Some thoughts on Pale Moon vs Firefox
 

I discovered Pale Moon some time ago, but didn't really like it, because a) it was missing some features I really liked with Firefox, and b) Firefox was still (mostly) acceptable, in terms of performance. Now, I'm sorry to say, that is no longer true, and the recent discussions of Pale Moon on here and the SlackBuilds on SBo make it quasi-official: Firefox sucks. I've not wanted to say anything before now, but even I have noticed the slow performance of Firefox, and wondered why recent releases have suffered from code bloat. I remember the introduction of Firefox in 2004, and marveled at the lean codebase it was back then. Of course, it was the work of one individual, before a large group got ahold of it. Now, it's become a mega-monolith of web features. I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that web browsing was supposed to be fast. Some browsers remind me of Microsoft Office in their slow startup times.

I think that the addition of Pale Moon is the best thing for Slackware, since it adheres to an earlier time, before Mozilla went off on a tangent. I really like Pale Moon's fast startup time, smooth responsiveness, and relatively small memory footprint. This is the browser that will remain in residence on my computer for the foreseeable future.

Alien Bob has recently put together a Pale Moon package and you can read about it here,

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/palemoon-browser/


I'm using it as "we speak" and, so far, I like it!
Hats off to Alien Bob!
:hattip:

Before this came up, I modified a mozilla-firefox.SlackBuild from slackware-13.1 that merely repackages the binaries. I modified it to handle x86_64 binaries, and replaced all instances of "firefox" with "palemoon", replaced the firefox.png with a palemoon.png, modified slack-desc to reflect the package's name, and mozilla-firefox.desktop to handle palemoon, instead. Not as difficult as it sounds, just a bit of work and common sense (of course, knowing how SlackBuilds work is a BIG plus :) ). Worked like a charm. As I said in my first post, I wasn't too impressed with it, but given recent events, I revived the SlackBuild. Now it looks as if I won't need it, as Pale Moon is now semi-official. I was kind of disappointed; all that work for nothing! (Or for a very short time, at least!). The bright side is that now we get an awesome Firefox derivative, and that's not a bad thing at all. :D

Seeing discussions about Firefox here recently, I thought I'd add my own view on things.

Contrary to most opinions expressed I'm actually quite happy with the performance of Firefox after relatively recent introduction of (partial for now) multiprocess support. Coming to Firefox after using Opera for a very long time (until version 12), I deliberately chose to use as little add-ons as possible, because that's what I was used to (Opera not having add-ons until the very last versions) and also because I feel that very few add-ons are of high quality. Right now I'm using only uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere, both of which play nicely when multiprocess is enabled (though I had to force-enable it, likely due to HTTPS Everywhere not being whitelisted by Mozilla). I also avoid Flash like plague. I find that this combination makes Firefox stable and responsive.

I believe that when most people complain about Firefox being slow, what they actually mean is that it's not responsive for them. Various tests show that Firefox is on par with (or at least not much worse than) other browsers in terms of speed. But being single process application until very recently, it was less responsive than its main competitors, most of which are multiprocess for quite some time. That's why I'm really happy with Mozilla heading for fully multiprocess Firefox. It's unfortunate that this will impact a lot of add-ons, but there's no simple way to make them multiprocess compatible, so you have to choose and for me personally responsive browser is more important. Let's face it -- the web is getting more complex for better or worse, you can't escape it, the browsers need to implement all these new technologies to stay competitive, so responsiveness will be even more important in the future.

The web evolving without slowing down is also the reason why I'm skeptical of Pale Moon. Compared to Mozilla, the project has very little manpower which is at odds with the current trends of the web. Being a fork of Firefox, until now it could piggyback on some of Mozilla's efforts which are not against Pale Moon's goals, but I feel that Firefox diverging from Pale Moon more and more, it would become harder or even impossible to do this, leaving Pale Moon developers on their own. While it's a viable alternative right now, I just don't see Pale Moon succeeding in the long term.

