Firefox-Forking Browser 'Pale Moon' Releases Major Update 28.0 (palemoon.org) 144
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."
Re: (Score:2)
Is this true?
I only have two other questions about PaleMoon - AdBlock? and NoScript? "No" to either is a deal-breaker. Otherwise I might be interested, ever since "Pocket" it's been downhill all the way.
Now I am having this really annoying weird shit problem where it stops rendering pages at random halfway through the page before it has rendered completely. It just hangs there, displaying favicon and it thinks it's done, but it isn't. Reloading the page re-renders it fine. Sometimes links don't work on
Re: (Score:3)
Is this true?
No, he's an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's not be forking naughty, I much prefer https://www.waterfoxproject.or... [waterfoxproject.org], because it let's me do things the old way, a bit slower but who cares performance is not everything. Just because it is faster does not make it better, cough, cough, just ask women about the testicular excitability of men, well, men they like, men they dislike and just fuck for money and want it over as fast a possible, high performance, as in faster being more high performance than slower, high performance all the way I suppose
Re: (Score:2)
Since the developer has blocked noscript [palemoon.org] from working out of the box, then that'd be a yes wouldn't it?
Pale Moon browser un-installs NoScript. (Score:4, Informative)
A Pale Moon Add-ons page [palemoon.org] 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?
Re: (Score:3)
Is there a hidden reason for un-installing NoScript?
Simple? Moonchild threw a hissyfit, no other reason. There was a far longer thread that they nuked the fuck out of a while back on it, and that's what it boiled down to.
I don't have problems with NoScript on Pale Moon. (Score:2)
Of course, anyone who doesn't pay attention to what NoScript says it is blocking is likely to have web site page display problems.
Another issue: Pale Moon doesn't allow the Ghostery add-on. It allows Disconnect instead. The user interface of Ghostery is much more sophisticated. I didn't find any explanation about why Ghostery is not allowed.
Re: (Score:1)
Pale Moon seems to be developed by extremely capable people. Is there a hidden reason for un-installing NoScript?
Halfay Decent synopsis here:
https://endchan.net/tech/res/12708.html
Re: (Score:1)
Typical Maskiki-ism: the words on the page you "read" and what comes out of your brain are linked only in the most tenuous sense.
For the information of anyone else reading (not you Mashiki: you're utterly impervious to facts) what they actually say is they're not providing support when NoScript is installed since it's causing too many problems.
And how on earth you think htat has anything to do with whether firefox uses threads is anyones guess. Not that anyone would want to guess!
Re:Does it support electrolysis yet (Score:5, Informative)
Reading further tells you that they actually blacklisted the addon in browser. You must disable addon blocklist in about:config to make it work.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for continuing to prove the old point. You can lead an idiot to knowledge, but you can't make them smarter.
If you actually read the thread, then you'd know that you can only enable noscript by getting into the guts of the browser via about:config as another person pointed out to you.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice try but no cigar. The post has a couple of random users saying it's blacklisted. Here you go form the horse's mouth:
https://forum.palemoon.org/vie... [palemoon.org]
(also note how I linked to not just the page but the post).
You can lead an idiot to knowledge, but you can't make them smarter.
Touche, my man, touche!
Re: (Score:1)
PaleMoon works just fine with AdBlock (uBlock Origin) and NoScript.
No problems with half loading. It's just you.
Re: (Score:2)
AdBlock? and NoScript?
It does. A major selling point of Palemoon is that it doesn't break existing extensions by forcing everything to use the Webextensions API.
Can't be stressed enough... (Score:1)
This can't be stressed enough. The original article actually failed to make the biggest selling point of Pale Moon, which is that it works, and it keeps working release after release without breaking things.
Pale Moon became popular because Mozilla just couldn't stop breaking things and trying to tell the users what sort of UI they should want. In fact, Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almos
Re: (Score:2)
I use uBlock Origin because of the efficiency and better UI than ABP, but the thing I hate is the lack of choice on supporting Acceptable Ads - I'm not against ad's, I'm against intrusive ads.
Re:Does it support electrolysis yet (Score:4, Insightful)
I stopped using Firefox as it only uses 1 core unlike IE 8 and Chrome 1.0 10 years ago
Rubbish. Top immediately shows Firefox on multiple cores with multiple tabs. Couldn't be bothered to check before spouting?
Re: (Score:1)
Oh Really? [palemoon.org]
What you see is JavaScript using multi-threads but all your tabs still use one big thread where one can freeze up the rest.
