Keeping tabs on Mozilla development, some preliminary plans for Pale Moon (i.e.: what will the future hold?)
Background in the Firefox/Mozilla neck of the woods:
- Australis is planned for Firefox 25, holding off until October. Even with the long process of trying to find all the quirks implementing one "holy grail" theme for every supported operating system, you can still expect more technical issues to pop up when it finally hits the release channel.
- Major back-end implementations will be completed in v23 (mostly for media support) and v24 of Firefox (working out additional kinks).
- Preliminary UI changes in preparation of Australis are made gradually, and should be fairly easy to revert if needed or desired.
- It is unclear whether the add-on bar will be retained past v24. The add-on bar is absolutely essential for Pale Moon as a customization/usage target.
- Choice of code base: Pale Moon 20.x is smooth and stable, and should certainly last until October without major changes.
- New code base Firefox 24 ESR: Going for the ESR build will allow faster and less problematic/risky implementation of security patches because all security patches will be specifically for the code base used.
- Extended life cycle: Because Australis is a big gamble in terms of UI, with a large percentage of people very likely not being happy with the changes, it serves well for Pale Moon to have an extended life cycle on the next major version, to:
- Be able to safely continue to supply a release-grade version that won't fall behind.
- Take a careful approach and be able to look at how well Australis will be received by the general public and add-on developers.
- Be able to focus on continued improvement of existing code and Pale Moon specific features.
- Retention of the current user interface: Retaining the current feature set and user interface will be top priority - if Firefox v22-24 remove functionality, all efforts will be made to revert those changes (unless they are made with good logic and do not impact normal use or configurability/use by Pale Moon users)