Meh Palemoon is snakeoil, it is no faster than Firefox, it uses an ever increasing outdated and buggy codebase with secrutiy fixes that Mozilla has fixed months/years ago that still linger around in the Palemoon codebase. XUL/XPCOM are outdated baggage that keeps Firefox from being a modern smooth browser, I am happy they are ever so slowly dropping it.

I don't want to besmirch anyone who chooses Palemoon over Firefox, but i have yet to be convinced in any way Palemoon is objectivity better than Firefox in anything relating to web browsing or being a web browser in general.

Pale Moon testing
 

I like Pale Moon, am trying the binary AlienBob built. Thanks.

But I am weird when it comes to files created on my hard drive, one reason I'm glad to be rid of Windows is filenames, and the spaces they contain. I also despise html email, might as well yell at the sky while shaking my fist.
Ha ha no thanks. I can't see myself dragging that profile around for another few years or so, it just bugs me. I'm silly like that.

Thank you for starting the thread though, I like reading what others think about the state of browsers right now. At least Mozilla has no 55 patch update, or whatever the latest monopoly malware is. Safebrowsing for the win! :-D

I have to agree with Pixxt. Its very slow on a system with 4gigs or 2gigs. I'll stick with firefox until something better comes along.

I agree that just looks ugly and out of place, standard windows user practice made its way into linux userspace, no respect for tradition these days.
There must be a way to patch the sources and replace the space with underscore, or better yet move the entire thing into ~/.config

I use Firefox on all of my platforms. I've been using Firefox before it was called Firefox. I still enjoy using Firefox. I have a boat load in add-ons installed and Firefox works just fine for me. I see no reason to change at this point. That said a few of my favorite extension are on the chopping block when WebExtensions take over. I will deal with it when the time comes. I have tried Pale Moon, felt like I was downgrading. <shrug>

I second this. Been using Firefox since when it exists, and don't have any particular issues with its performance.

I may agree with criticism to its development path, but I am fine with its speed.

I would consider switching to another browser at the condition that it supports 100% of extensions and layout scripts that I normally use, or equivalents to them. And I believe this only happens with Chrome...

Basically, I agree with this and have not had any of the problems with Firefox I've read about
in other threads.
OTOH, I have been using Pale Moon for two days now and it is, without a doubt, faster than Firefox.
I'm keeping Firefox to view Netflix, will use Pale Moon from now on for general browsing, and have deleted Chromium and anything related to it, e.g., Vivaldi.

What I have noticed is a serious slowdown from both Firefox and Google Chrome. Opera was still pretty responsive. I doubled the memory in my machine and all of them became faster, and more similar in terms of speed. My assumption then is that Mozilla and Chrome engines now take more memory the way that are installed and configured by default. There may be ways to speed them up and require less memory in the settings, but if you ave the choice of throwing memory at it, please do.

That seems the fastest and least painful fix.

I don't really have a strong opinion either way, but I like that Pale Moon is lighter than Firefox and still supports the extensions I like (just ad block and pentadactyl (I use vimperator on Firefox, but that stopped working on Pale Moon and pentadactyl seems to be a fork that is officially supported on the Pale Moon extensions page) (sorry for all the parentheses)).

I have dumped Firefox when they dumped ALSA. I have never wanted to run sound daemon, like PA, so FF is incompatible with me. Now I am using Vivaldi and Pale Moon, like many other Firefox "refugees". Pale Moon looks like good old Firefox 3.x, runs considerably faster (maybe not page rendering, but old GTK2 interface is very fast). However there seems to be some problems which rarely happen and difficult to reproduce. For example, I was watching movie the other they, and suddenly video stopped at one frame, while audio continued. Closed the browser and started again, everything is fine. Those problems are not serious enough to prevent you from using the browser. Pale Moon does not support DRM, deliberately.

