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

Posted by BeauHD on from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.

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.

5 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. things you should never do part 1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    who needs another browser anyway?

  2. Re:Ok? by aevan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Not from scratch by somenickname · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Haven't they done this before? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Re:interesting and I wish them luck by Aighearach · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.