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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.
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.)
UNFORTUNATELY, much as I've enjoyed using it, a while back (v.26 or 27?) Pale Moon decided to unilaterally disable NoScript, then make updated versions unavailable for installation. I don't quite understand their beef (many accusations, didn't find any evidence), but I know what mine is: I don't need browser-makers deciding what extensions I should use, although I appreciate a heads-up.
Here's their two cents worth: https://forum.palemoon.org/vie...
I've disabled my PM installer app and won't be updating. I recently DL'd the most recent IceCat; it's still good enough for them.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson