz that's a damn crazy undertaking

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how badly Mozilla has gutted Firefox, is their plan even possible? It seems like a massive amount of work and they have already admitted that they aren't up to the task:

"Additionally, as Firefox continues to evolve . . . . . Pale Moon is bound to run into big complications with future versions of the Firefox codebase. These complications would have been taken care of, but Moonchild also admits that they don't have the manpower to deal with them"

As a long time Palemoon user, this sounds like a bad idea.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Aighearach]

This will reduce the amount of work needed, not increase it.

Firefox has a lot of constant code thrash, with a bunch more already scheduled in the future. This is a great move, because they'll be selecting a single interface and feature set and then they can target that directly, without code thrash. Also then the code structure has enough stability to really improve over time, something that doesn't happen if new code is replacing all the old code, instead of just adding to it or fixing bugs.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Great Big Bird]

Is this the by product of having so many updates so quickly?

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Aighearach]

Yes. If you don't update... you don't have code trash. :)

IMO the goal should be to stop needing to make changes, except for bugs or to interface with new protocols and formats.

Why should a user application have more code updates than a C compiler, or an OS kernel? It seems like they should just "get there" at some point.

Emacs isn't getting constant code changes; neither are most other programming environments. They're already stable. Gimp doesn't experience code thrash. If I had a user shell that was 10 years old, I wouldn't even notice. Most of my media viewer applications are over a decade old, with new codecs and formats added. I could run a window manager from the 90s, and it would still work.

Of course in the context of the story, they're just re-forking to avoid backporting code thrash. So, they get to skip a bunch of versions. They'll have to do it again in the future, because firefox isn't going to stop thrashing.

I'd prefer a finished interface, and a new rendering engine version every 5-10 years.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[serviscope_minor]

Why should a user application have more code updates than a C compiler, or an OS kernel? It seems like they should just "get there" at some point.

Get where?

There is no "where" for a web browser except perhaps for good support for ad-hoc and official web standards. But since they are continuously undergoing standards thrash there's no chance for any browser to get there.

I'd prefer a finished interface,

I've come around to like the new firefox interface. I use the classic theme restorer, since the curved edge tabs look ugly as sin on my setup. I don't expecially care for the menu pictures rather than words but whatever. I do appreciate the space saved on not having a menu bar I never used. I disliked it to start with, but especially when I'm on my 1024x600 screen, it makes a pleasant differece.

and a new rendering engine version every 5-10 years.

You'd prefer a rendering engine that doesn't support a significant number of new websites?

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an interesting thing that I noticed in the Foxit forum recently.
When they decided to permanently remove the option to switch away from the ribbon mode a lot of the users got irritated. (Let's face it, people switched to Foxit to get away from Acrobat, not to get another bloated copy of it.)
What became fairly evident is that those users like to keep old version of software around.
There was comments along the line of "I installed the 5.x version because that is that last version that does what I want.".

At some time in the development cycle a piece of software should reach a point where it is called finished. Where it doesn't need updates without becoming obsolete.
A software shouldn't hog its developers indefinitely. They need to move on to new projects too, without the old software being left broken.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

...You'd prefer a rendering engine that doesn't support a significant number of new websites?

Personally, I'd prefer it if websites concentrated on the substance of the pages, rather than adopting the sort of BS stylization buffoonery that requires new rendering engines just so we can access maybe one useful paragraph of text per pageload of script and graphics.

Seriously, this idiocy has to stop somewhere..I've just checked a live website that I cobbled together back in 1995/96, it supplies the relevant information (and graphics), and looks the same in this version of Chrome as it did in Netscape Navigator and Mosaic back then (probably IE as well, but as I never used IE..), no recoding, no CSS, no scripting edge cases for different browsers...

I'll go back to telling the kids to get off my lawn now...

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the commercial mindset (sadly, that /mindset/ also infects some open source projects), which requires change for the sake of change, so that the software remains on top of the attention grabbing pile. By contrast the Unix philosophy develops software as building blocks. A building block can be finished, and should be finished so that what is built on top is stable. An attention grabbing program cannot stabilize and must not be used as a building block for others, because then the attention focuses on the ends not the means, and the program is just the means.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

..At some time in the development cycle a piece of software should reach a point where it is called finished. Where it doesn't need updates without becoming obsolete.

A software shouldn't hog its developers indefinitely. They need to move on to new projects too, without the old software being left broken.

It never happens though, does it?.
In my previous life in IT, I had occasion to have to revisit various 'obsolete' software packages to try and fix bugs (as I had/have a skill for it). The main gripes I always got from the end users of the software when finding out exactly what they thought was buggy and I brought up the fact that there was a newer version of the software available were;
a. New bugs: made it unusable for their purposes.
b. UI changes: people hate them, especially radical irrational ones (idiotlogicallly driven?).

Bugfixing, it starts off as a fun game, but you have no idea how soul-destroying it eventually gets when you spend most of your time having to fix simple issues in code which the original developers abandoned maybe 5 years before you get to play with it.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

And it loaded damn fast!

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[johanw]

At least you don't have to re-fix them when a new version comes out. :-)

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Aighearach]

If you can't find where "there" is, I'm not even convinced you care about using the tool, or how it functions.

Why would I value your comments?

As for your strange claim about rendering support... actually fuck it, in light of your above lack of interest, and the lack of correct quoting, not gonna bother. You're wrong, done.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Foxit's tech support actually *recommended* that I not update, because they dropped "classic" menus.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's actually change for the sake of change. I think what actually happens is that there is people churn all the time. New people come in, and they want to make some contrbution, so they claim that this or that needs to be changed to their taste. Eventually, they garner enough political support because other people are tired of fighting with idiots, and the changes are made. Don't forget that Mozilla's head is a lawyer.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[cfalcon]

It's not old fashioned though. The thing you are complaining about- loading tons of executable code on the destination machine- is absolutely horseshit. It's terrible at every level, and the majority of it is used to track, advertise, and shut down known good interfaces. And the result is poorly written content whose entire point was to get their code to run on your machine. It's absolutely awful- that's not an old fashioned opinion, it's a fact.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

And what else would you like to be able to do with a web site? You can do anything you want already, there really isn't anything more that need be added at this time.

All of these constant updates are caused by nothing more than a dick measuring contest between Google and Mozilla.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict the coders themselves will have a great time, but the result will take 10x longer than predicted to eventuate and be slower, buggier and less feature-full than the original. Eventually, at some point in the dim and distance future, an excellent browser may result, though this is far from guaranteed and will probably only happen a decade or two after we've moved on to whatever happens after the net.

