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Firefox-Forking Browser 'Pale Moon' Releases Major Update 28.0 (palemoon.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader tdailey spotted a new version of Pale Moon, a customised version of Firefox optimized for speed and efficiency. Beta News reports it's the first major update since November of 2016:
There are virtually no visual or obvious changes in this new major build, but the under-the-hood changes are both extensive and necessary.... Despite all the updates, Moonchild is keen to stress certain things haven't changed -- unlike Firefox, for example, Pale Moon continues to support NPAPI plugins, complete themes and a fully customizable user interface. There is also no DRM built into the browser, although third-party plugins such as Silverlight are supported. It will also continue to work with certain "legacy" plugins of the type abandoned by Firefox.
Pale Moon strips out what one reviewer calls "little-used components" of Firefox, including parental controls and accessbility features, as well as crash reports and support for Internet Explorer's ActiveX and ActiveX scripting technology.
"Proving that open source leads to great development, Pale Moon takes the already decent Firefox web browser and makes it even better and a faster."
There are virtually no visual or obvious changes in this new major build, but the under-the-hood changes are both extensive and necessary.... Despite all the updates, Moonchild is keen to stress certain things haven't changed -- unlike Firefox, for example, Pale Moon continues to support NPAPI plugins, complete themes and a fully customizable user interface. There is also no DRM built into the browser, although third-party plugins such as Silverlight are supported. It will also continue to work with certain "legacy" plugins of the type abandoned by Firefox.
Pale Moon strips out what one reviewer calls "little-used components" of Firefox, including parental controls and accessbility features, as well as crash reports and support for Internet Explorer's ActiveX and ActiveX scripting technology.
"Proving that open source leads to great development, Pale Moon takes the already decent Firefox web browser and makes it even better and a faster."
> accessbility features
Because fuck handicapped people, right?
Here is the reasoning behind this decision:
As far as accessibility goes: Pale Moon supports full accessibility features as one can expect from a browser, like caret browsing, adaptation to high-contrast themes, etc. -- but what it does not support is specialized hardware for the severely disabled. This has been a choice since day 1 of its publication, and falls in line with another key statement about the Pale Moon browser: that it does not attempt to cater to all possible usage scenarios, but instead tries to find a sane balance between features and performance/stability. This inevitably means that deeply-complexity-impacting components that would be used by a disproportionately small portion of the users are disabled. The browser is no less useful because of what is disabled - but it may of course not cater to specific specialized needs that specifically rely on those components and fall outside of what should be considered the scope of a web browser.
No, you have this exactly backwards. Spidermonkey -- Firefox's JS engine -- can only use one thread per process. Firefox (and Gecko itself for that matter) use multiple threads and always have. Part of the reason for moving to a multi-process architecture (electrolysis) was to allow for multiple instances of Spidermonkey so that (among other things) browser chrome that relies on JS can not be blocked by content JS.
(In case you're going to do the tedious 'citation needed' thing here, my citation is that I'm a former Firefox engineer.)
Pale Moon browser version 27.9.4 actually sometimes un-installs NoScript without notifying the user. Other times it complains. When Pale Moon un-installs NoScript, I re-install it.
A Pale Moon Add-ons page provides a link to NoScript. Confusion?
Pale Moon seems to be developed by extremely capable people. Is there a hidden reason for un-installing NoScript?
Reading further tells you that they actually blacklisted the addon in browser. You must disable addon blocklist in about:config to make it work.
Get uMatrix instead of NoScript. NoScript is proprietary. uMatrix is GPLv3. uMatrix is more flexible and works better.
I'm glad you provided a link but it's not what the link actually says. To quote my clarifications in box brackets:
'We're sorry that you will be considered to be "on your own" when you use NoScript,'
and
' If you install NoScript, you're on your own with any breakage [of the site, not the browser]'
because
'The problem is users who install NoScript, without knowing the inherent risks, and expecting it to "keep them safe" but otherwise not expecting (major) breakage [of the site], and as a result come knocking with "Pale Moon doesn't work on site X!"'
I've never had a problem with NoScript and I'm ok with stupidly written sites breaking. If you don't understand it's the site's fault, not noscript's, you will be confused.