7 ms·
Pale Moon Browser Continues Support and Development of XUL
- bepvte 8y agoPale moon forums is full of conspiracy theories on how Mozilla has been taken over by "SJWS." That, along with the horrible temper of the author, really discourages me from using or trusting it.
- sandov 8y agoThe SJW movement has definitely permeated Mozilla, "taken over" might be an exaggeration though.
- chx 8y agoLet's draw a line in the sand -- it was, I feel, drawn in the sand by the blood of 49 innocents. And let's never again stand for people utter such things ever again without being called out. As someone who had a part in building and advocating for the Internet (I worked as a columnist in the nineties and a lead software architect for two social news websites 2006-2010) just to see it being turned into a breeding ground of hate, I need to do something and this is what I will do. So, what do you even call an SJW movement?
- sanxiyn 8y agoSJW movement is movement such as trying to fire Brendan Eich over political donation.
- chx 8y agoCall a spade a spade as I said above, I am done with people twisting words to cover hate, no more. "Over political donation"? Brendan Eich paid money to oppose the marriage of consenting adults just because they happen to be of the same gender. Several people didn't want to work with him after doing so. It's very hard to argue such a position would agree with the Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-CA/about/manifesto/ .
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ougij 8y agoWhat the fuck has the New Zealand shooting to do with SJWs in Mozilla?
- sandov 8y agoI'm sorry but I didn't quite understand the first paragraph of your comment. English is not my native language. What I call the SJW movement is people who see the world as a battle between races, genders, sexual orientations instead of seeing every individual as a separate entity with their own virtues and weaknesses. They often discriminate against people who belong to "privileged groups" and favor "marginalized" people in some sort of revenge for unjust things that happened in the past against these marginalized groups (and maybe for some unjust things that may still happen), and generally support positive discrimination, and even state interference in order to reach some sort of equality between these different groups of people assuming that if those things hadn't happened in the first place every group would behave the same way.
- bepvte 8y agoThis is how you define the SJW movement, while I just consider it a group of people who want to make it socially unacceptable to call people like me slurs. Maybe if we stop grouping people in these broad and vague ways, like for example some particularly person labelling you a 'nazi', or 'racist' or beliefs no where near what that label entails, because you happen to have an opinion shared with someone who is actually a nazi. (This sentence was hard to write and maybe even harder for people to read, so I just want to make clear that I am not calling you or your beliefs 'nazi' or 'racist')
- bepvte 8y agoLooks like I didnt finish the sentence either :(. I meant to say that getting rid of these dumb and broad labels might lead to some progress and compromise and understand.
- bepvte 8y agoI think its a movement that encompasses everyone who believes in respecting everyone despite their identity, and is led specifically by those who publically make embarrassing mistakes or get angry in a way that is easy to villainize or make fun of.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't use HN for fiery ideological rhetoric, regardless of which views you prefer. It isn't what this site is for, and it burns it up for what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- protomyth 8y agoBSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems. Anyone got the story on this one?
- EamonnMR 8y agohttps://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86 https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
- Ashymad 8y agoYeah, but rather than "resistance from BSD community" I would call it "Pale Moon developers being huge d* * *s" https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86 https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
- berti 8y agoWow, those guys sure know how to not make friends. Last I checked choice of bundled or system libraries is normally reserved for distro packagers, and one would really hope the system libs win out wherever possible!
- reaperducer 8y agoWow, that got out of hand quickly. Like in a matter of minutes. At first I was thinking, "Oh, neat. A browser I know nothing about. Maybe I'll give it a try." After reading how multiple Pale Moon people acted in that thread, I'll pass. I've worked with people like that in the past, and I don't want to support them in any way, or validate their work.
- rezonant 8y agoAs far as I can tell, they don't even have a trademark on Pale Moon (EDIT): Ah shucks, USPTO TESS links don't work correctly. Anyway just search for "Pale Moon", I couldn't find anything relevant. http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/
- 8y ago
- bubblethink 8y ago>*BSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems. What a load of crap. Some guy in his free time tried to port palemoon to one of the bsds (i think it was open), and they got all up in arms about use of their name before the guy even published anything. He was hacking in his own github repo, and these clowns created a scene there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- haolez 8y agoI've just read the thread and I agree with the Pale Moon devs. The redistribution conditions were clear and the build system easily allows you to disable the official branding. The Pale Moon devs weren't super polite about it, but they were objective and clear in their statements.
- naniwaduni 8y agoThey were also, apparently, correct! The mozconfig was indeed revised to remove the offending lines after the issue was raised! (by nuking the port work entirely)
- close04 8y agoBeing correct definitely didn't justify the crappy attitude. The end result is most devs stay away from the person and the project.
- naniwaduni 8y agoA bit of a self-fulfilling prediction, but mission accomplished, right?
- rhblake 8y agoIt was a work-in-progress tree and they weren't redistributing any binaries/sources from there. The Pale Moon devs were both wrong and remarkably hostile.
- jchw 8y agoI still use Firefox rather than Pale Moon, despite Mozilla's recent slip ups. One of the main reasons for that is that Firefox of today is surely a lot faster and more secure than Firefox of the past, even if it's not perfect. Innovations like WebRenderer and Quantum were part of the reason for the move toward WebExtensions, no doubt. And the move toward WebExtensions definitely did reduce some control for extension authors, but for it we trade more stability and security. I'm not sure if XUL and XPCOM really makes sense the way that it did when it emerged sometime in the history of Firefox (or Mozilla or Netscape - I'm not sure.) If I were to use a Firefox fork, I think the most I would ask is one that is more defensive and less full of services I don't care about. I don't trust studies or experiments anymore, and I don't care about Pocket.
- duskwuff 8y agoAnd pledging to continue supporting NPAPI definitely doesn't make sense. NPAPI is dead. There are no longer any mainstream browsers which support it; as such, upstream development of NPAPI plugins has largely ceased. NPAPI plugins present a significant attack surface, especially ones which interpret code like Flash and Silverlight, so continuing to support them presents a significant risk to users.
- andrepd 8y agoThat's true, but it's just a shame for the millions of pieces of content out there in flash that risk becoming lost.
- duskwuff 8y agoThat may be true, but it needs to be dealt with in some way that won't expose an outdated and insecure plugin to potentially malicious content. (Especially since plugins aren't even sandboxed in these browser forks.) If there's really interest in preserving old Flash content, then perhaps people need to work into forward-looking ways of preserving that content, like a JS-based viewer.
- 8y ago
- sandov 8y agoThe same browser that blocked an extension they didn't like. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504 on HN(2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15112524
- superkuh 8y agoOh no! An about:config option has to be toggled from 2 to 3! Getting Pale Moon set up to be user friendly is much easier than all the crap you have to do with Firefox.
- sandov 8y agoWhat things about Firefox are not user friendly? I'm genuinely asking, I'm not defending Firefox. The only one I know of is that you have to go to about:config to disable Javascript.
- duskwuff 8y ago> The only one I know of is that you have to go to about:config to disable Javascript. And I frankly don't see any problem with that. The modern Web requires Javascript. Most major web sites will fail to work properly without it, often in confusing ways. (For example, Youtube will just display as a bunch of gray boxes.) Hiding a setting whose effect, for most users, is effectively to "break" the browser, is entirely appropriate.
- snazz 8y agoPeople who are genuinely serious about blocking JavaScript (like me, and I’m sure many others in the HN crowd) are happy to install NoScript, especially since it gives you much more fine-grained control than simply on/off. I agree that hiding it behind an about:config switch is perfectly fine, considering that there is rarely a legitimate reason to use the setting.
- Nicksil 8y ago
- oifdf 8y agoThe idea of Pale Moon sounds good, it's a shame (most of) the community and the developers are drooling retards.
- levlaz 8y agoPlease don’t use that word.
- throes_death 8y agoSlightly OT, but I think it's time to move on from using "retard" as a derogatory term, in the same way we've all moved on from "gay" and "spastic". It's just offensive.
- jccalhoun 8y agoBest of luck to them but it is an uphill battle. The number of addons that are still updated for the pre-webextension system is really small. The last time I tried to use Pale Moon for an old extension I found that it wasn't worth it because so many other extensions were either out of date or just unavailable. I keep Waterfox around for the rare times I need to use an old extension since it can also use current ones as well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Multicomp 8y agoWaterfox - it's like Pale Moon but started as a 64 bit version of Firefox. They can pry my NPAPI plugins out of my bare hands.
- berbec 8y agoNo they won't pry them away from you; it's a great attack vector. If Homestarrunner ever let's his domain lapse, it'll be a malware goldmine.
- syntheticcdo 8y agoOut of curiosity - what NPAPI plugins are you using?
- antisthenes 8y agoI can't speak for the OP, but personally - DownThemAll, Classic Theme Restorer, Session Manager among others. These 3 are the main reason I still have a semi-legacy browser (Waterfox)
- sebazzz 8y agoAren't those XPCOM / XUL extensions? NPAPI is only for purposes of Silverlight and Flash AFAIK.
- pmoriarty 8y agoI used to use Pale Moon because Pentadactyl still worked on it. But then it broke even in Pentadactyl, and I moved back to Firefox with Trydactyl (which is nowhere near as good as Pentadactyl, but it's better than nothing). I've also tried qutebrowser, which is nice, but it's missing uMatrix/NoScript, RequestPolicy, and uBlock Origin-like extensions. So I'm stuck with Firefox for now.
- WallWextra 8y agoIt wouldn't be worth dealing with these people even if they were developing a good technology, but XUL???
- WalterGR 8y agoDo you think they’re doing it because they love XUL, or because of the number of extensions that require XUL and no longer work in Firefox?
- jcranmer 8y agoHmm, funnily enough, despite saying they're not going to support DRM... they seem to be doing exactly that: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/962 https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/962.