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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.
Cuz that's a damn crazy undertaking
""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.
sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
who needs another browser anyway?
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.
Because it's not from Microsoft.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
To see what Firefox has became from what it was 10 years ago
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Yes, why should you download some random OS from a spyware vendor? Not downloading but using the preinstalled one doesn't make matters better.
if Firefox didn't keep constantly breaking extensions, removing useful features, and generally pissing off users.
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.
I hope the "scratch" version will support all of the add-ons that the current version supports.
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?
Fuck no. It's a terrible buggy browser.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
vodka flavoured coffee?
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.
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.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I've never needed a code of conduct on an open source project before... Honestly, sounds like they're drama prone.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Actually they are well aware of all of that. Maybe you should try reading the discussion on the Pale Moon forum.
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Not downloading but using the preinstalled one" does matter in real world.
That's because they forgot to correct for Rayleigh scattering.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
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.
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.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
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.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Older white males know better than to join a cult like the Rust community, and so apparently do non-whites/non-males ;-)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Required reading for internet skeptics
From the forum: .. 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."
"Allow me to further clarify
http://forum.palemoon.org/view...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
NON-geek Linux user since 1998
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.