Re:Does it support electrolysis yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I have more than 500 Firefox tabs open at this moment without freezing or performance issues. Looks like sound engineering to me, please do everybody a favor and take your wanking elsewhere.
Re:Does it support electrolysis yet (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
Most engines these days support worker threads, but that means you are managing them yourself. That might be a good thing...
Re: (Score:2)
I stopped using Firefox as it only uses 1 core unlike IE 8 and Chrome 1.0 10 years ago
Firefox already uses all the memory, you want it to evolve to use all the cores as well?
Re: (Score:2)
No it doesn't.
benchmarks (Score:1)
Any benchmarks?
Re: (Score:1)
Any benchmarks?
With real programmers the only important "bench marks" are the ones on their butts after sitting for hours doing the optimization testing and bug fixes. Bench marks can be similar to "fake news" if not done on low powered equipment as well as silicon rockets, that said I don't think Pale Moon even with no script has a blue moons chance in hell at outperforming Lynx on my P11 running on the latest kernel on Slackware in straight Enlightenment xWindows with 256 meg of ram on a 3 gig 5400 rpm drive.
I would g
6 watts low enough power? (Score:1)
Bench marks can be similar to "fake news" if not done on low powered equipment as well as silicon rockets
Does a 6 watt 4 Airmont core 1.6 GHz Pentium N3710 CPU in a fanless 11.6" Dell laptop count as "low-powered equipment" or "silicon rockets"? Or are you talking CPUs designed to fit in a 5-6" phablet?
The important part (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here, but I use WaterFox on my Mac. It appears PaleMoon is not on mac, yet.
https://www.waterfoxproject.or... [waterfoxproject.org]
Re:The important (bad) part (Score:1)
Palemoon still supports NPAPI plugins
Looks like it's time for a fork of the fork... to get rid of the NPAPI security nightmare.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet they nuked jetpack addons even before the "addon apocalypse" of firefox, and now they're blacklisting some addons because "we can't be bothered to provide support, and we don't trust you to be smart enough not to ask for support".
I.e. the noscript being blacklisted by palemoon devs in browser.
Pale Moon development is just weird. At some points, they genuinely seem to try to work to meet existing demand. And then there are other points, where they make mozilla's worst actions look user-friendly by compar
Re: (Score:2)
Palemoon still supports NPAPI plugins
Commonly referred to as unmaintained plugins.
Re: (Score:1)
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.
The 27-year-old Ph.D. in computer science who did the design as part of their interview/internship at Google is mildly offended by that remark.
How much spyware and privacy violating shit? (Score:1)
How much spyware and privacy violating shit?
Some new plugin slurping up browser history or tabs under the guise of security or safety?
Bought and paid for management means the Firefox product will shit out whatever advertisers dictate this quarter. Fucking wonderful.
Don't forget to add whataboutism about competitors to justify one's own actions.
Little-used components (Score:4, Insightful)
> accessbility features
Because fuck handicapped people, right?
Re: Little-used components (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, they are grateful when you do
Re: (Score:1)
People who need accessibility features don't use Firefox. Prior to the removal of NPAPI and XUL addons, they may have made heavy use of those to add needed accessibility options to Firefox. But they don't use the native accessibility features. They use addons and plugins that require the hooks provided by Pale Moon and the old Firefox addon API in order to meet their own, personal, needs. Accessibility is not "one size fits all" - everyone is different, and everyone needs different addons and plugins to
Focus (Score:5, Insightful)
Then use Firefox. Or Edge. Or Chrome. Not every feature needs to be in every browser.
ADA (Score:2)
Saying that they can just use FF is fine if PaleMoon offers nothing other than FF without accessibility
PaleMoon's main selling points are that it loads faster because it drops a bunch of functionality. It keeps old fashioned extension and plugin support, which includes support for (now) deprecated accessibility plugins. And it allows for more UI customization, which is useless for the people using accessibility support it drops - namely screen readers.
The reverse your argument is also true. Does PaleMoon do something that people needing accessibility need that you can't get with Firefox?
Re:Little-used components (Score:4, Informative)
> accessbility features
Because fuck handicapped people, right?
Here [palemoon.org] 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.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, that is a very long-winded way of saying what the other AC put so succinctly.
Re: (Score:3)
Some of them wouldn't mind sex. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Because fuck handicapped people, right?
Just because handicapped people exist doesn't mean every parking spot needs to be twice the size. There is already a browser that has accessibility features. Not including these features in every piece of software *eva* is not "fuck handicapped people".