I have installed it from DEB package, because I am lazy. One just needs to unpack the archive with

$ ar -x Palemoon<something>.deb data.txz

then unpack data.txz

$ tar Jxf data.txz

and make Slackware package

$ makepkg -l y -C n Palemon<something>.tgz

Why would you go through all the trouble of repackaging a Debian package when you can just get Pale Moon from SBo?

Source build: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...work/PaleMoon/
Binary repackage: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...work/palemoon/

Or from Eric's repo: http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/peo...ilds/palemoon/
(Eric's package requires ffmpeg, and oxygen theme rebuild for KDE.)

Technically, they didn't dump alsa, they just stopped supporting it with their pre-built binaries. Firefox itself still works with alsa if you build it with it. And Slackware's Firefox still works perfectly with alsa since it includes the --enable-alsa flag during the ./configure.

For how long ? They are about to remove the actual ALSA related code in the very near future. I'd better start getting used to it now.

Actually, I could, and I often do. To be completely honest, I wanted to try it out. There are plenty of DEB packages out there and not all of them have matching Slackbuild. This one is rather simple, there is no installation script. I should try something more complicated.

It is a thing that I like about Slackware, it is relatively easy to install from both RPM and DEB. Especially if the packages date from roughly the same period as your Slackware version. I have been using Red Hat, Fedora and SUSE in the past, and it was not nearly as simple. I think it is because Slackware installs everything (within reason) that you need by default, so shared libraries and other stuff you might need are often there right from the start.

This is not true. I've seen several places the mozilla devs state they aren't removing ALSA. This is just one more place I just found, which is a recent statement.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu...id=1345661#c83

And of course they inject more all over the place of the "no-one uses ALSA" and "full of bugs" except ALSA is the subsystem for linux, and pulseaudio uses that. It's sounds like an excuse not based on a real perspective, but one to fit their development agenda.

Slackware flipping on --enable-alsa would have been pretty pointless if they are removing it. But since it is available, and it has always worked just fine (right everyone??), I think it makes total sense. But if the mozilla maintainers end up blocking patches to their code if some bug is out there or that they broke it purposefully, then I'd question mozilla judgement and future use of their browsers. In fact, I've seen recently a couple examples in the corporate space that firefox has been dropped, saying 'DO NOT USE -- it won't work', and to use a supported browser, Chrome, Edge, or Safari. And I confirmed it. That is not a good sign. Pale-moon is unlikely to get anywhere, given where they came from, I'm sorry to say. But there is a sore need for a browser to fill firefox's place if mozilla starts to go under.

I've searched around a bit. They said that ALSA related code is unmaintained, so it will conflict with something, sooner or later. Or it won't work with later versions of ALSA.

I had a lot of problems FF video playback problems until 45ESR, and I often needed Chromium to watch HD movies. It was much before these ALSA issues. So the idea of replacing Firefox is not new to me.

Early Mozilla browser started much worse than Pale Moon. They had ton of untidy code inherited from Netscape, it was sluggish and needed a lot of memory to run. However, they created a decent browser in the end.

When Firefox started (it was called Phoenix, then Firebird) from fresh code, it was barely usable. Firefox 1.0 was first acceptable version, although it had glitches. People were saying it had no chance, because it was not IE compatible and did not support Microsoft specific features.

Pale moon was just an optimized Firefox build with good old interface for a long time. At some point they decided to fork from Firefox, and it was not so long ago. They are getting better with each release.

That's not what they're saying. From the comment your linked to (emphasis mine):
What they're saying is that Firefox ALSA backend (not ALSA the Linux subsystem) is buggy in its current state and that not many people in their userbase use it. The second part (not many people using ALSA backend) seems very likely because most major Linux distros ship PulseAudio these days. They also say that writing code for ALSA the Linux subsystem is hard, and that's another reason why they prefer PulseAudio.

Supported by whom? By some lazy vendor who only tests with browsers they claim are supported?

The web in 2002 (the year Firefox was first released) was so much simpler than the web now.