Or at least that's my experience with great expectations and re-writing from the ground up. Just remember to have fun along the way.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. To make the obligatory car analogy, at some point you have to stop buggerising around adding go-fast stripes and jamming in bigger engines and better stereos and say "we're done". From that point on you should only need the occasional tyre-change and service. Ditto software: at some point it should get to the stage where you only need the occasional minor update (fix extremely obscure bug x, add format y or whatever). Then the coder can move on to other things bar the occasional fixes.

Current update practice seems based on the over-sugared-10-year-old-brat-with-worms model. Noisy, constantly squirming around and prone to random bouts of pointless and often destructive activity.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[mikael]

Web browsers are built on hundreds of standards. They need image file loaders (bmp, tga, tiff, gif), audio codecs (mp3, mp4, wav, ogg vorbis), video codecs (mpg, mp4, wmv), fonts (freetype, truetype TTF), the official support for HTML ... HTML5, and all the other languages CSS. There are the internet protocols specified by the RFC's (ftp, http, telnet). Then there is internet security through encryption with SSL. Each of these libraries depends on other API libraries, even OpenGL and OpenCL for WebGL, X-Windows and Gnome/KDE for Linux.

All of those libraries are fixing bugs, refactoring code, creating interface layers, internal engines, adding caching, improving compression, reducing file IO. Every time someone removes or renames a function, or changes the way objects are created and manipulated, that causes a code thrash ripple that works it's way through the entire library dependency chain. Even adding a new rendering method to speed things up (using OpenGL texture for fonts), or Framebuffer Objects for offscreen rendering will cause a domino effect as every other layer takes advantage of that feature. Users with high-end systems seen their browser running faster. Users with old system, see their browser running slower and sucking up more memory.

Re:interesting and I wish them luck

[mikael]

>UI changes: people hate them, especially radical irrational ones (idiotlogicallly driven?).

No, just familiarity. Users aren't interested in playing puzzle games when they are working. They just want to get their work done as quickly as possible.
People get annoyed when the supermarket rearranges the placement of items in the aisles. "Drinking straws? Why aren't they beside the soft drinks? Oh they're up beside the party items like napkins and cake decorations." "Where are the tinned peas? What? They've been moved beside the tinned products section? They used to be beside the vegetable section".

Uh . . . No

[Anonymous Coward]

""This re-forking would be done on the last stable version of Mozilla code that hasn't had a sledgehammer put to it yet"

And that would be . . . Firefox 24 ESR, the version that Palemoon is based on.

things you should never do part 1

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

who needs another browser anyway?

Re:things you should never do part 1

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

who needs another browser anyway?

I always thought that article was spot on. A restart from scratch is likely a very daunting undertaking, particularly if you don't have the team that built the original as part of the project, since otherwise starting from scratch means throwing away all those accumulated bug fixes.

Of course there are times when part of a code base is just not worth keeping because:

1) Something new that is truly better can be used to replace a large chunk of it. I.E. if you created a library that does some cool thing, but the industry has now adopted something else as the standard, and using that something else causes you to have much less code with no other downsides, then go for it.
2) Hardly anyone uses it
3) Lack of people willing to pay money to maintain the part, even if it is used.
4) Security considerations and reliability issues arising from unmaintained code.
5) The cost of maintaining the old part of the code exceeds the cost of redeveloping it. (In very rare cases this might justify a complete rewrite.)
6) You can legitimately improve things so it is easier to maintain/clearly better/simpler/etc.

In most of those cases it is just improving a part of the code and getting back to something you can use or sell. Sure a major update of a library may be justified and the right thing to do. It may even still be justified when the ripple effect is considered. That is a far cry from rewriting everything and even if that is the direction you want to go, it is still likely not a bad idea to rewrite one section at a time. Now I'm not necessarily a fan of forcing everything into a two week sprint. Some things are just bigger than that, but reducing the project scope when possible and doing things in steps is a good idea.

Re:things you should never do part 1

[Hognoxious]

I would reword your last item and put it at the top.

0) It's a pile of shit.

Re:things you should never do part 1

[Dutch Gun]

sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/...

who needs another browser anyway?

Just to be clear... this is not Pale Moon writing their own web browser. This is Pale Moon reforking from a newer Firefox branch and reimplementing the features that distinguishes them from Firefox. So, the article and summary says "from scratch", which is misleading because it's not "from scratch" as most people understand the term (writing a new browser yourself from the ground up), it's modifying the newly branched Firefox code, adding their own new features or stripping out crap from Firefox. It's the Pale Moon features only that would have to be rewritten "from scratch".

Joel's advice doesn't account for this scenario, in which you're building new code on top of an existing forked codebase that is lagging behind modern web standards. There are only two choices: Moon Child can try to integrate massive amounts of Mozilla developer changes back into an older fork (impossible, really), or he can refork and redo his own changes. Given that undoubtedly Firefox's changes have been far more numerous and substantial, it probably makes sense to re-fork and rewrite the Pale Moon code.

Honestly, I'm not sure how this is really sustainable, as the same thing is bound to happen again in the future. And I've never figured out how anyone can be assured that Pale Moon is at all secure, either. I have a sneaking suspicion it's "secure" in the same way Macs (and Linux, actually) used to be secure - too small a target for anyone to bother with. I mean, I love the guts of these guys trying this, but... well, I wish them the best.

I also really hate whenever someone trots out this article of Joel's and presents it as gospel, because while it's a good rule of thumb, it's foolish to view any particular development rule as 100% inviolable. I've personally been involved in several highly successful near or partial complete rewrites of very large codebases. I'd say it's certainly a good default position to take - you'd need to convince me before tossing code and starting over. But there are times when doing so would actually be more damaging and end up compromising your new design too much in order to maintain compatibility. Often, it's far better to simply put in a compatibility shim, leave the old code behind, and build a new module next to it, switching over when backward compatibility is needed and slowly depreciating required dependencies.

Re:things you should never do part 1

[Anonymous Coward]

I would reword your last item and put it at the top.

0) It's a pile of shit.

They were not in any particular order. Just be sure it really is a pile of shit before diving into a potential multi year multi person task with no clear end.

Re:Pale Moon is a Hipster Browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are either grossly ignorant or a troll who is long past their heyday. In all probability, it's the latter.

Use these.

[Anonymous Coward]

https://tails.boum.org/
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
https://www.torproject.org/docs/android.html.en
https://distrowatch.com/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/
^Rufus portable to put live DVD's/CD's on USB drives.

Cunts hate it when you're smart.

Re: Use these.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a cunt I can assure you that you're not smart. I don't hate you either - you're kinda cute and I would like to tickle your bum. X.

Re: Use these.

[Anonymous Coward]

X.

I'm thinking of getting a gazebo

[Anonymous Coward]

That patch in the garden is looking a mess, perhaps I should concrete a base and build a gazebo so I can be more connected to the outdoors. I'll get the house up to scratch first.

Erm vapourware is stuff that's announced with dates as though its real and in development, but it doesn't actually exist yet.
So what is this "Vapour plans"?? Thoughts about what they might plan for in future?

You realize I probably won't built a gazebo don't you? Because talk is cheap and deeds are not.

Pale Moon going to re-fork from Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually read the article. I know it's bad form but I was bored. I already knew Pale Moon was the work of a single developer, so he/she couldn't seriously be thinking of starting from scratch. It turns out that he/she/they are just going to re-fork Firefox from a new version of the code base.

Re:Pale Moon going to re-fork from Firefox

[ChunderDownunder]

Maintaining EOLed technology as complex as a browser is a big ask, when the Web itself evolves rapidly. Interesting to know the fate of the project if Mozilla divests itself entirely of Gecko, XUL and related technologies as early as 2018.

Buy a book on Rust and send your CV into the Servo team... Or become just another Chromium fork.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

My copy of Palemoon works just fine and I have never yet encountered a situation where I couldn't do something I wanted to do.

Meanwhile, the current UI of Firefox is horrible and so many features have been ripped that it feels like a browser specifically designed for stupid people.

Re:Already have the internet.

[Stormwatch]

Because it's not from Microsoft.

tabgroups? I like that

[tanstaaf1]

Actually I like the whole idea of diversity -- especially if it includes the ability to opt in where I want and opt out of any standardized way of tracking me. I'm going to take another look at pale moon now. I hope they follow through with what they are thinking. Anything but more Google/Microsoft/Safari consumerism.

So frustrating

[Billly Gates]

To see what Firefox has became from what it was 10 years ago

Re:So frustrating

[NormAtHome]

Yeah, it really is!

Re:So frustrating

[antdude]

Someone need to repeat Phoenix with a brand new web browser!

Re: So frustrating

[Anonymous Coward]

Look how many years late they are with the Electrolysis project, which sums them up: they've been doing fluff instead of serious features. I switched to Chrome three or four years ago because I got so fedup with their memory leaks and poor performance. Now that I've used a browser where I can figure which tab is draining my battery or using all my memory, I won't switch back until Electrolysis is deployed. And then there are the security benefits.

Before the Firefox fork, the Netscapd and Seamonkey people always struggled with the concept of multiprocessing, claiming they needed a single monolithic process for better and tighter integration. It seems they're still struggling with this.

10+ years ago I was complaining about Mozilla was causing Windows 2000 to BSOD. The Mozilla devs and others on this site put me down repeatedly rather than taking this seriously telling me to use s real OS because an app can't do this. It turns out of course that they had a BITMAP resource leak of many years that could bring down Windows if you left the browser running long enough. Then in the years before I switched to Chrome, same story and attitude but this time about unconstrained memory growth by the browser, always denying that it was their problem and had to be my choice of plugins. Never mind that other multiprocessing browsers don't have this problem.

Mozilla seems to consist of weak developers with no architectural skill and no sense of responsibility or ability to make change when there are clear but difficult problems in their product. This is why Firefox is finally dying.

Re: So frustrating

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair though, a bug in a userspace program really shouldn't be able to crash your entire operating system.

Re:So frustrating

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's money completely rotted Mozilla. It got a lot of money and then completely lost sight of its mission.

It is time for it to die and be replaced by something uncorrupted.

Re: So frustrating

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not an excuse for bad programming or not trying to fix a problem that your app causes on your most important/popular platform.

I think the problem from the OS perspective was moving graphics in to the kernel for better performance. Then again, if that was in user space then Mozilla bringing down the graphics system is basically as bad as taking down the whole OS anyway when you're dealing with a desktop environment.

Re:So frustrating

[gweihir]

Well, it nicely shows that FOSS projects can be ruined by bad management and stupid "leaders" just as much as any commercial software project. I do not know what exactly went wrong at Mozilla, but they must have used really large buckets to carry the stupid in.

Re: So frustrating

[Billly Gates]

I think the codebase was just not flexible. A LNG time ago I had lunch with one of the engineers at Netscape with the Linux users of New York. IE just was accelerating faster than they could keep up as more bugs kept hitting the rendering engine as features were added. IE 6 being better and less buggy should say alot right there??

A little late now as WebKit is accelerating

Ok?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone actually use this browser? Can you vouch for its relevance?

Re:Ok?

[aevan]

I ran it in parallel with Firefox, mirroring every action, back when Firefox when firefox changed its UI: 300 tabs on each, playing videos and long text pages heavy css, and without closing for a few weeks.

The memory footprint was over a gig in PaleMoon-64s favour, and it wasn't showing any appreciable slowdown in performance. Can't speak towards Firefox nowadays, but I will note Pale Moon does seem to pick up a stutter with some videos lately if not shutdown. That could be entirely unrelated though.

Re:Ok?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be far more interesting if somebody compared Firefox and Pale Moon now, rather than years ago. When I did, I noticed no appreciable dip in quality between the two. One just looked older and behaved how I remember Firefox behaving (more or less). The latest stable release behaves fine for me, and the Electrolysis-enabled pre-releases are appreciably smoother experiences for me. I haven't tested RAM usage, but don't really care if I'm using another gig of RAM for the benefits Electrolysis gives me (I'll just take it easier on my lower-resource systems like I always do, instead of complaining that I have 800 tabs open and it's dog slow). But then I'm sure people with old profiles and who dislike the updates that Firefox has had to make will disagree with my opinions. Hopefully by the time Pale Moon adopts them, they will magically change their minds because Pale Moon did it.

Re:Ok?

[Anonymous Coward]

The memory footprint was over a gig in PaleMoon-64s favour, and it wasn't showing any appreciable slowdown in performance. Can't speak towards Firefox nowadays, but I will note Pale Moon does seem to pick up a stutter with some videos lately if not shutdown. That could be entirely unrelated though.

It's probably unrelated because I can't watch YouTube videos at all in Firefox 45. Well, I can, but they stutter like crazy. The problem is apparently with hardware acceleration, if I disable that, movies - well, now they stutter in a different way, because everything else becomes so slow.

This is yet another one of those lovely Firefox bugs that has existed for years at this point that has yet to have any action taken towards fixing it.

Re:Ok?

[thegarbz]

Does anyone actually use this browser? Can you vouch for its relevance?

It's very relevant as an alternative to Firefox which isn't Chrome or Edge for the policies behind the companies. Firefox was an awesome browser by a company which didn't sell all your information to 3rd parties. Unfortunately as of late they have a tendency to shit on their user base.

Personally I started using Pale Moon as a primary browser only 6 months ago. I did a lot of active complaining about Firefox but just was never bothered to switch. Then one Firefox update caused it to simply crash on startup. I could file a bug report, but quite frankly with developers so toxic to user fuck-em. It was less effort to switch to Pale Moon than to fix what was broken and I ended up with a faster, leaner browser that reminds me of all the things I liked about Firefox in the first place.

