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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."
Palemoon still supports NPAPI plugins and themes.
I had literally spent years getting FF just the way I liked when they started screwing up everything.
Chrome never did much for me other than being able to run Netflix on my laptop (linux) And the settings menu in Chrome has always looked like it was designed by a 10 year old as an extra credit project in remedial programming.
I've pretty much completely ditched Firefox for Palemoon and don't really care about FF or what the Mozilla foundation is breaking anymore.
This is great when you need to access old Java-based HP iLO and Dell DRAC remote console interfaces. It also helps with the occasional elderly IPMI interface that only works with a similarly old Java-based remote console interface. It is worth keeping around so you can save a trip to the data center to maintain your legacy hardware.
Palemoon is why we have open source.
I used to keep an old CentOS 7 VM with a very elderly Java-enabled Firefox ESR browser to access near-end-of-life servers with obsolete iLO and DRAC. With Palemoon, I don't have to do that anymore.
Kriston