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In Feb/March 2017, we opened a usage survey for anyone to fill out, which was a public request to users, past and present alike, to indicate which parts of Pale Moon should have focus, and to decide in part on development direction. This was done in the spirit of "Your Browser, Your Way"™ -- you, the user, should have a say in what your browser will be shaped like!
This page provides an analysis of the results, and provides our (dev) response to some of the comments our survey respondents left.
[...]
About 80% of the respondents use Pale Moon as their primary web browser to surf the web. The other 20% uses either a different browser or multiple (other) browsers to varying degrees. Of course it is fantastic to see so many users using Pale Moon as their main (or only) web browser of note.
Among our users responding to the survey, the main reasons for not using Pale Moon as their primary browser have been:
1. Extension compatibility with Firefox extensions. Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to provide exact compatibility with Firefox extensions because we are not Firefox. Because of our different application code, we are also not able to provide compatibility with WebExtensions at this time, because those use HTML for user interface elements instead of XUL. We are, however, working on providing an as broad as possible support for the three main extension formats in use: XUL, bootstrapped and SDK (in the form of PMkit); the technologies that Mozilla is going to completely abandon in November 2017 with Firefox 57.
2. Website compatibility. As long as websites keep specifically checking for and catering to (specific versions of) only 3 or 4 "mainstream" browsers, you will always have some sites that will not cooperate with using an independent alternative. On the browser side, there is very little we can do to prevent this. As a user, however, you have the power to convince websites to give this attention by contacting webmasters of troublesome sites and making them aware of their restrictions.
3. "Firefox is more secure". There is still a percentage of people that take arbitrary version numbers as a criterion at face value to determine what is, in their opinion, "outdated" or "insecure". Once more here the affirmation that Pale Moon is most definitely as secure, if not more so, than the current mainstream browsers. Our versioning is also independent of the versioning used by Mozilla. Security vulnerabilities that become known in the Mozilla platform code ar evaluated regularly and ported across if applicable.
4. "Chrome is faster". This may be, depending on what you use to measure "speed"; in our experience though, there is no significant difference between any of the modern browsers when it comes to real-world speed. In fact, Pale Moon has regularly shown to perform very well in comparison on lower-end computers. Your Mileage May Vary in this respect.
[...]
Pretty much a unanimous vote here (even among the 20% who don't use Pale Moon as their main browser) that extensions are essential to the browser. Totally expected, and maybe Mozilla can draw a lesson from this.
This also underwrites the need for what we've been working on to restore: as much compatibility with Jetpack-style extensions as possible through PMkit.
http://www.palemoon.org/survey2017/
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @05:48PM (9 children)
We are, however, working on providing an as broad as possible support for the three main extension formats in use: XUL, bootstrapped and SDK (in the form of PMkit); the technologies that Mozilla is going to completely abandon in November 2017 with Firefox 57.
So... you're going to be 'behind' even more and get out of sync even more with one of the major browsers in the world and its capabilities? You'll make it even harder for folks to develop extensions for your product?
2. Website compatibility. As long as websites keep specifically checking for and catering to (specific versions of) only 3 or 4 "mainstream" browsers, you will always have some sites that will not cooperate with using an independent alternative. On the browser side, there is very little we can do to prevent this. As a user, however, you have the power to convince websites to give this attention by contacting webmasters of troublesome sites and making them aware of their restrictions.
How about focusing on extensions and creating a default extension which lets you spoof this, I mean, if this is such a big deal, why not allow spoofing right from the get-go with an officially supported extension for this?
Once more here the affirmation that Pale Moon is most definitely as secure, if not more so, than the current mainstream browsers.
Well yeah, you ain't got no extensions which are one of the major attack vectors and weaknesses when privacy is at stake.
All in all, this reads very much like a "we /could/ do this but we don't want to..."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @06:19PM (1 child)
Doesn't being stable (changing slowly) also assist in having sufficient extensions? That's one of the strategies/goals of PM, isn't it? Chasing after the other brands' changes is against that goal. There is a trade-off in being a non-moving target for extension devs versus keeping up with the Jones' in order to borrow their extensions.