If you're a Firefox user there's zero cost to switching. It will pull across your profile from Firefox, and it has a rich extension base except for all the extensions that try and make Firefox look like it.

Re:Ok?

[Cederic]

If you're a Firefox user there's zero cost to switching.

The very real cost is needing to start up another browser to use certain websites, or specific capabilities of certain websites.

This is happening at an increasing rate and unless better compatibility with whatever web standard those sites are using lands quickly I may have to switch to another main browser.

It would be a shame, but a browser that can't render the web isn't terribly helpful.

Not from scratch

[PineHall]

Moonchild's proposal involves creating a new browser from scratch, in a so-called "re-forking" operation, where the Pale Moon devs take a newer version of Firefox and rebuild Pale Moon on top of that.

They are not building it from scratch. They will use a newer version of Firefox as a starting point. It is "re-forking". It is likely they will not use the latest version since they want to keep tab groups. Though it will be new code when compared to the old Palemoon.

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

where they are at now is the inevitable, coming back to bite them in the ass. you can't maintain a fork and backport features from the donor forever... not when you keep fucking around with the donor code, like they have, with both the browser and the render engine. granted, mozilla isn't doing them any favors with their own molestation of firefox.. but pale moon dug this hole themselves.

current firefox with a couple addons to restore some old features like previous ui and tab groups is all you need.

Re:Not from scratch

[somenickname]

This is basically what Debian does with Iceweasel (and Icedove). They pick a version of Firefox for the stable release (38 at the moment) and then just backport security fixes for it. For people that are just looking for a browser that doesn't change out from under them every time they start it, Iceweasel from debian stable is excellent.

Re:Not from scratch

[ChunderDownunder]

Wasn't the functionality of "tab groups" moved to an extension?

Look, clearly I've never used the feature, but what is the main objection to using the extension and pouring resources into that codebase rather than maintaining it as part of the core browser?

Surely maintaining less code in the core browser is a good thing, if the modular replacement does the job and is supported adequately by an extension writer.

Re:Not from scratch

[postmortem]

That sounds awfully similar to Firefox ESR, which is also on 38

Re:Not from scratch

[secretsquirel]

haven't noticed a difference so far. can't believe people don't use tab groups though it's pretty useful.

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not building it from scratch. They will use a newer version of Firefox as a starting point.

That sucks. I wish they would do it from scratch. Then I might care. It's like how every collaborative "office" document suite is based off of (read forked from) apache wave (read google docs). Couldn't one of the 50 of you have started from fresh fucking code? Why does everyone have to copy the top suckitude?

Re: Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds forked up to me!

Re:Not from scratch

[ChunderDownunder]

Not by coincidence. Iceweasel *was* just the ESR release rebranded for debian stable.

Anyhow, I use the past tense.

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely maintaining less code in the core browser is a good thing

Maybe Mozilla should have considered that before building an entire videoconferencing client, and Pocket, and other cruft into Firefox. Pale Moon wouldn't even need to exist if the right people had concentrated on the core browser. I dare say the tab group feature is much closer to a core browsing feature than trying to reimplement Skype from the ground up...

Re:Not from scratch

[Aighearach]

It isn't a "hole" because they can just walk away and re-fork, something they're doing.

If they were a company with a bunch of version-locked support contracts, then you'd have a point. But they're not.

Re: Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Why build a videoconferencing client into the browser, when HTML5 gives a standard way to access the webcam/mike, raw sockets, and a canvas to fling pixels at?

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Not by coincidence. Iceweasel *was* just the ESR release rebranded for debian stable.

Anyhow, I use the past tense.

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

So, if I read this right, Debian, having foisted the poisoned-software-we-dare-not-name-lest-it-summon-trolls upon its users, is now going to unbrand their neutral sounding icexxxxxx ports of Mozilla stuff and give them back their true names?

I do suppose it's only logical. Mozilla is rapidly losing any true relevance, anything to boost the install base numbers now goes, feck knows what Debian are getting out of this, now the brands are tainted.
In the case of Firefox, I used it quite a lot in the past, now, the software has at best become a major joke, at worst, it's a major embuggerance..having been presented with the fait accompli of Firefox/IE only on a works machine I have no admin rights to, the resource sucking nature of Firefox was such that running it with more than three tabs opened caused issues for the other software on the machine...thank FSM for portableapps.
As for firefox on my mobile, again a resouce hungry wee monster that gets worse with every update (so much so, I've rolled back a couple) I only keep on there for the two websites that I need to access which choke on the default browser (cough...security...cough..).

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

current firefox with a couple addons to restore some old features like previous ui and tab groups is all you need.

The primary goal of palemoon was to get rid of the bloat for performance reasons, not to restore old features.
Just reskinning Firefox is easier but it doesn't solve the same problem.
It's like the old looking at Mars through a telescope vs. sending Humans there. The former is cheaper easier and faster. That doesn't mean that it gives an equivalent result.

Re:Not from scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

When you make a new thing, you have new bugs. For something like a browser, these are highly security relevant.

Re:Already have the internet.

[NotInHere]

Yes, why should you download some random OS from a spyware vendor? Not downloading but using the preinstalled one doesn't make matters better.

Anecdotal and sample of one.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Firefox since launch and it has always been fine.

And that's supposed to mean what exactly?

It's easy to tell that you've never taken a statistics course.

Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that Microsoft open sources Edge, and ports it to Linux and OS X. Although I don't use Windows, I do realize that Edge is a fine browser that's getting better and better. The only thing holding it back is that it only runs on Windows.

If it ran on the other major platform (OS X) and on minor platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, I could see it being the final nail in Firefox's coffin. In my opinion, Mozilla has repeatedly shown the user community that Mozilla doesn't give a damn about its users' wishes. That's why we've seen Firefox trashed, with one unwanted change after another, release after release, even after the community has begged Mozilla not to make these unwanted changes.

Users are fleeing Firefox like there's no tomorrow. The stats show that Firefox is likely around 7% of the browser market on all of the platforms it supports. The stats clearly show that Firefox's users are going to Chrome and Edge.

Open sourcing and porting Edge wouldn't be without precedent. Microsoft is open sourcing much of .NET, and porting it to other platforms. It's porting SQL Server to Linux. IE itself used to run on non-Windows OSes.

Now is the time to Microsoft to truly free Edge. Doing so would push it as the main competitor to Chrome on all of the major platforms, finally burying the rotting corpse of Firefox and finally giving some real options to web users.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[binarylarry]

Thanks for the ad, Microsoft shill!

How can I buy a new surfaceplank or whatever?

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[MightyMartian]

Fuck no. It's a terrible buggy browser.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody should mod up the parent comment. It doesn't deserve to be at -1. It's one of the most insightful comments posted so far, even if it doesn't toe the /. line.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Masked Coward]

Users are fleeing Firefox like there's no tomorrow. The stats show that Firefox is likely around 7% of the browser market on all of the platforms it supports. The stats clearly show that Firefox's users are going to Chrome and Edge.

All we need is confirmation from Netcraft. Firefox is dying and bleeding users, flowing like a river of blood.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict firefox's future. The hand writing is on the wall: firefox faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for firefox because firefox is dying.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[cbhacking]

I don't know that I'd call Edge buggy, unless you're running the preview versions (which are pre-release software and expected to have bugs). It is undoubtedly getting better, feature-wise, too. However, it is still fundamentally a toy browser, an overgrown mobile phone app, and it is really quite worthless as a consequence.

It has nothing resembling good tab session management (although they did add an interesting feature in that general area in the last preview update).
It offers basically no support over what JS can and cannot do.
It has basically no cookie filtering.
It has no tracking protection or ad blocking (IE first got these almost a decade ago).
It built-in Flash that can be globally disabled, but cannot be enabled and disabled for specific sites.
It has no support for tab grouping or switching tabs in last-used order.
It cannot understand RSS/ATOM feeds at all (renders them just as XML files, no feed reading ability).
It doesn't support per-tab taskbar items.

I'm sure there's many more features missing; I don't use it enough to find out because the list above already contains multiple deal-breakers for me. The only things it does well are its dev tools (which are not mobile-app-like at all), its rendering engine, and displaying which tab(s) are playing media. Nobody who has any choice in the matter should be using it on a desktop PC, and I say this as somebody who voluntarily uses all off Pale Moon, Opera, IE11, Chrome, real Firefox (on occasion), and Midori (on occasion, though it's pretty feature-less too).

Re: Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Edge is far nicer to use on a mobile platform (VERY superior touchscreen/pad support), if not for the lack of extension support (adblock/noscript/keepasshttp) i'd be using it as my only browser. Most of the list above would be pretty simple to fix, which i really hope microsoft will do.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

> minor platforms like Linux and FreeBSD

Go fuck yourself you pile of shit shill. No one wants Edge. It's apparently designed to explicitly exclude adblockers, and its just more closed source bullshit from Microshit.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[iampiti]

Haven't you gotten the memo? You're supposed to use, simple, feature-limited mobile apps in your desktop and throw away the featureful, desktop-oriented-UI programs we've been using for decades...because...reasons and then doing your work...I don't know how.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[jbolden]

No at least with Microsoft you are supposed to move to applications that can gracefully upscale and downscale depending on where they are rendering. On a watch they offer a very limited feature set, a phone far more, a tablet more, a laptop far more, a multiscreen display desktop even more. The idea is that you don't have data migration issues as you migrate between interfaces and interface adjustment happens automatically.

That's the goal. You may agree, you may disagree but it doesn't help the argument to mis-state the goal.

Re:Microsoft should open source Edge.

[david_thornley]

That's a difference only if upscaling and downscaling aren't too difficult. Otherwise, you're either writing multiple UIs or picking a target platform and doing a hack job on the other ones. iampiti may not be describing the goal correctly, but he may well be describing the results of aiming at the goal correctly.

Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just join the Servo effort, then? I know this is Slashdot, where we all hate Mozilla and Rust and Servo, but I'd rather get a browser at the end of the day, and not another iCab experiment that petered out and just became a WebKit/Blink clone. If Pale Moon can't even keep up with Firefox patches, it's much less likely they will be able to make a browser from scratch. I'm sure Servo's devs would love the help, and there would be nothing stopping you from making a fork if you got too opinionated to stick with the mainline.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I love Rust, and love their Code of Conduct even more. Everything about the project is perfect, especially how they keep a detailed defect backlog and understand it's a bad idea to try and compile Rust itself with Rust, until everything is mature and ready.

However I'm probably going to get drunk and do a few lines of coke later and I get mean and bitchy when I do that. I'll probably even come back here and ramble on about hating Rust. When that happens, just ignore whatever claptrap I spout off about.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are nearly all of the Rust contributors young white males? For a project that puts so much emphasis on diversity and tolerance and all of that, why is their community so uniform? Why do we see such a lack of diversity?

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Ash-Fox]

Personally I love Rust, and love their Code of Conduct even more.

I've never needed a code of conduct on an open source project before... Honestly, sounds like they're drama prone.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as japanese female, it is because something like that is insulting. We are just normal people too, and all we want is to participate all the same. When people look at me and think, "oh, lady only got here because she's asian female", it insults my work and me. It is much harder to find project where I can be like other people than it used to, some mean because I am japanese and other trying to be nice but insulting.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

..drama prone.

s/prone/queens/g

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lady, you nailed it - when people cave in to "political correctness" they are making things worse, as if that wasn't obvious.
The 'geek crowd' used to put skills first and I respected that. Now even you are getting invaded by politics.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[gweihir]

A code of conduct written by SjWs (and they all are) is an absolute no-go, because these projects obviously place product quality a distant second to other considerations. That cannot work.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[gweihir]

Older white males know better than to join a cult like the Rust community, and so apparently do non-whites/non-males ;-)

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't use Rust. I hate gay marriage and niggers.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geeks still do. Everyone is still busy fighting off SJWs- they stormed the castle, but we're tired of it. We can't say so in public because they have the ability to render you unemployable, but that won't last either. Everything that becomes exclusionary and only allows in the regressive left will eventually be replaced by something with merit-based ideals- but it won't happen overnight, as not everyone is awake to the threat yet.

Re:Why not help Servo?

[narcc]

There's nothing but pointless bickering and drama in just about every open source project. It's disgusting. Having a code of conduct keeps that down to the absolute minimum.

None of this would have happened

[Anonymous Coward]

if Firefox didn't keep constantly breaking extensions, removing useful features, and generally pissing off users.

Re:None of this would have happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it would have. We've been asking Mozilla to fix Firefox for a long time now, and they've been doing it. True, it's been slow and compatibility with addons and sites breaks as they do so sometimes, but that's the price of progress when you've got a ten year old browser that needs to be modernized... I mean, why do you think Pale Moon has to re-fork now? It's not because it's a perfect thing that needs no updates or modernization. And PM also broke compatibility with addons rather severely, so they're hardly above reproach for similar things. Here in our echo chamber we've built up a bizarre narrative that Mozilla is to blame for everything, but it's completely unfair when you actually look at the whole picture. People who don't like things breaking are perfectly within their rights to use an ESR build or fork that doesn't update as frequently, but they'd rather complain that Mozilla isn't perfect and is therefore the harbinger of all bad things.

