Idea for a new browser product
forum.palemoon.org
forum.palemoon.org
- Mozilla made architectural changes to address limitations in Firefox that inhibited the pace of improvements
- We didn't like the changes Mozilla was implementing
- We forked Firefox to revert the changes
- We spent years insulting Mozilla engineers for the changes they were making
- We realized that we can't implement changes because of architectural limitations
- We are going to re-fork Firefox from a later version
- We still think the Mozilla engineers don't know what they are doing
- This is a totally new browser product and a fork of Goanna, not Gecko!
I am a huge Mozilla fan-boy, and an ex-employee, but come on, this is just off the wall silly.
I have removed my fair share of malware from other peoples machines though and I have yet to observe that Firefox extensions has been the attack vector a single time.
For that reason I do find it puzzling that they want to irrevocably destroy their single biggest advantage (in my and many other vocal supporters eyes): real, USEFUL extensions. (Even Lastpass has to add an extra binary to my OS to fully work under Chrome IIRC.)
Also while I should mostly not say much about design I do find it odd that so many projects attempt to look Mac OSX and I think it is the same frustration some people have with Firefox starting to look like Chrome: not everything the big boys do is necessarily better.
I happen to think australis looks way more spiffy, old design looked kinda clunky, but then I also love minimalist design of Chrome.
Your implication that he's calling it a unique new browser is either intentionally disengenous or confused. A "browser product" is a product made from an existing browser: Firefox. There's nothing in the linked post that presents it how you do.
Pale Moon's fork fixes some important ethical (and aesthetic) issues I have with Firefox's current direction. I'm glad that both (and icecat, iceweasel, etc) can coexist because they're open source. Re-forking from a later version seems reasonable to me since not that many people think the above issues are important. As the post said, there aren't enough contributors to keep up with the evolving web. Re-baseing from an acceptable later Firefox version would give me another few years of breathing room.
The only part of this I don't agree with is the existing Firefox extension ecosystem not being compatible with the new Pale Moon. But I guess as Firefox abandons them the value of the old ecosystem dimishes.
With respect, this argument falls flat on it's face. Both Firefox and AMO (old and new versions) remain open source. The additional requirement of signed extensions allows Mozilla to exert a light increment in control.
- Adding digital rights management black boxes
Fair enough, I didn't like the additional of EME either, but I also like netflix, despite the DRM constraints. As a user I am ok with this choice, because it enabled me, as a user, to choose to either consume DRM content or not, while using the browser of my choice.
- baking in commercial software like Pocket
Yep, that one left a bad taste in alot of peoples mouths. It would have been better if an API had been published and more than one provider had been supplied (cough cough social API, looking at you).
- intending to abandon XUL for better security of non-technical users
Palemoon does absolutely nothing to protect it's users. The Palemoon devs and project leads never miss the chance to take pot-shots at Mozilla and the Firefox engineering team, but the only reasonable claim they can make about security is "Pale Moon is based on the Mozilla release source code that has a large community of developers and security-aware people, next to having seen over a decade of development by now."
The problem, which the Palemoon devs have now stated clearly, is that they can't improve on the legacy version of Firefox they forked, and even when I still worked there were only able to take up security fixes with diminishing capabilities due to deviations in the code base.
Finally, Mozilla is not abandoning an old ecosystem, they are making a substantial investment in building out a new ecosystem while providing tools, documentation and an upgrade path. I recognize that there are still people who like to use old software, but at some point you have to take a good solid look at things and think: ok, lets try this again and apply the lessons learned.
Palemoon is an insecure knockoff browser that leverages open source in all of the worst ways without giving anything significant back, and even worse, they weasel around what they are doing and make claims about performance and stability that are flat-out indefensible (not that they could prove it since they have no mechanism to collect the data outside of their own build machines).
And for all this they abandon power users. If there is a real shame for all Open Source, it is Firefox.
p2p is the future... (and don't tell me about websockets, they're not true p2p)
> the idea has come up to make a new browser product, re-forking from a later point in the Mozilla source tree
Palemoon lacks the resources to drive a modern browser fork. Rather than trying to maintain the current fork they have, the proposal is to either rebase, or create a new fork (or some other definition of "re-fork" that I am not able to parse).
The irony in this is that the reason they need to do this is because they were deeply unhappy with the changes Mozilla was making to correct technical debt due to the age of the codebase. Those changes allowed the features to be implemented that the Palemoon devs are lamenting in the post.
I would also like to take this moment to bang the security drum and remind everyone that Palemoon has been developing new browser features for 6 years, while taking up some, but not all, Mozilla security fixes, without a security team of their own. Read into that as you will, but also consider how successful people have been in forking Chromium (or just grab a bowl of popcorn and read through https://twitter.com/taviso if you don't know the history).
Don't like what it has become? Change it again.
Between all the flaming going back and forth, we still respect each other and work on making the world a better place, one line of code at time.
Others were unhappy about the new Firefox skinning that was backwards incompatible (I think).
Their choice to implement the W3C's disasterous digital rights managment technology in the form of EME was too much. At the very minimum including this DRM in the browser opens up any devs or researchers trying to port to other platforms/OS to legal liability and attack.
Additionally Mozilla's choice to bake in bloatware like Pocket is very unpleasant. Basically every time I do a fresh install of Firefox I have to go through a long series of config to de-bullshit it (ref: https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5).
Palemoon is more Firefox than Firefox these days.
Someone should just make a UI for servo, and release it for people. It's probably as good as Gecko was when it was first shipped in Netscape's products, considering the rapid development.
Which, as an aside, I think is hilarious, because they claim standards compliance as one of their biggest features.
Sounds totally unrealistic. This product will be dead on arrival.
Probably to some extent that prescription makes sense however it can never be successful. Search can never be decoupled from the browser. It just can't. I keep twitter spamming Brendan Eich with this for the Brave project.
Guy is way smarter than me.
Created the language I use sloppily.
Has more credibility, team, ect than I ever will.
However, I still think I am correct. No one gives that much of a fuck (within reason) what UI you wrap around Google.
To palemoon. Please build a search engine. I have only tracked a few teams working on this. Probably could get a 1 year headstart before this becomes "hot".