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.)