There are so many good FLOSS browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

that could be made even better. Firstly, uzbl. Such as a nice browser that could really be a winner.

Re:There are so many good FLOSS browsers

[Scoth]

And yet it's still Webkit. Are there any major non-IE browsers left which aren't Gecko or Webkit/Blink? As in, could use them for day to day browsing including multimedia, social media, major sites, etc etc? Opera was the last major one I knew about. Servo could be interesting if it makes it.

Add-ons

[Nunya666]

I hope the "scratch" version will support all of the add-ons that the current version supports.

Re:Add-ons

[Anonymous Coward]

this. i run addons with a browser attached

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

My copy of Palemoon works just fine

The Pale Moon developers don't agree with you.

Rust and Servo... LOOOOOOOOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually tried Rust or Servo? I have, and in my opinion they are sad, pathetic jokes.

I think that Rust is hype, and nothing but hype. It sounds great, until you try it out and find yourself severely disappointed. Yeah, it's supposedly safer, if you trust those programmers building a Rust implementation to do it perfectly. But they sure have created a lot of bugs in Rust itself already! It's not like you can even use another implementation of it, because there's only one! Even if it were perfect, the language is still very painful to use. I think you're better off using modern C++ techniques, which give you just about as much safety without being hellish to use.

Servo is also an extreme disappointment to me. It's probably 10, if not 15 or 20, years behind the times. If they hope to catch up with Blink, WebKit, Edge and even Gecko, they will need to do an absolutely massive amount of work. I've tried Servo repeatedly over the course of many months, and I've seen very little real progress. So I am very doubtful that they'll be able to accomplish anything within a reasonable amount of time. It's not like their competitors are standing still, either. Being written in Rust doesn't help, either. Despite being written in Rust, which is supposed to make it harder to introduce bugs, Servo is full of bugs. Rust also probably drives away good volunteer developers, I think. In my view, good developers would realize that using Rust is a bad idea, and they would use a modern subset of C++ instead, so they don't bother with Servo.

I think that Rust and Servo are failures of the same type as Firefox OS was. Instead of just doing the smart thing, which would be to convert Gecko to a modern subset of C++ and undoing all of the stupid UI and other changes made to Firefox these past few years, we see Mozilla wasting more of their effort and resources on silly projects. It reminds me a lot of the big "Javagator" debacle from many years ago, actually. Rust and Servo could be history repeating itself.

Re:Rust and Servo... LOOOOOOOOL!

[ChunderDownunder]

I briefly played around with Rust about 18 months ago.

The syntax (aaaaargh pointers!) took a bit of getting used to and admittedly I think the lack of implicit conversions involving mutable types, strings etc is a bit of a pain in the arse.

But the functional aspects seem handy.

Re:Rust and Servo... LOOOOOOOOL!

[jbolden]

Rust/Servo doesn't really have competitors certainly not C++. Rust/Servo are about parallelism and the ability to take advantage of multiple cores easily. Everything else could be worse if that proves to be a substantial advantage.

Re:Pale Moon is a Hipster Browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pale Moon has always been for Windows users who want to bitch about Firefox but still use it.

Haven't they done this before?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Netscape 4 sucks, so lets throw it out and start again. Back when Spolsky could write he bitched about this.

Mozilla seamonkey sucks, so lets gut most of it and make Phoenix (now known as Firefox)

And now this again?

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Billly Gates]

Well MS is getting rid of IE in favor of Edge. Mozilla is creating a new browser after realizing how supperior webkit is for threading and process isolation and app integration compared to Gecko.

Oddly Chrome will then have the most legacy and older code

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Aighearach]

And yet, the alternative would be to use the same thing forever. Was it a mistake for Netscape at that time? Arguably. Does that example apply to open source? Probably not, open source often doesn't (can't) "go out of business" the way a company like Netscape can.

Any time there are 2 software products that solve the same type of problem, one of them could have just not been written because there was already something else. Is writing something new any different than re-writing something from scratch? Not if it is open source and you don't really care about user numbers.

If everybody believed that, we'd still be using sendmail. I used to configure sendmail, because nobody else on teams would ever be willing to. I don't really want to go back to that.

Joel was right about a few things over the years. But he was wrong about a few things, too.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[EmeraldBot]

Netscape 4 sucks, so lets throw it out and start again. Back when Spolsky could write he bitched about this.

Mozilla seamonkey sucks, so lets gut most of it and make Phoenix (now known as Firefox)

And now this again?

Seamonkey's actually pretty decent. It's lighterweight than Firefox (!!!) and comes with tons more features and custimizability. The only thing you lose is the newer stuff like Pocket or the chatting service, and you have an older interface pre-Auralis (though I daresay many consider these features). The real loss is fewer extensions are compatible, but a decent selection of Firefox ones still are, and there's even a converter that can get solid results. I don't know if you'll like it, but I'd reccommend to give it a try, if you want a good open source browser.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[phantomfive]

The key difference is that in each of the examples where it worked, it was a different team doing the rewrite (and in the case of Phoenix, it wasn't really a rewrite, it was a code cleanup).

The guys at Mozilla have been making lousy decisions for a while now, if they decided to rewrite, do you really think the result would be an improvement, or do you think they would just make the same mistakes?

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a pretty good post, thanks for the link

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Aighearach]

Well, anybody that engages in as much feature thrash as those guys, no. I think they would make worse mistakes the second time, but clean them up faster. It would come out exactly the same, because they're engaging in so much feature thrash that they are rewriting the whole thing continuously.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[phantomfive]

I think that's a big part of the problem with doing a big rewrite: people who wrote lousy code will write lousy code. For most people, it's better off to learn how to fix things than to try to rewrite it perfectly from scratch.

Imagine if firefox had been constantly focused on improving quality all this time. Right now they would have one amazing browser.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Kjella]

And yet, the alternative would be to use the same thing forever. Was it a mistake for Netscape at that time? Arguably. Does that example apply to open source? Probably not, open source often doesn't (can't) "go out of business" the way a company like Netscape can. Any time there are 2 software products that solve the same type of problem, one of them could have just not been written because there was already something else. Is writing something new any different than re-writing something from scratch? Not if it is open source and you don't really care about user numbers.

The difference is natural and forced adoption. If you create something new, you don't have existing users and people would have to start using it because they find the pros outweigh the cons. If you see a massive voluntary migration it's pretty obvious you're doing something right. When you rewrite something you have existing users and features that used to work and when things stop working we call those regressions. Most are unintentional side effects that developers agree are bugs and should be fixed.