What next: There's people in wheelchairs, why do motorbikes even exist?
Re: (Score:2)
Say what?
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/177893#autoclick [google.com]
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/177893#tapdrag [google.com]
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mouse-shortcuts-perform-common-tasks [mozilla.org]
Is Pale Moon is a browser for Furries? (Score:4, Funny)
Pale Moon is a great idea but I have this unshakeable feeling that it is some kind of furry-related thing. A je ne sais quois. There's something weird about the whole "moon" and IM A WOLF INSIDE theme. I do support this project. Any web browser unaffiliated with garbage corporations is automatically a "good browser", even if it's not functional.
Perhaps it's just a man and his undying love of werewolves, but it does have that "was this built by a person who wears a sweaty fursuit?" sort of concern. Like that pick-up truck at the Winn-Dixie with a giant 3 WOLFS + LIGHTNING decal on the rear window of the cab, and when the driver gets out he's wearing a nearly identical shirt, and the license plate also says MOONCHLD.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you care about the maintainer's personal life choices? As long as they provide software you like and they don't murder someone [wikipedia.org] - thereby stopping maintaining the software you like because they get thrown in the slammer - why should it matter to you whether they wear furry suits or smelly shirts? I mean, most of the world uses software made by a brilliant guy with revolting personal hygiene [youtube.com] and nobody bats an eyelid...
Re: Is Pale Moon is a browser for Furries? (Score:2)
That's a poem
Re: (Score:1)
My problem is with the fact that a fat obnoxious fuck called Tobin has a lot of influence over things. God knows why Moonchild likes him, he's rude and has absolutely no social skills or desire to be diplomatic to anyone. No idea how he functions in the real world. He literally kickbanned me from the IRC channel for saying that Pale Moon was a fork of Firefox because he's so autistic that you can't call it that because they changed some of the code.
Re: Is Pale Moon is a browser for Furries? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Pale Moon is a great idea but I have this unshakeable feeling that it is some kind of furry-related thing.
If it was Cheetara running the show I'd be a lot more comfortable with it.
Re: (Score:2)
Next Stop... (Score:2)
When you need to access old HP iLO and Dell DRAC (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
May limit access to NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [palemoon.org]
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.
uMatrix is better (Score:3, Informative)
Get uMatrix instead of NoScript. NoScript is proprietary. uMatrix is GPLv3. uMatrix is more flexible and works better.
Re: (Score:1)
they fixed that, theres a new setting, in security menu set "addon security level" to off. I agree it sucked when they borked noscript, not a good move on their part-- this is not a plugin you want to break
"Pale Moon decided to [...] disable NoScript" - no (Score:2, Informative)
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 wi
Re: (Score:1)
I just installed the newest old-style noscript on the newest palemoon. Seems to work fine.
Pale Moon isn't very good (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless you really have some desire for some old extensions Pale Moon looks old, isn't updated nearly enough to call it secure and definitely Pale's in comparison to any other modern browser. The browser looks like some relic dug up from a old software CD with a bunch of old crappy outdated software on it. Yeah its just barely kept alive by a few developers who don't have time to properly update it, and their few users who enjoy being stuck in the 90's.
Re: (Score:2)
Pale Moon (the final XP version) is a little antiquated. But man is it fast. When you X it away, one second later it is gone from memory. No other browser comes close (and Chrome is the worst at this).
Most importantly, it uses about 20% of the memory of Chrome. My main machine has 3 GB of RAM. With it, I could watch a total of one video in one tab using Chrome and I still had RAM issues. With PM, I can forget about memory issues.
Two drawbacks (with YouTube). #1 - it doesn't support the now default vi
Flash still working? Awesome! (Score:1)
I assume the NPAPI support means flash will keep working? That's awesome news for someone like me who enjoys flash every day online. Believe it or not but flash is alive and well for a certain percentage of the population and we want a browser that still supports flash.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what your problem is.
I just updated to v28 and posted this with uBlock Origin. It's running fine---looks like 9 of 18 domains are blocked on this page.
I'm running 1.13.8, so maybe there is an issue specific to the newer releases. That's always a possibility.
Just use Vivaldi (Score:1)
Unofficial Windows XP builds for Pale Moon (Score:1)
Installer releases [github.com] and latest betas [rthost.cf]
These are called New Moon builds. They are unsupported but I've tested them and work fine on Windows XP. Biggest advantage over outdated Firefox ESR versions: you can watch Youtube with the latest video codecs.