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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.
sounds familiar
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
who needs another browser anyway?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.