I believe it in the spirit of PM to leverage the advantages of stability. I suspect most PM users are PM users because the other browsers change for the sake of change alone, ticking people off.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2017, @07:23PM
Web browsers are capable of so much, I really would prefer a more stable experience that tends not to break functionality.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Thursday March 09 2017, @07:14PM (1 child)
How about focusing on extensions and creating a default extension which lets you spoof this, I mean, if this is such a big deal, why not allow spoofing right from the get-go with an officially supported extension for this?
Simply spoofing the user-agent (which seems to be what you're suggesting) wouldn't be sufficient, the browser would have to spoof the behavior of other browsers. That's really, really, REALLY not feasible - especially since many sites are uncooperative about working with what they perceive as "minor league" browser developers, so you can't even figure out where the issue is.
And there's already a built-in way to spoof the user agent, in a site specific way, and which users can add to: In Pale Moon's about:config, there's a series of preferences with names starting with general.useragent.override. followed by the name of the site that it's active for. There's some weird things in there - for example, different overrides are used for gaming.youtube.com and the rest of youtube.com.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @01:40AM
the browser would have to spoof the behavior of other browsers.
You seem to be giving web 'developers' a lot of credit there...
(Score: 5, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 09 2017, @07:22PM (3 children)
So... you're going to be 'behind' even more and get out of sync even more with one of the major browsers in the world and its capabilities?
Accurate enough.
You'll make it even harder for folks to develop extensions for your product?
No, in fact they'll be the only guys still supporting the way Mozilla *currently* lets people design addons (more or less). It's Mozilla who's jettisoning their entire addon system and making everyone start over.
How about focusing on extensions and creating a default extension which lets you spoof this, I mean, if this is such a big deal, why not allow spoofing right from the get-go with an officially supported extension for this?
Everybody and their brother already lets you spoof the user agent string. They're talking about features web designers expect a browser identifying itself as Mozilla-compatible to have, which PM doesn't since they forked. The changes are too big and fundamental for an addon to be remotely capable of patching over them.
Well yeah, you ain't got no extensions which are one of the major attack vectors and weaknesses when privacy is at stake.
Yes they do. The vast majority of the existing Firefox addons work, and they even have a page [palemoon.org] listing which ones, and hosting fixed builds of many of the ones that don't.
All in all, this reads very much like a "we /could/ do this but we don't want to..."
Your entire comment is woefully uninformed and inaccurate. Maybe if you had spent a minute or two investigating literally any of the points you were complaining about, that would've helped.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @05:57AM (2 children)
No, in fact they'll be the only guys still supporting the way Mozilla *currently* lets people design addons (more or less). It's Mozilla who's jettisoning their entire addon system and making everyone start over.
If there ever was a case of motivated reasoning, that's it.
Mozilla has 10,000x the number of users as palemoon.
No dev wants to spend the energy to maintain two duplicate source trees.
As soon as they've ported to the new firefox extension API they won't spend another second maintaining a palemoon-compatible version.
You can deny it until you are blue in the face, but unless someone starts paying devs to maintain two forks, they are going to stick to the one that has all the users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @08:51AM
As soon as they've ported to the new firefox extension API they won't spend another second maintaining a palemoon-compatible version.
Several of the Firefox extensions that a lot of the remaining Firefox users can't live without are currently in the category "will never be supported by the new API", including Classic Theme Restorer.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 10 2017, @03:45PM
Mozilla has 10,000x the number of users as palemoon.
Well, they're doing their best to solve that 'problem.' graph [wikipedia.org]
I'm not *expecting* the extension developers to jump ship to Pale Moon, but that doesn't mean I can't *hope* some do. And we'll still have the back catalog of extensions that worked up until the Big Jettison. Apparently there are people who've been tweaking problem ones to keep them working, so presumably they'll keep doing that for some length of time, anyway.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 10 2017, @12:54PM
Firefox being about to drop existing extensions is the main reason I'm currently looking into Pale Moon. And the fact that it Currently has so few little working extensions (I don't mind if they are native Pale Moon, ported Firefox or native Firefox extensions, as long as they work on the current browser) is the main reason why I'm not converted yet. Being compatible with the existing extension formats is the fastest way to get many of the essential and not so essential extensions quickly.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.