Rewrites are typically when those rules go out the window. Not supported anymore. That's not a bug it's a feature. That's gone and not coming back. Might come back someday, but not a development priority. Often with a solid dose of hubris like "you shouldn't be doing that" or "once you get use to it you'll love it" or "users want simple, minimalist interfaces" to say "we heard you, but you're wrong". Or to belittle you by saying this is a "tempest in a teapot" by a "vocal minority" of luddites that oppose all change.

I guess if you don't care about users and functionality but just more code and new code it can't fail, but then you could just hire monkeys to bang on typewriters. There are good rewrites where the code was just a buggy spaghetti mess and the rewrite was a huge success, you just don't hear much about those. But often it's just a version of NIH syndrome, I don't understand the code so the code must be stupid and if I could just write it myself I'm sure it would be much cleaner and better. Usually those end up as a total disaster, with the culprit abandoning it midway.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Aighearach]

I don't care about users, most of the software I use is written so that I can use it, and the software I use wasn't written to maximize users. Proprietary software has more users, for example, and that was never a problem. Software I use is written so that I can use it, not so that I must.

You just hand-wave and claim that "functionality" is improved by never throwing anything away. I disagree, and I challenge that that is some sort of given. I also challenge the absurd idea that somehow people who want higher quality code at any cost think coding is done by monkeys. It shows a lack of theory of mind.

You may not hear much about "buggy spaghetti," but don't tell me I don't. Because I do. The reason you don't hear about the great successes, is that in open source branding isn't important, and the good teams name the rewrite something new. So you simply don't know it happened. And often, after rewriting it, it becomes "stable" and doesn't need to be changed for years.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla seamonkey sucks, so lets gut most of it and make Phoenix (now known as Firefox)

Gecko stayed the same. A rendering engine is what makes a browser -- they only rewrote the UI. I'd dare say they rewrote at most 25 % of the code -- not 'gut most of it' as you say.

Also, it wasn't called SeaMonkey back then. It was the Mozilla suite. It renamed to SeaMonkey when Mozilla abandoned development on it ('made it a community project') and focussed on Fx.

Re:Haven't they done this before?

[Rexdude]

Mozilla seamonkey sucks, so lets gut most of it and make Phoenix (now known as Firefox)

You've got that wrong. Seamonkey is the successor to the Mozilla suite (which was the successor to the Netscape Communicator suite), and it had browser + mail/news client + HTML editor and a bunch of other stuff. Firefox is the successor to just the browser component.

Plus they haven't gutted anything. They chose to stick with the v 24 codebase and forked it from there because of how Firefox is slowly morphing into a pale imitation of Chrome by shedding all the customizability and user choice that made it great in the first place.

Don't forget security

[yuhong]

There is the issue of security too. One security question is whether it have "Slaughterhouse" (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... and http://bholley.net/blog/2016/t...). This is not the only incident where Mozilla people have suggested hiding bugs until an old ESR goes end of life BTW.

Re:Don't forget security

[dgatwood]

After reading that, I'm downright horrified. That further supports the common argument that responsible disclosure without a mandatory end date is irresponsible. If these people found those holes in Firefox, odds are pretty good that other people did, too, and that those people didn't have our best interests at heart.

At least in my mind, it's really simple. If you agree to maintain something, you should maintain it. If you aren't going to maintain it, don't promise to maintain it. You may choose one or the other. You may not choose both at the same time. Not cool.

Re:Don't forget security

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly don't see the problem. ESR builds are meant to retain compatibility, not accept risky new fixes. That includes backporting security issues sometimes. It's your call if you want to use an ESR - you know it's up to a year out of date from the main branch. This same shit happens on other software that has ESR releases, and singling out Mozilla for it seems pretty heavy handed. Not to mention that the forks didn't get the fixes either.

Re: Pale Moon is a Hipster Browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I get the idea that these repeated idiot comments posted anon on article after article, and repeatedly in this thread, are all the work of the same person? Seriously, hipster browser? Nobody says this. It's someone's psychological issues being vomited out on Slashdot.

Because there are no black russians

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh.

Re:Because there are no black russians

[ChunderDownunder]

vodka flavoured coffee?

off-white pages please

[Provocateur]

Please provide the option to offer not just white background pages (the glare limits my browsing/web surfing in subdued ambient light conditions). I do not need the baggage of a "theme"; that would be excessive; just a light shade of gray would provide soothing comfort after long work hours in userspace. Opera has this out of the box fer chrissake, YOU ARE PALE MOON and white was the color the astronauts wore on the lunar surface, which had if I recall correctly from those photos some other color but definitely was not white at all.

Re:off-white pages please

[Anonymous Coward]

A lesser known feature in FireFox : you can add/edit a userContent.css, which acts like a global CSS for all web pages. See here for more info.

Re:off-white pages please

[Anonymous Coward]

If on Windows, simply change the god damn background color in apps using the fucking Windows tool (Desktop Customization). It should not be part of the fucking browser to change that. Now I do agree that the fucking Bright White background is annoying and should be swapped for a 10 percent gray (enough to be easy on the eyes while not intefering with reading).

Re:Yeah, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. They seem to have no idea how massively complex project a modern web browser engine is. They would need a big team of highly experienced full-time developers. Those kind of guys usually expect to be paid as well. A trip to Microsoft's or Google's offices and meeting the browser teams might be an eye-opening experience.

Re:Yeah, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they are well aware of all of that. Maybe you should try reading the discussion on the Pale Moon forum.

SM...

[antdude]

SeaMonkey doesn't suck! Others and I till use the suite bundled versions. Also, its GUI hasn't changed much for decades unlike Firefox's.

Re:SM...

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube videos flicker badly in Seamonkey... doesn't happen in firefox.

I wish Seamonkey would copy Firefox's dynamic status bar which shows the status only when you're downloading/uploading something, else the status bar disappears. This looks so much cleaner than Seamonkey's distracting status bar.

Re:SM...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

"seamonkey sucks" at the time of the split. I haven't used seamonkey since early Phoenix days. It may have shaken out a lot.

The point is not whether i think it sucks, but whether the devs decided "screw it lets just restart everything" and rewrite basic code. again. for the third time.

Re:SM...

[antdude]

Weird. I don't get those flickers. Ah, autohide the status bar. I like the status bar for other stuff though. SM do need more help to make and fix stuff.

Re:Pale Moon is a Hipster Browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pale Moon has always been for hipsters who want to bitch about Firefox but still use it.

Nah, PaleMoon is for true-hipsters who want to bitch about other faux-hipsters and their pathetic attempts at hipsterdom, let's face it, Firefox is so uncoool man with non-hipsters that it must be hip?, right? Problem is that it's still to common, whilst it might be hip, it ain't cool, so is the choice of those wannabe hipsters out there, the faux-hipsters, those too cool to use Chrome and IE, but still not cool enough..

.. I have been using Firefox since launch and it has always been fine.

Oh man, faux-hipster alert.

