Palemoon and TOR.

[Moonraker]

Not sure if i'm in the right section here and more an enquiry than anything else.I notice that TOR uses firefox as it's root browser program and i was wondering if moonchild had in the past been approached by the tor project to in fact use palemoon instead.
I regard palemoon as a better browser than firefox is at the moment and is also considerably more privacy focused and going on that basis it would be safe to assume that palemoon would be a better choice for the tor developers.

So in essence has moonchild been approached or interested in becoming part of tor.It would be an interesting developement for sure.
Thanks.

[Moonchild]

So in essence has moonchild been approached

Nobody has approached me.

or interested in becoming part of tor

I'm not interested in hacking things into UXP or Pale Moon that will cripple the already-precarious balance one has to keep for web technology vs. usability vs. privacy, to cater to TOR usage like Mozilla is, if that's what you mean with "becoming part of TOR".
I also have little good to say about TOR and its general usership in general. It was an interesting idea, but "intended goal" users are a vast minority. ~99% of the traffic on there is for illegal and abusive use.

I regard palemoon as a better browser than firefox is at the moment and is also considerably more privacy focused

Thank you. What you might not realize is that it achieves that by not compromising on its goals and balance like you're suggesting

[affinity]

~99% of the traffic on there is for illegal and abusive use.

That is absolutely false, stop spreading FUD, it isn't necessary -- we already know what you think, let's just beg to differ on the facts or we'll be going around in more circles because you can only see things from your own POV.

[affinity]

In many respects, TBB is essentially Firefox ESR with some about:config changes and a small number of web extensions.

Both TBB and Firefox benefit from this relationship, there is little reason why the same couldn't be done with PM if there was good will towards the idea; but it doesn't matter, it isn't necessary.

Again, if you want more privacy and security, then use TBB and better still within the Tails live USB boot environment -- but then you have the /issues/ of systemd which many like to debate.

I use PM with Privoxy and socks5t proxy via tor; it mostly works well, except for when sites deliberately and/or ignorantly exclude their visitors when coming from the Tor network. Again, this is helped and the problem is lessened with just a user agent adjustment.

https://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

The UA that I use is from TBB:
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0"

With the UA change, many sites that would have required captcha will work without any other frustrations.
NB: changing the UA is something that I have to do whenever I start PM as I'm starting a new session each time.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

That is absolutely false, stop spreading FUD, it isn't necessary

You're the one spreading FUD, and refuting known facts is also unnecessary.
Let me quote Lewman, for a point of reference.

I think 95 percent of what we see on the onion sites and other dark net sites is just criminal activity. It varies in severity from copyright piracy to drug markets to horrendous trafficking of humans and exploitation of women and children.

https://www.cyberscoop.com/tor-dark-web ... ecuredrop/

Aside from criminal activity in the above respect, more of it is being attributed to plain destructive behavior because people, when they find themselves "anonymous" will simply cause shit because they can.

The small percentage that is left is legitimate and intended use. So, please stop fighting me on this. It's not opinion, it's fact. Do some research.
Now, please do not drift off-topic again here and keep that discussion limited to the off-topic board and focus this on the actual request.

TBB is essentially Firefox ESR with some about:config changes and a small number of web extensions.

What you're missing here is that Firefox has made core changes specifically to cater to TOR browser use. So the effective need is "flipping a few switches" because Mozilla has made these core changes in their cooperation with TOR and have been adopting many TOR bug reports and "enhancement" requests for TOR use into mozilla-central. And I'm saying we have no interest in making these core changes because of their impact on the browser's feature balance.

A small subset of these changes labeled with whiteboard [tor] can be found here