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I always found the denials of this to be bizarre:
Given the intrusive nature of government surveillance, Mozilla—with its dedication to privacy and independence from corporate and government interests—should be more vital than ever. But in the age of social media and mobile devices, it has struggled to maintain relevance and failed to transition to a world where the desktop browser is fading in importance. Mozilla hasn't even dented the mobile market with mobile versions of its browser or its Firefox OS smartphone operating system. And the organization has done little to counteract Facebook's expanding influence. What's more, its foothold on the desktop continues to slip as Google Chrome grows in popularity.
[...] The good news is Mozilla has found some partnerships to supplement its search revenue. For example, the company quietly integrated the "read-it-later" service Pocket into Firefox along with a video conferencing feature powered by European telco Telefonica earlier this year. Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn't pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies.
takyon: Mozilla retires Firefox's sponsored tiles, hunts for new revenue streams
Previously: Mozilla Integrates Proprietary Pocket Plugin
Warning - Firefox Has You in the Pocket
(Score: 3, Informative) by Celestial on Tuesday December 08 2015, @12:47AM
I prefer to use a browser that isn't by a one-man band, thanks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @12:56AM
Duopolies are not good for competition. I prefer open standards that can be freely implemented by any parties. Similarly, standards-compliant web servers and web sites that can be viewed correctly in any browser, whether made by a big company or a small team of enthusiasts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @01:42AM
People on that green site said the same thing about MATE.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @04:19AM
There're multiple people maintaining the browser at this point.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kunasou on Tuesday December 08 2015, @08:01AM
Exactly, they even have someone to care about the linux edition of Palemoon. I've been using it for two years with any major issue, sometimes it crashes but same happens to Firefox though.
They have their own fork of HTTPS Everywhere, AdBlock Plus (Latitude) and other extensions.
Also, the only Google service I use is Youtube and also works fine on it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @11:30AM
Cool story bro.
What happens when Mozilla gets rid of XUL and Gecko? These guys won't be able to provide security updates. As it is, they rarely release security patches and that's WITH someone else maintaining a majority of the code for them.
Palemoon is the Trinity Desktop of the browser world. Looks great when there isn't much divergence in the codebase, but two years from now is when we'll really see how serious this project is (hint: Trinity Desktop introduced all sorts of bugs, regressions, and exploits into their fork of KDE once the main project diverged too much for them to leech from).
(Score: 2) by Kunasou on Tuesday December 08 2015, @12:00PM
I will use it while it lasts and I've been a happy user of Firefox (since v1) until they did the Australis GUI switch. Since I needed to add several addons to bring the old GUI back that was an issue for me. I tried to go back several times but they added more useless stuff like Firefox Hello or Pocket.
Mozilla will remove the support for NPAPI (and I still need flash) and Complete Themes soon and that's another piece of code that Moonchild will have to maintain.
And also, there's the Servo problem in the near future: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap [github.com] , and the Rust coding problem.
As far as I know, the Pale Moon project also forked Gecko and renamed it to Goanna: https://www.palemoon.org/WIP/ [palemoon.org]
As for security patches they release only a few every version: https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml [palemoon.org]
I used Opera Presto for years (really old computer) after they ended their Linux support and I survived, but after a while it was buggy as hell. So, after they release version 26 with Goanna we'll see if they can do a good work or it will end like Trinity Desktop.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:10PM
Have you even read their release notes page [palemoon.org]? No? Didn't think so, otherwise you'd know your argument is BS. Just because they're not changing major version numbers at the insane pace that Google Chrome started (and Mozilla just followed suit on) doesn't mean they're not handling security issues in a timely fashion.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:20PM
> Just because they're not changing major version numbers at the insane pace that Google Chrome started
By saying that you prove you didn't understand GP's point. Increasingly divergent code-bases have nothing to do with version numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:45PM
Yep, about what I expected.
Look at that fucking mess. CVE-2015-7199 was identified on 16 September [mitre.org]. It was fixed in the upstream Mozilla browser on 3 November [mozilla.org].
OMG, look, here comes PaleMoon, they released a fix exactly two weeks later [palemoon.org]! Gee, I wonder where that came from?
Let us know when the PaleMoon developers write a bugfix before the Mozilla guys do. Right now, they're just maintaining a fork, and backporting fixes from upstream. That upstream is about to change rendering engines, plugin support, and user interface language. Backporting someone else's bugfixes is trivial compared to the load of work that PaleMoon will have to do once they are maintaining their own rendering engine, keeping it standards compliant, and working out the bugs across multiple platforms.
Palemoon -- right now, they're no different than any of the kids on Distrowatch who change the default Window Manager and fonts on Ubuntu or Fedora and then release it as a new "distribution."
(Score: 2) by Kunasou on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:23PM
Also https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-7189 [mitre.org] was found on 16 September and fixed on 3 November.
In release notes (25.8.0) they show this:
Fixed a potentially vulnerable crash from a spinning event loop during resize painting. DiD
Fixed several Javascript-based memory safety hazards. DiD
Maybe are own Palemoon fixes or Mozilla ones, since they don't have CVE or bugzilla link.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:06PM
I prefer to use a browser that isn't by a one-man band, thanks.
misandrist! ;)