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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 13 2016, @07:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing dept.

Mozilla has sent mixed signals about the future of the Firefox Web browser:

The head of Mozilla's Firefox browser is looking to the future. And, for the moment at least, it seems to lie in rival Chrome. Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser.

"Let's jump right in and say yes, the rumors are true, we're working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox," Mayo wrote in a blog post. "The premise for these experiments couldn't be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us – both on PCs and mobile devices – has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0, and we're long overdue for some fresh approaches."

The biggest surprise, however, was that the project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology – Gecko – but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.

However, Mayo updated his post to say that "I should have been clearer that Project Tofino is wholly focused on UX explorations and not the technology platform. We are working with the Platform team on technology platform futures too, and we're excited about the Gecko and Servo-based futures being discussed!" Mozilla's CTO also reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Gecko rendering engine:

Just two days after Mayo broke ranks, Mozilla's CTO jumped up and announced another new project – this one called Positron (geddit?) – which will take the Electron API and "wrap it around Gecko." Or, in other words, make it possible to take Mayo's new, better browser and pull it off Chromium and back into the safe hands of Gecko. And so the status quo seeks to reassert itself.

Also at CNET.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:01AM (#331064)

    I think he means http://www.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:35AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:35AM (#331074) Homepage Journal

    Palemoon, FTW!

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @01:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @01:16PM (#331128)

    And finally a repository for LinuxMint/Ubuntu to use:
    deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/stevenpusser/xUbuntu_14.04/ [opensuse.org]

    (at https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Astevenpusser&package=palemoon [opensuse.org]
    linked from https://www.palemoon.org/contributed-builds.shtml [palemoon.org] "Pale Moon repositories for Debian and Ubuntu by Steve Pusser")

    Any idea why they didn't just put it at a normal PPA?

    • (Score: 1) by WillR on Wednesday April 13 2016, @02:10PM

      by WillR (2012) on Wednesday April 13 2016, @02:10PM (#331156)
      "...for Debian and Ubuntu..."
      Debian doesn't speak PPA
    • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday April 14 2016, @04:57AM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Thursday April 14 2016, @04:57AM (#331479) Journal

      Note that the second link you're pointing to is actually an OpenSUSE user repository, so users of that distro are covered as well.

      For the rest of the Linux kingdom, according to linux.palemoon.org [palemoon.org]:

      Installation, uninstallation and upgrades are normally managed with the Pale Moon for Linux installer [palemoon.org]. However, you can also download Pale Moon for Linux as a bzipped tarball [palemoon.org] that can be extracted and run from anywhere. There is also a special build [palemoon.org] available that is specifically optimized to run on Intel Atom processors.

      Additionally, Pale Moon is included in and can be installed directly from the default repositories of the following distros:
              Manjaro (both the standard build and Atom builds)
              PCLinuxOS
              Puppy Linux "Tahrpup"
              MEPIS/MX-15
              Arch User Repository (AUR) (both standard and Atom builds)
              Gentoo Overlays
              Slackbuilds

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @10:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @10:56PM (#331333)

    Palemoon is not a suitable browser for anyone, because it is proprietary software.

    From their license[1]:

    No rights are given to copy, modify or create derivative works of this software.

    That means that Debian/Ubuntu couldn't even put Palemoon in their proprietary sections, because the license prohibits copying.

    [1] http://www.palemoon.org/freeware-license.shtml [palemoon.org]

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2016, @01:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2016, @01:20AM (#331396)

      as you can see there, that doesn't apply to the web browser (which is the part we are interested in...),
      "note that this license does not apply to the Pale Moon browser, but to other specific (helper) applications released by Moonchild Productions. For licensing of the browser, please see the MPL (for the source) and redistribution license (for binary (re)distribution)"
      MPL is the same open source that firefox use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License [wikipedia.org]

      Looks like the special freeware license thing is for an firefox extension "Pale Moon Commander", a "Pale Moon profile migration tool" and a "Flash Protected Mode tool" just small tools for changing settings... nothing you or I would use :-)