I wonder what API is Firefox 57 going to use in order to run Flash content. Is it still going to be NPAPI or something else ? If Firefox drops NPAPI, Adobe will, almost certainly, drop NPAPI Flash plugin. And that is what Pale Moon is using at the moment.

There was a Freshplayer plugin which allowed Firefox to run Pepperflash, a possible alternative.

They are cutting corners ever since Google stopped supporting them financially. I suppose they lack resources.

I don't know, but gradually rewriting their browser to be fully multiprocess (Electrolysis) and modernizing their web engine to utilize multiple CPU cores and GPU offloading (Quantum), while doing this in new programming language (Rust) which they're funding development of, doesn't sound like lacking resources to me. Considering that Linux is not the most used platform they're targeting and that majority of users on that platform are using PulseAudio, it looks to me that they're simply spending their resources wisely.

Well, this is a free country, at least where I am posting from. Mozilla is free to do whatever they believe to be the best for them.

I, on the other hand, will surely do what is best for me. That is Vivaldi, which is very configurable and does everything right and Pale Moon which offers "outdated" interface which I like. Firefox does not have anything to offer for me any more, and I don't see why would I waste my time on it. If they shut down the project, I'd probably learn about it from the newspapers.

I never said they were speaking of the ALSA subsystem solely either. My comments are about their decision not to support a mature standard available everywhere, one even pulseaudio uses, that they used themselves for years.

Thanks for that proper response, much better than just nit-picking. I don't know about the patch, but you made me curious about how that might get done. Cheers.

I did separate searches in the source code for both "moonchild" and "productions" separately, but unfortunately I didn't turn up anything that seemed to reference the .moonchild productions directory. It would take some digging to find out how it's set.

Same rare experience with continuing audio while video is shut down, waiting a while or restarting helps, but this is just a minor issue for me.

Concerning speed, the difference between FF and PM is clear. Obviously, if you're using latest HW you may not notice. I'm using repackaged PM binaries on 14.1 and haven't had a single crash in 2 months.

I'm generally disappointed by what I consider a devolution in web browsing experience where website development has turned into careless integration of zillions of add-ons (often for the most simplistic tasks) into a single long vertical page to cater to mobile users. The result are sparsely populated pages taking ridiculous amounts of CPU cycles to render a few words. Here PM often does a good job on slower HW.

I never bothered comparing rendering speed, because FF is, generally, slow in page rendering. It does not bother me as much as memory consumption. FF runs in less memory compared Chrome and Chromium, and could be tweaked to use even less memory.

Pale Moon is using even less memory than Firefox. It is important on my older, 32-bit machine. PM is much more nimble on old machine.

Yes it is clear Firefox is much faster than Palemoon.

That does not agree with the behavior I have observed. On what platform, what CPU, and how much memory?

I found palemoon slightly faster on a Thinkpad with 4G ram running Win10 on 4 3.5GHz Intel cores.

I find Pale Moon faster and more responsive on both of my computers. Especially on old, 32-bit one Pale Moon has significant advantage. However, it is possible that presence or lack of some libraries on the system might make it slower or faster. I don't have multilib, for example. I think I had problem once with some program on 64-bit that wanted to load library from /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64, but I can't remember what the program was any more.

Both of my slow Netbooks, Intel Atom N270 with 1.5 gig of ram, and an Atom N450 with 2gigs of ram. I had so many browsers installed at once on them Chromium, Opera 12, Opera Beta, Firefox ESR, Firefox Beta, Seamonkey, Midroi, Xombrero, Dillo, and Palemoon. Not saying Palemoon runs slow as to be unusable but it was not faster than Firefox, and on some pages it took forever to load, and had memory leaks. the chromium based browsers ran the fastest until you opened up a bunch of tabs, with many tabs Midori and Firefox were the fastest. I had 100 open tabs in Firefox and it was slower but still smooth. Having many tabs opened was no problem for Midori but the ux and handling of bookmarks and history are a pain in Midori so I did not use that browser everyday.

Using those Netbooks and another slow Laptop for a few years until I got my desktop fixed made me love Flash, it ran faster than html5 video in all of the browsers that had both enabled.

