There comes a time when one has to put their personal prejudices aside.
Pale Moon just works. I like the interface and, as I said, it just works, without looking like the gawd awful current version of Firefox.
As to "personal prejudices," KDE-5 is just plain a** unattractice. Yes, I know that is subjective, but after several attempts, I will NEVER use it, if there exists an alternative such as Xfce.
OTOH, KDE-4 is, for all practice purposes, dead, and should have been replaced in -current a long, Long, LONG time ago. And, again, OTOH, Xfce-4.14 doesn't bring much to the party. Talk about wasting a life. Four plus years for almost NOTHING in return? The developers should be ashamed!

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You should be telling that to the palemoon team who have made decisions detrimental to portions of their user base over personal prejudices. I first tried their software optimistic that it would be better, but was quickly shown how very wrong it was when they ignored severe usability issues and falsely documented security based addons as malware. The issues they had with AlienBob among other incidents is just insult upon injury.

Firefox may not be better in many regards, but at least it has much more robust support.

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As far as I know the major issue was the port to GTK-3, as GTK-2 is dead too.

Not aiming to start a flame war about GTK+, but
GTK+2 is not dead (and it's so good GIMP and Inkscape still can use it)
GTK+3 is unstable, since they keep breaking the API on minor releases (I think it's a GNOME thing, and part of why our Mentor stopped shipping GNOME)

Audacious has gone QT
Wireshark has gone QT

Wish that there was a QT port of Firefox - I personally spent lots of time just to make GTK+3 usable (readable), since the browsers I use are still GTK+3 dependent (Tor Browser and Waterfox). But paraphrasing an old song, I know that some day (sooner than later) all that work will go to the trash when the GTK+3 team decides to "upgrade" their CSS API, once again.

I am not publishing exactly how I did it, or how I made Waterfox look usable (it involved looking at the source code), because I have a feeling that the Firefox team actively monitors all the Internet looking for people who might dare to customize it. As they did with building XUL separately (they at first discouraged it and then directly admitted they wanted to make it harder for people to do it, and then just made it impossible to do it). So by publishing the method I used to test it, I'd be risking they messing it up once again, so as to make it impossible for people to customize anything save the bare minimum.

Same attitude as with the GNOME Adwaita (there is only one). If I wanted my browser to look like a clone of Edge..., or that it's built with .NET Framework 4, I'd just use a virtual machine.

That's why I mostly use Tor. At least I know what I'm getting.

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I was present during most of that; and unless you had some private conversations I don't know about (maybe you did but I doubt it); then I can state with confidence you didn't really take the time to get to know the developers at all; or to fully thresh out the situation. The incident between AlienBob and the Pale Moon devs was unfortunate; and based on not much more then a misunderstanding whose fault was mainly (if not altogether) the Pale Moon devs fault. People are not perfect; misunderstandings happen.

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It's funny how you start off with saying we need to put personal prejudices aside and then go on an OT rant about your own personal prejudices.

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"Official Branding"... go and get stuffed. This is an open source environment, where you are generally free to patch and make changes and they should expect that. Maybe they can play those games on the Windows platform or something that those so called "normal people" use, but that doesn't work for us.

I don't use Pale Moon, but Mozilla have similar policies about this... for a while even Patrick was not allowed to distribute Firefox builds. (I was disgusted that Slackware, that generally respects the intentions of developers probably more than any other distribution, had to repackage binaries. Slackware!)

Everybody in this environment knows that a distributor's binaries for a project may vary somewhat, with different compile time options, different patching, different linkage etc. Don't like that? Use official binaries, compile it how you want it to be or use another distribution. I don't use distro dogfood for web browsers. Or kernels for that matter, and every distributor, regardless of what they've done, still calls it "Linux".

If a distributor cripples things, they won't have much of a user base for long.

I'm not calling my browser fuckweasel just because I changed some flags, options and compiled it myself. I didn't "make my own web browser!" it's still Mozilla Firefox. Yes, I have shared some of my builds on occasion, though I wouldn't say I "distributed" it as it wasn't to the public. I wouldn't do that anyway, simply because I'm not qualified to make binaries for the general public and frankly, I wouldn't want that responsibility.

Which is why they were included, i.e., as an example.
This morning I loaded up AlienBob's latest KDE-5 updates and ran it for a while. Still don't like it,
but its getting better.

There is some logic to it. Your browser is like your lungs; it's an interface with the outside world and the first port of call for any incoming infection. Mozilla didn't want their good name damaged by weaknesses introduced by other people modifying their code. So you can modify it -- good luck to you! It's foss after all -- but you can't then use their copyrighted names and logos.

When it comes to self builds, there are so many options compared with most software that I wouldn't be surprised if you could do some damage by using the wrong combination. So again, "you can do that if you want but not in our name".

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With the kernel and all the software in our environment, you think that the Mozilla snowflakes are something special? Lots of software interfaces with the Internet and you don't hear those devs whining about calling the software by its name. That is not within the spirit of open source software.

Also, I've been building Firefox since before it was called Firefox, and the only damage you'll do is to make your build fail with the wrong combinations of options :-)

I'm surprised this only got one small mention in this thread thus far:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...ces-criticism/

It is indeed another "horrible decision" by Mozilla. Far from being safer, all DNS traffic will be funneled through Cloudflare which is based in the US.

For now it can be disabled, but only via about:config settings or user.js. But who knows if the current setting will be the same in the future.

Google are, of course not doing that, not yet anyway, as they're not so stupid.

Disabled by default in OpenBSD's firefox port: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=arti...20190911113856

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It's not relevant to this thread that somebody gives as a reason for not using Firefox that the developers, not being sub-human scum, made a change to help people to be more free? Developers are people and sub-human totalitarian scum are sub-human totalitarian sacum. That doesn't mean the product of the developers is better or wrose due to thgeir dislike of subhuman totalitarian scum.
Perhaps the origibal post belongs in general?

FWIW I'm actually a big fan of this feature: I just changed the default dns-over-https in

Preferences -> Network Settings -> Use DNS over HTTPS -> Custom Provider

and selected one from this list

https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS

I'm also using dnscrypt-proxy pointing it to a DNS over HTTPS provider (and redirected the bind queries to dnscrypt-proxy).

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Interesting thread, we could easily have one "The case for Firefox". I would venture to put myself in that camp, been using it since Netscape days, also enjoy SeaMonkey (glad to see a recent update). I do play with Chromium from time to time to see what they are up to etc... But Firefox still remains my "more trusted" browser. The more Google proves they are evil or at least became so, the more "The case for Firefox" becomes relevant.

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I wonder why Mozilla jumped on this silly fashion trend. It puts questions marks around the whole browser if the Firefox team cannot hold their own ground and do their own thing and have their own integrity. Jumping on stupid fashion trends? Do they even have their own personality anymore or are they just tossed around with the wind? It certainly makes it clear that Mozilla is no fortress standing their own ground.

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