Pale Moon vs Firefox
 

A quick search shows this really hasn't shown up yet, surprisingly.

With all the BS that Mozilla has been doing to FF, particularly in the last few months, could it possibly be time for Slackware to ditch FF and go to Pale Moon? On the off chance you don't know, PM was forked from FF due to these very things.

I'm very curious about arguments for and against doing this. To be clear, this isn't about whether SlackBuilds are available or not, but whether PM should be mainlined. This also has nothing to do with Seamonkey or Thunderbird.

I switched to Pale Moon months ago because of the UI changes FF have been making. That was in Win. Have just been trying out some linux distros and began with Mint Cinnamon. PM not in the repository and being a newbie could not get the tar.gz to install. Have installed Manjaro because it has Pale Moon in its repository, but alas my profile will not transfer from Win to linux.

I agree that I would like to see more distros include PM. Just as many switched to Mint because of Unity, some of us have switched to PM because of unnecessary UI changes.

My thing is, they removed the backwards compatibility settings that some websites can grab onto to properly display webpages. Not a major issue, but it does leave websites in a limbo trying to detect what browser is in usage.

Still a SlackBuild, source build or binary repackage, would be welcomed.

well someone just submit a palemoon SlackBuild script to SBo :)

Pale moon is my favorite browser. A build script for FossaMail would also be nice.

Sweet! :)

Binary repackage or source build?

You just hit on one of the major problems with PM and some other forks like Waterfox: they're primarily or ONLY for winblows. Apparently there are some fairly major differences between PMwin and PMlinux, and the fact you said your profile won't transfer highlights this. Between that and seemingly no support outside win or lin (i.e., *BSD including OS-X), it makes me leery to rely on it since it keeps giving me the feeling they may drop Linux at any moment.

OTOH, what Mozilla is doing is becoming unacceptable. I really want to support them, but they seem dead set on driving off as many of their users as possible.

And Chrome is spyware, which I tolerate on Android because the whole OS is kind of spyware and I don't see an alternative yet (maybe Sailfish in the future...?), but on my laptop where I'm doing banking and other sensitive stuff, it's Slackware with FF. But if FF is no longer safe...now what? (Note that I'm not under the illusion that anything is totally safe, but I do the best I can with what I have, which at the moment doesn't include a Stallman-approved laptop.)

If anyone else has any ideas outside of these, I'm sure listening, for one.

I seem to be one of the few that was actually pleased to see Firefox's new interface, although i didn't dislike the old one. I switched to Pale Moon earlier this year because the 'pause' function in the download manager of Firefox was first hidden into the right click context menu, and eventually removed entirely. That was the final straw.

I only install Chrome for the pepper-flash plugin for freshplayer, otherwise to me, Chrome is useless.

I've been having a really, really good time with FF 16.0.2 (40-70 days of uptime, no memory leaks that I can tell, none of the new UI nastiness), but it's accumulated a few critical vulnerabilities which I can't work around with configuration changes.

I'm pretty good with C, and can usually get through C++ eventually, so have contemplated coming up with my own security fixes for 16.0.2 and just sticking with it.

That plan has a few problems, though:

* Eventually websites stop working with older FF versions (when I migrated from FF 3.25 to FF 16.0.2 a lot of websites were misbehaving with FF 3), and I'm not sure if I can keep ahead of it myself. So do I want to go through the effort of fixing FF 16.0.2 if I'm just going to have to abandon it in a year or two anyway?

* There are other personal projects I'd rather spend my time doing,

* Some of the critical vulnerabilities are described only as "Multiple unspecified vulnerabilities" :-P (like CVE-2014-1519) which means squinting at release diffs to figure out what they fixed and where.

As it happens, just last week a friend suggested I look at Pale Moon, so this thread is timely. I'll give it a whirl while contemplating patching FF 16.0.2.

Using Pale Moon ever since FF UI disaster. Very happy user so far. It works far better than FF ever did.

But PM has a problem of being kind of Windows centric. No decent way to build it from source. Linux folks only get binary. Also, it is Freely Available Copyrighted Software ("Freeware") therefore including it into main Slackware tree is problematic. It's very nice to see a SlackBuild for it. Tough it's only repackaging of their provided binary.

I'm not a fan of its license, but it looks like they do provide the source at least. Although I haven't tried to build it or even taken a close look at it yet.

https://www.palemoon.org/sourcecode.shtml

Edit: Apparently Pale Moon branded builds (Their binary I presume) use that license, but the source is MPL.

Other than the dialogues for settings and the like (which are hardly ever used) being turned into silly web-page style like Chrome my current Firefox (43.0a1 (2015-08-22)) doesn't seem much different to me than it was about 5 years ago. Just what are the interface changes I'm managing to ignore?
Oh, and thanks for the mention of Pale Moon I'll give it a whirl as I like to try new things.

For me it was inefficient use of UI space. I can't use small icons any more. It was impossible to fit everything in just 2 lines (address bar, menu, navigation icons, etc) like it is possible on classic UI. Gone download pause, silly settings menu that looks like a webpage. I can understand the need to compete in casual user base with silly chrome UI, but to loose devoted and loving users...

Usually programs are getting used for one of the two main reasons.
1) It performs great!
2) User interface is nice and comfortable

FF was lacking in performance a lot, and holding on their superior UI, which they decided to ditch. Oh well It's still the one fully open sourced browser and it needs support, but as a user I need some love :hattip: