Totoro-kun: I didn't know about the license at all until this moment. That can be a fair deal-breaker for use in a distro. It would also explain why other developers haven't flocked over (yet?). For that reason, I'm going to mark this as "solved" even though there's more being discussed.

273: The UI changes are just one part--Mozilla is also introducing DRM (the bad kind) and settings and other stuff that can be classed as borderline spyware or at least PUP. Then there's FF-41, which will break plugins and force signing whether people like it or not. It's like M$-mandated UEFI all over again, but with a browser.

My problem is that I thought I could reasonably trust a Mozilla browser not to deliberately introduce vulnerabilities and spyware. This is no longer true. PM or at least Webkit without the closed-source plugins (chromium, konquerer, etc) seem like the only options now, at least where rendering pictures and being forced to use javascript is concerned. (I'm still a happy user of Lynx, when I can.)

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A few observations:

* Firefox 3.6.3 was released in April 2010. At the time it worked extremely well.

* By mid-2012, it was my experience that many websites would not work with FF 3.6.3.

* Firefox 3.6.25 was released in December 2011, but it was not much better with those problematic sites than 3.3.6.

* Firefox 16.0.2 was released in October 2012, and was a slam-dunk, working very well with all sites.

* Today, nearly three years after its release, Firefox 16.0.2 is still viable (except for the security vulnerabilities issue, which is serious but separate). I am aware of two web services (ello and zillow) which are unusable under 16.0.2, and one web service (github) which is usable but suffers from occasional problems under 16.0.2.

Have html/js standards been changing less rapidly recently than they were just a few years ago?

If so, then could we reasonably expect a modern rendering engine, up-to-date today, to remain viable for many years (five years? ten years?), or are there changes coming down the pipeline which will obsolete it?

Mozilla has taken Firefox off the rails in ways which makes me unwilling to consider it in the future, but I've been assuming an older version of FF would only remain viable as long as html/js standards didn't change too much (assuming vulnerabilities get patched).

But if those changes take longer than three or four years, then investing in maintaining an older version of the browser (from before the introduction of undesirable "features") might be feasible.

My main Win computers are on Pale Moon. Some others that I haven't bothered changing are on Firefox ESR. I have them modified with add-ons that I've been using for years. And since most of my time is spent in the browser, arbitrary and unnecessary changes to the UI that interfere with how I have the browser set up are not welcome.

If someone with coding skills really wanted to facilitate more users over to linux, writing a tool to convert a FF (presumably also work for PM) profile and bookmarks from Win to linux would probably produce more results than yet another faffing about with window manager desktop UI changes.

Bookmarks are easy -- just export then import. Anything else, I've not tried it but Firefox Sync apparently will do it for you?

YES
NO. I do not track FF development, but judging by news of last few month, I prefer to ditch everything related to Mozilla. I will not list any reasons influenced my decision(pretty huge one, 1st reason appeared in 2007), just read their blog.

If you search the web you will probably find a SlackBuild.

Palemoon is not great, but it's good enough. It brings back the elements of former FF user interface making it easier to use. Aurora UI is terrible on the desktop. But there are some tiny incompatibilities. Although Palemoon author forked gecko. We will see what will come out of that.

Pale moon is an excellent browser!

I switched to Seamonkey a year ago, after Firefox had this radical UI change (version 30?). With a few plug-ins, it can be made to have the same UI as the older Firefox (well, different buttons icons):

https://slackalaxy.wordpress.com/201...ing-seamonkey/

You see this is what confuses me. That's what Firefox looks like on my systems and I'm running version 43 or so.
Whether you decide Google Safe Search or optional DRM are reasosns to leave Firefox is, of course, a matter of your principals (there are things I won't use, do and buy for similar reasons). I am just confused about what it is about the UI that has changed so radically (the afore-mentioned stupid web-style setting pages aside)?
Sorry, to go on about this but I really don't understand all this talk of UI changes. I'm not at home but if I remember when I get there I might upload a screenshot of my FF.
I should also add that I sometimes hate the interface of Google Chrome and Chromium when I use them and I do love old-style Firefox. So this isn't a criticism just genuine curiosity.

Just an FYI, according to mancha, it seems that seamonkey trees are currently frozen due to an outstanding bug, so you won't be getting any security updates.

Firefox has introduced Australis with version 29. Since then, the status bar has been removed, you have force-grouped buttons at the top (for example: You can't move the reload button out of the address bar) and Mozilla has made deals with Cisco and Telefonica to include binary blobs and a video chat system. Also, the download manager has been replaced with a library, which I personally don't like.

So they made it worse on two sides: They added unneccessary bloat and removed useful features. Unless you're using extensions like Status 4 Evar, it can't look like on the screenshot above.

Mozilla isn't the big freedom player they once were. Their marketing department always says it's getting faster, though. If I'd just experience that for myself :P

I'm not using it anymore. AlienBobs Chromium is just fine. Granted, their interface is simplistic but it renders faster, the PPAPI version of Flash is still being developed and they don't add so much bloat or change the interface radically every few versions.

PaleMoon also is a very fine browser for older machines. I just don't use it on my main machine because I couldn't build it from source, ran into various problems there.

If it wasn't for webkitgtk...
I like midori. It has a future. I hope that future is not to far off.

I used to be an Opera user, until their privacy options were clearly made obsolete by the ever-increasingly aggresive tracking and advertising networks ("site preferences" was great, but with the myriad of third party elements in the modern web, a single "allow javascript" was not enough). And after that, they basically became a Chrome copy and removed everything that made it great.
So I reluctantly went to Firefox, where I can have the web behave (ABP, NoScript, CookieMonster, RequestPolicy, GreaseMonkey) although the browser really has become worse over time. The settings "web page" is horrible, but one doesn't need to go to it that often. Same with the buttons: I can't remove the reload button, but I use F5 for that anyway. What really makes me angry is things like the forced-settings for search [1]. I haven't tried PaleMoon due to some doubts regarding its support or future viability, but the truth is that the web is becoming more and more hostile over time [2], and the only viable alternative is a browser that lets extensions give control back to the user, hence Firefox

[1] Default (browser-provided) search engines take precedence over user-defined searches with the same name, so you can't define a "google" search pointing to encrypted.google.com or a DuckDuckGo search pointing to the non-JS version of their site, because they get overriden by the default settings for each, and *every upgrade* removes my customizations

[2] I notice it when I use another browser without ABP or similar, but it really makes me sad on phones, where I can't give the phone to my son to play silly games like Talking Tom without seeing how almost all space is dedicated to one form of ad or another, and wherever he puts his 2-year-old finger, an ad opens.


Edit:
I disabled Classic Theme Restorer to see how bad the damage is ... damn! let's say I just enabled it again

Edit 2:
I just found the Classic Theme Restorer setting to bring back the RSS button to the location bar. Whose idea was to remove it? :angry:

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That used to happen to me, too. And I am 25 years old :P They are designed that way.

But thankfully, adblockers for phones have been developed, too. On my own Android phone I use AdAway, which is very effective in blocking out ads from applications.

I noticed the newer versions of Palemoon have increased resource consumption. Some people even had problems with a high CPU usage. I noticed on my own box the memory consumption is higher than in FF with a similar extension set and the same sites loaded. While there is a possiblity the problem can be 3rd party extensions or force-loading the Firefox extensions, this happening is worrying. It might mean garbage collection is flaky.

But early versions were great, even if Linux version was still unofficial. I think it's currently semi-official.

Anyways I generally like Palemoon, but will wait to see what happens next and if problems persist. I'm kinda worried forking Firefox is too big of a task for a small team. But I wish them all the luck.