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

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: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).