Pixxt, Pale Moon is compiled with some switches which are supposed tomake it optimized, especially on newer hardware. Maybe those switches are not always the best choice. Try installing from Debian package. Debian people are often more conservative.

You're kidding right? I'm running the binary repackage of Pale Moon (x86_64) on a '07 Inspiron 1520 with a C2D @ 2GHz, 4GB RAM, 800MHz FSB, 13 Addons (Adblock Latitude being one of them) and I have no issues.

I don't understand why you keep wanting to install Debian packages on a Slackware installation. That just doesn't make sense to me.

I have no issues, either, but Pixxt says he has. I assume he is not crazy to say that, unless proven otherwise.

There are 2 Pale Moon Slackbuilds. One compiles from source, if you have time to wait for it to complete.

The other is using build from Pale Moon site, one that *REQUIRES SSE2* instruction set for 32-bit platforms, as the *DESCRIPTION* says. It is clearly stated that some or all of *CONTRIBUTED BUILDS* *REQUIRE SSE* only. Debian is one of the most conservative distros, so I expect DEB package (one of the contributed builds) to support SSE only CPU's. At least one of Pixxt's machines is 32-bit.

Besides, one of my machines is very old 32-bit and it supports sse2. However sse only build runs better for some reasons.

Is this clear enough ?

Or perhaps they are PERFECT, for the major Intel and AMD processors, but not so fine for ATOM.
I think I could write a book about software that performs differently on ATOM!

Now this makes infinitely more sense.
For some reason the Atom part didn't register with me when I first read Pixxt's post.

I am using Pale Moon (the binary repackage) on my ASUS TP200SA notebook. This system has 2GBs of RAM and a Celeron N3050 processor. I don't see a noticeable speed difference between PM and Firefox, but the former uses less RAM and that makes a lot of difference to me.

Before switching to PM from FF, due to the tabs and other software I prefer to keep open all the time, the system would be pressured (albeit slightly) to swap memory out after a while. I even considered using window managers lighter than XFCE. But in the end, the switch to PM made this unnecessary.

I am really anxious to see what FF will be like when they complete the moving of the codebase to Rust. When FF makes full use of the concurrency features of Rust it should become a much better performing (and way more secure) piece of software.

Isn't this somehow wrong ? The web pages are loaded with crap more and more, we need parallel thread/process architecture to handle it. The response is going to be even more crap. The content has, I'd say, deteriorated. I could browse for hours in the past, never had enough time, now I am finished in 30 minutes max.

Web pages are more like desktop apps now, but that worked even in browsers from 5 years ago. I am never using a browser which doesn't have "offline switch" extension because of all that crap which keeps loading forever.

You've nailed it on the head, I think.

Nobody has written a browser correctly, yet.

While we're waiting for someone to do that (and resisting the urge to do it ourselves), we use whichever browser is least horrible. At the moment, I'm of the opinion that that's Pale Moon.

What are you guys solution for playing youtube videos?

I fail to see the relevance of this question to the topic of the thread? Pale Moon plays Youtube videos just fine.

Ummmmmm nope!!!!! It plays very choppy. Is the reason I asked, I'm testing a lil bit more. Try and load pbskids/youtube and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not having any problems and have a YouTube video running as smooth as silk in another window as I type this post.

I have no problems with YouTube on Pale Moon either.

I do observe that youtube seems to work a little better with the latest google chrome on Linux, but only if you have 1.5G or ram or more. It seems to suck some ram, but with that ram it does seem to do video better.
Have you other processes chewing up ram?

Youtube plays fine under Pale Moon here, too.

Unfortunately a lot of things can influence in-browser video playback -- other things eating CPU or RAM, too many flash objects loaded in various tabs/windows (a lot of ads contain flash these days), ill-written javascript loaded in other tabs, etc. Try closing some AJAXy tabs and killing your flash plugin process (it will respawn when you reload the youtube tab).