9 ms·

Idea for a new browser product

43 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

taspeotis 11y ago
The title of this submission has been changed now, but it was originally "Pale Moon may drop Firefox codebase and write a new browser from scratch". Which does not seem to match the post: > the idea has come up to make a new browser product, re-forking from a later point in the Mozilla source tree
- galistoca 11y ago
  The current title doesn't seem to match the post that much better either. Clicked to see what awesome new idea about a next generation browser I will encounter. Was not quite what they were talking about.
  - ygjb 11y ago
    See my other comment in the thread. Palemoon lacks the resources to drive a modern browser fork. Rather than trying to maintain the current fork they have, the proposal is to either rebase, or create a new fork (or some other definition of "re-fork" that I am not able to parse). The irony in this is that the reason they need to do this is because they were deeply unhappy with the changes Mozilla was making to correct technical debt due to the age of the codebase. Those changes allowed the features to be implemented that the Palemoon devs are lamenting in the post. I would also like to take this moment to bang the security drum and remind everyone that Palemoon has been developing new browser features for 6 years, while taking up some, but not all, Mozilla security fixes, without a security team of their own. Read into that as you will, but also consider how successful people have been in forking Chromium (or just grab a bowl of popcorn and read through https://twitter.com/taviso https://twitter.com/taviso if you don't know the history).
vonklaus 11y ago
I have never heard of palemoon before but I agree with these points but not the conclusion. Probably to some extent that prescription makes sense however it can never be successful. Search can never be decoupled from the browser. It just can't. I keep twitter spamming Brendan Eich with this for the Brave project. Guy is way smarter than me. Created the language I use sloppily. Has more credibility, team, ect than I ever will. However, I still think I am correct. No one gives that much of a fuck (within reason) what UI you wrap around Google. To palemoon. Please build a search engine. I have only tracked a few teams working on this. Probably could get a 1 year headstart before this becomes "hot".
- PhilipA 11y ago
  More competition in the search engine market benefit us all. I don't like the power that Google posses over Mom & Pop stores. Don't like it, they can just block it and they can just close.
ygjb 11y ago
Wow. - Mozilla made architectural changes to address limitations in Firefox that inhibited the pace of improvements - We didn't like the changes Mozilla was implementing - We forked Firefox to revert the changes - We spent years insulting Mozilla engineers for the changes they were making - We realized that we can't implement changes because of architectural limitations - We are going to re-fork Firefox from a later version - We still think the Mozilla engineers don't know what they are doing - This is a totally new browser product and a fork of Goanna, not Gecko! I am a huge Mozilla fan-boy, and an ex-employee, but come on, this is just off the wall silly.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Any semblance with the current Bitcoin situation is merely a coincidence, I'm sure
- digi_owl 11y ago
  CADT squared?
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Mozilla engineers do not know what they are doing. If they did they would not be planning on removing all existing extension, they would not have listened to the designers and implemented australis, they would not be trying to make a chrome clone.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    I wouldn't have phrased it that way. I have removed my fair share of malware from other peoples machines though and I have yet to observe that Firefox extensions has been the attack vector a single time. For that reason I do find it puzzling that they want to irrevocably destroy their single biggest advantage (in my and many other vocal supporters eyes): real, USEFUL extensions. (Even Lastpass has to add an extra binary to my OS to fully work under Chrome IIRC.) Also while I should mostly not say much about design I do find it odd that so many projects attempt to look Mac OSX and I think it is the same frustration some people have with Firefox starting to look like Chrome: not everything the big boys do is necessarily better.
neals 11y ago
This is why I like open-source and the community we are creating with it. If you don't like something or if you don't agree, start making changes right away. Don't like what it has become? Change it again. Between all the flaming going back and forth, we still respect each other and work on making the world a better place, one line of code at time.
wodenokoto 11y ago
Can someone provide a bit of context? Reading the post I'm confused if this is by a mozilla engineer and what the product is, or what Gonna is.
- hga 11y ago
  Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. Goanna is their current and quite new rendering engine: http://betanews.com/2016/01/26/pale-moon-adopts-new-goanna-browser-engine-fine-tunes-interface/ http://betanews.com/2016/01/26/pale-moon-adopts-new-goanna-b...
  - dkuntz2 11y ago
    I mean, it sounds like it's basically just a fork of an old version of Gecko/SpiderMonkey, because it looks like it definitely doesn't have the same latest standards support that current versions of Firefox have (based on the Pale Moon website). Which, as an aside, I think is hilarious, because they claim standards compliance as one of their biggest features.
jokoon 11y ago
I don't really know what kind of browser they want to make, but if I would make one, I'd add some p2p networking on it, like IPFS or a minimalist databse that runs on a DHT. The end goal would be to have your data hosted and automatically spread on clients, instead of servers. Currently I can't really name a p2p platform which has some usable interface, where you can share content like the web allows it. There is zeronet, but I'm still waiting for a browser all in one package to make it usable. p2p is the future... (and don't tell me about websockets, they're not true p2p)
dkuntz2 11y ago
What even is the purpose of the Pale Moon browser? Their entire website can't give me any concrete reasons why someone would rather use this over Firefox.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  We hoped they would manage to run a fork of the browser we used to love and advocate for: the free and open and technically superior Firefox with real extensions like scrapbook (userfriendly recursive web page/site scraper), tree style tabs (if you do research on the web and haven't given it a try do it now) etc etc. Others were unhappy about the new Firefox skinning that was backwards incompatible (I think).
- superkuh 11y ago
  As a user I can can explain. I was unhappy with Mozilla implementing a walled garden for their extensions. I am not an extension dev but it's a rare month where I don't pop open an xpi and edit something to my personal preferences. In a walled garden I can't do that. They are taking control of the browser away from me. Their choice to implement the W3C's disasterous digital rights managment technology in the form of EME was too much. At the very minimum including this DRM in the browser opens up any devs or researchers trying to port to other platforms/OS to legal liability and attack. Additionally Mozilla's choice to bake in bloatware like Pocket is very unpleasant. Basically every time I do a fresh install of Firefox I have to go through a long series of config to de-bullshit it (ref: https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5 https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5). Palemoon is more Firefox than Firefox these days.
CelticSuperhero 11y ago
So, they have issues already with implementing Promises and handle the older less complicated technology wise seen engine 24 - and they are seriously thinking about forking a much later code base and try to keep their old ui, remove Australis, DRM and so on? Sounds totally unrealistic. This product will be dead on arrival.
anonbanker 11y ago
If anyone remembers the Netscape 6/7 days, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a breath of freh air from the bloated mess that Seamonkey had become. All that was needed was for Blake Ross to write a new, lighter, UI for the thing. Someone should just make a UI for servo, and release it for people. It's probably as good as Gecko was when it was first shipped in Netscape's products, considering the rapid development.

43 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

The title of this submission has been changed now, but it was originally "Pale Moon may drop Firefox codebase and write a new browser from scratch". Which does not seem to match the post: > the idea has come up to make a new browser product, re-forking from a later point in the Mozilla source tree

galistoca 11y ago
The current title doesn't seem to match the post that much better either. Clicked to see what awesome new idea about a next generation browser I will encounter. Was not quite what they were talking about.
- ygjb 11y ago
  See my other comment in the thread. Palemoon lacks the resources to drive a modern browser fork. Rather than trying to maintain the current fork they have, the proposal is to either rebase, or create a new fork (or some other definition of "re-fork" that I am not able to parse). The irony in this is that the reason they need to do this is because they were deeply unhappy with the changes Mozilla was making to correct technical debt due to the age of the codebase. Those changes allowed the features to be implemented that the Palemoon devs are lamenting in the post. I would also like to take this moment to bang the security drum and remind everyone that Palemoon has been developing new browser features for 6 years, while taking up some, but not all, Mozilla security fixes, without a security team of their own. Read into that as you will, but also consider how successful people have been in forking Chromium (or just grab a bowl of popcorn and read through https://twitter.com/taviso https://twitter.com/taviso if you don't know the history).

vonklaus 11y ago

I have never heard of palemoon before but I agree with these points but not the conclusion. Probably to some extent that prescription makes sense however it can never be successful. Search can never be decoupled from the browser. It just can't. I keep twitter spamming Brendan Eich with this for the Brave project. Guy is way smarter than me. Created the language I use sloppily. Has more credibility, team, ect than I ever will. However, I still think I am correct. No one gives that much of a fuck (within reason) what UI you wrap around Google. To palemoon. Please build a search engine. I have only tracked a few teams working on this. Probably could get a 1 year headstart before this becomes "hot".

PhilipA 11y ago
More competition in the search engine market benefit us all. I don't like the power that Google posses over Mom & Pop stores. Don't like it, they can just block it and they can just close.

ygjb 11y ago

Wow. - Mozilla made architectural changes to address limitations in Firefox that inhibited the pace of improvements - We didn't like the changes Mozilla was implementing - We forked Firefox to revert the changes - We spent years insulting Mozilla engineers for the changes they were making - We realized that we can't implement changes because of architectural limitations - We are going to re-fork Firefox from a later version - We still think the Mozilla engineers don't know what they are doing - This is a totally new browser product and a fork of Goanna, not Gecko! I am a huge Mozilla fan-boy, and an ex-employee, but come on, this is just off the wall silly.

raverbashing 11y ago
Any semblance with the current Bitcoin situation is merely a coincidence, I'm sure
digi_owl 11y ago
CADT squared?
J_Darnley 11y ago
Mozilla engineers do not know what they are doing. If they did they would not be planning on removing all existing extension, they would not have listened to the designers and implemented australis, they would not be trying to make a chrome clone.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  I wouldn't have phrased it that way. I have removed my fair share of malware from other peoples machines though and I have yet to observe that Firefox extensions has been the attack vector a single time. For that reason I do find it puzzling that they want to irrevocably destroy their single biggest advantage (in my and many other vocal supporters eyes): real, USEFUL extensions. (Even Lastpass has to add an extra binary to my OS to fully work under Chrome IIRC.) Also while I should mostly not say much about design I do find it odd that so many projects attempt to look Mac OSX and I think it is the same frustration some people have with Firefox starting to look like Chrome: not everything the big boys do is necessarily better.

neals 11y ago

This is why I like open-source and the community we are creating with it. If you don't like something or if you don't agree, start making changes right away. Don't like what it has become? Change it again. Between all the flaming going back and forth, we still respect each other and work on making the world a better place, one line of code at time.

wodenokoto 11y ago

Can someone provide a bit of context? Reading the post I'm confused if this is by a mozilla engineer and what the product is, or what Gonna is.

hga 11y ago
Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. Goanna is their current and quite new rendering engine: http://betanews.com/2016/01/26/pale-moon-adopts-new-goanna-browser-engine-fine-tunes-interface/ http://betanews.com/2016/01/26/pale-moon-adopts-new-goanna-b...
- dkuntz2 11y ago
  I mean, it sounds like it's basically just a fork of an old version of Gecko/SpiderMonkey, because it looks like it definitely doesn't have the same latest standards support that current versions of Firefox have (based on the Pale Moon website). Which, as an aside, I think is hilarious, because they claim standards compliance as one of their biggest features.

jokoon 11y ago

I don't really know what kind of browser they want to make, but if I would make one, I'd add some p2p networking on it, like IPFS or a minimalist databse that runs on a DHT. The end goal would be to have your data hosted and automatically spread on clients, instead of servers. Currently I can't really name a p2p platform which has some usable interface, where you can share content like the web allows it. There is zeronet, but I'm still waiting for a browser all in one package to make it usable. p2p is the future... (and don't tell me about websockets, they're not true p2p)

dkuntz2 11y ago

What even is the purpose of the Pale Moon browser? Their entire website can't give me any concrete reasons why someone would rather use this over Firefox.

reitanqild 11y ago
We hoped they would manage to run a fork of the browser we used to love and advocate for: the free and open and technically superior Firefox with real extensions like scrapbook (userfriendly recursive web page/site scraper), tree style tabs (if you do research on the web and haven't given it a try do it now) etc etc. Others were unhappy about the new Firefox skinning that was backwards incompatible (I think).
superkuh 11y ago
As a user I can can explain. I was unhappy with Mozilla implementing a walled garden for their extensions. I am not an extension dev but it's a rare month where I don't pop open an xpi and edit something to my personal preferences. In a walled garden I can't do that. They are taking control of the browser away from me. Their choice to implement the W3C's disasterous digital rights managment technology in the form of EME was too much. At the very minimum including this DRM in the browser opens up any devs or researchers trying to port to other platforms/OS to legal liability and attack. Additionally Mozilla's choice to bake in bloatware like Pocket is very unpleasant. Basically every time I do a fresh install of Firefox I have to go through a long series of config to de-bullshit it (ref: https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5 https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5). Palemoon is more Firefox than Firefox these days.

CelticSuperhero 11y ago

So, they have issues already with implementing Promises and handle the older less complicated technology wise seen engine 24 - and they are seriously thinking about forking a much later code base and try to keep their old ui, remove Australis, DRM and so on? Sounds totally unrealistic. This product will be dead on arrival.

anonbanker 11y ago

If anyone remembers the Netscape 6/7 days, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a breath of freh air from the bloated mess that Seamonkey had become. All that was needed was for Blake Ross to write a new, lighter, UI for the thing. Someone should just make a UI for servo, and release it for people. It's probably as good as Gecko was when it was first shipped in Netscape's products, considering the rapid development.