..Just update your Firefox and quite being a whiney hipster too hip to use a normal browser like all the "plebs"

Plebs (aka non-hipsters) use IE and Chrome, stop being a faux-hipster man and either trade up to Pale Moon or join the herds..
   

Re:Already have the internet.

[short]

"Not downloading but using the preinstalled one" does matter in real world.

For want of an 80C filter the plot was lost

[Hognoxious]

white was the color the astronauts wore on the lunar surface, which had if I recall correctly from those photos some other color but definitely was not white at all.

That's because they forgot to correct for Rayleigh scattering.

Re: Yeah, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use Mozilla SeaMonkey as the basis for their next browser? It would be at lot easier than trying to start from beginning. And since they are already familiar the code base they can get things going much quicker.

-imprezza86

Please make it like Old Opera!!

[Anonymous Coward]

With its fully customizable interface and low resource use and full of features that are built-in and don't require a squillion extensions!

Not like the browsers of today which look to have been designed for idiots to use and will happily eat all the RAM on the system when used for an hour!

As a Pale Moon user,

[jenningsthecat]

I really hope they do this and are successful.

If they get enough traction soon enough and have a strong enough core team, maybe they can pick up a few Mozilla devs when FF crashes and burns. The existing team will need to reign in the new Mozilla devs and totally squash that fucking "we know better than the users" craptitude that sent FF swirling down the drain - hence the need for a strong, established core of Pale Moon devs to establish, protect, and enforce the 'user requirements first' culture.

Re:As a Pale Moon user,

[Anonymous Coward]

"rein in" - as in rein in the team of horses pulling a stagecoach (at least in my visual imaginarium

Slow day?

[sproketboy]

What a *(&)&*( &*( ( non story. The 7 people who use this browser don't even care.

Always sounds nice until you actually try it

[Theovon]

I’ve tried to start codebases from scratch a few times myself. The same thing happened that happened with Gecko. I was not able to find a truly elegant solution that accounted for all of the requirements up front, so although I solved one set of problems better, all the later hacks I had to do to fix all of the oversights made the new codebase almost as crufty as the old one. All I really accomplished was to waste a bunch of time developing a new codebase with a whole new set of bugs to fix.

On the other hand, I have been successful at incrementally *refactoring* code. If I did my job right in the first place, most functionality was already modular. Then I can take some of the stuff on top of my libraries and extract it into more libraries, which I can then improve individually.

Re: Always sounds nice until you actually try it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea that's all fine and dandy if you wrote the original code.

You can't fix stupid.

Tab groups was the best hidden feature

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure if people actually knew it existed, it would be much more popular. I can't imagine browsing without it today

Re:Already have the internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Literate and pretending to be clueless. Hi, troll! :-)

This Article Is A Lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

This Article Is A Lie. And much to my surprise, it wasn't posted by timothy.

As has been noted repeatedly PaleMoon will fork Firefox. But the title will never be changed. Uh, imagine that.

As a side-note. It is truly sad what the software 'profession' (my profession) has become and the sad, clueless people who now fill its ranks. People who are scared witless by (gasp!) writing software. They now want to just download some bug-ridden crap from github, "glue" it all that crap together and call it a day. Writing new lines of code is too hard and scary for them. They'll find any and all excuses not to do it. As evidenced by many of the comments in this thread.

I've also watched these buffoons spend weeks screwing around with gihub crap they do not understand, rather than take 2 days to just write it themselves and be able to control it and understand it. Nope. Because "no one does that anymore" they say. "It's not efficient!" In reality, they just don't know how. And they will be the ones replaced by AI.

Re:This Article Is A Lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's down to code reviews, bug fixes, time estimates, tasks complete and churn. By using open source code, any hard-to-fix bugs found can get blamed on the author. Decide to do something in-house which ends up with intractable bugs and "management" wanting to know what is causing a holdup in the release of the product, and someone isn't going to be there for much longer.

"Emacs isn't getting constant code changes"

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs gets updated now and again (19.29 when I started, currently on 24.5.1, v25 coming soon) and it's packages that get updated because really emacs is a bunch of packages. I know this because the guy working on the ANTLR mode package is using me as his guinea pig (his words) and we've already gone through a few versions number updates thereby.

Remember when Netscape did this?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Remember when Netscape did this?

The decision was one of the major reasons for the death of the Netscape browser. It was a terrible idea and led to Netscape (the leading browser at the time) disappearing from the market for all intents and purposes. The browser (and the company) sank like a stone, never to be a dominant player in that space again. Or ANY space as far as I can tell.

Years later (during the Netscape post-mortem) everyone agreed that "redoing the codebase from scratch" had been a stupid and horrible idea. It was an undeniably fatal move by the company.

Re:Yeah, sure

[cfalcon]

> They seem to have no idea how massively complex project a modern web browser engine is.

Yes they do lol. They already maintain a browser fork of firefox, I'm sure they know a lot about what they need to do.

Mission churn

[jbolden]

What went wrong is constant churn in mission:

i) Create an open source platform for a commercial browser (Netscape) to sit on top off.
ii) Create an alternative browser so that Microsoft won't be able to squeeze out AOL.
iii) Create a lightweight version of the open source platform totally useless as a platform for commercial netscape.
iv) Create a browser that people like that enforces web standards allowing for web applications and thereby replacing Microsoft IE. Oh and make Google the default search engine.
v) ????

Re:Yeah, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to forget that the browser engine powering both Chrome and Safari was created by the open source community. Internet Explorer is based on NCSA Mosaic, which was also a small team.

Re:Yeah, sure

[mikael]

From the forum:
"Allow me to further clarify .. ONE AGAIN.. Our future and whatever path we take is going to still have specific requirements and parameters. It is gonna be a mozilla-like codebase.. It is gonna have a gecko-like rendering engine (Goanna) it will have XUL, XBL, all the technologies everyone wants and needs. What this will not be is a trident shell, a webkit shell, a blink shell, or whatever servo is gonna be.. No, does not and would not support all the bits of technology to be a product we and you could use and be proud of. If you think this is gonna happen.. Just stop because it isn't going to ever be that. So get that out of your heads."

http://forum.palemoon.org/view...

Cyberfox

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyberfox is nice.

Cat got your tongue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the post talk about PALO MOON and I get a page to PALE MOON? ???? Help anyone?

Works fine

[suppo]

I've used Pale Moon on linux on my main home computer for about six months with zero issues. NoScript and Adblock Latitude are supported. Haven't found any web sites that do not render. Only minor complaint is that on text boxes like this one the default (but changeable) language is German vice English. Haven't really tried to fix it yet.

Re:Yeah, sure

[MoarSauce123]

If anyone can pull it off, then the folks from Pale Moon. This project is one of the few FOSS projects that does not alienate its users.