Start portal discussion thread

[Moonchild]

Since the change of the start page is likely to spark some discussion, you are welcome to discuss anything about it in this thread!

[KNTRO]

Hi there,

This topic is to discuss a little about the Pale Moon start page change announcement.

First of all, congrats on this. I think it's a positive change, at least its concept.

Now, I have to tell that the start.me add-on isn't compatible with Pale Moon 25.2. This is the first thing you should manage with the start.me people. Then, I will contact start.me staff and ask if I can localize its website to es-AR, because it's poorly customizable and lacks of local content for the Southern Cone. So, I'm not sure if those locale services must be managed via the Pale Moon team or the start.me team.

If there's something useful I can do to help integrating start.me into Pale Moon, just let me know.

Best!

[michieldewit]

Hi KNTRO,

Thanks for the congratulations on behalf of start.me. We are very excited about becoming the new start page for Pale Moon.

About the three things you mentioned, the add-on, customization and support for Argentinian locale: I am more then happy to work with you on those.

Can you tell me a little more about the problems you experience with the add-on? Our current add-on is developed for Firefox. In what ways would it have to be adjusted to become compatible with Pale Moon (if at all possible)? Would you be able to assist on that?

Customization is one of the spear points of our development efforts. Still, we believe there already is a lot of customization possible with start.me. What kind of options are you missing, specifically?

Our current locale set spans 14 locales. Adding an Argentinian locale is quite possible, but we would have to rely on you (and others) volunteering. We use a web based translation system (WebTranslateIt) that we can invite you to. Would you be interested in working with us on localization? We already have quite some translations to Spanish (although it's hard for us to assess its quality): only missing phrases and phrases that differ from the European Spanish would have to be localized.

Michiel de Wit
Lead Developer at start.me
michiel@start.me

[x-15a2]

Can you tell me a little more about the problems you experience with the add-on? Our current add-on is developed for Firefox. In what ways would it have to be adjusted to become compatible with Pale Moon (if at all possible)? Would you be able to assist on that?

PM is only compatible with start.me extension 1.0 or older, otherwise they get the message:


Generally, these are extremely easy to fix, often with no more than simple changes to the .xpi . You can read about it more on this thread: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5932 or contact Tobin, as he has headed up the extension compatibility effort.

Thanks!

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Moonchild, I bet will be able to get them to do it because he is working on the deal with them.

[Moonchild]

Yeah I'll work with them on getting the extension working on Pale Moon.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Just my two euro-cent.
Which is not a criticism.
I think I do not need a start page, since on one hand I have a personal home page (I mean, pointed at at in the profile, not my public one) where I have a search engine among a list of "medium frequency used sites" (once or twice per year I move bookmarks into my database ... the generic bookmarks are for "low frequency used sites" or for "interesting ones waiting to be stored in the db"), on the other hand for the "high frequency used sites" I keep their tabs permanently there, usign the session manager addon.

[michieldewit]

PM is only compatible with start.me extension 1.0 or older, otherwise they get the message:

Generally, these are extremely easy to fix, often with no more than simple changes to the .xpi . You can read about it more on this thread: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5932 or contact Tobin, as he has headed up the extension compatibility effort.

Thanks for the advice! We added Pale Moon as a target application to the extension manifest. After testing, we will upload it to the Firefox Add-on repo. This whole process may take some time (as Firefox add-on moderation usually takes some time).

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Thanks for the advice! We added Pale Moon as a target application to the extension manifest. After testing, we will upload it to the Firefox Add-on repo. This whole process may take some time (as Firefox add-on moderation usually takes some time).

You will have to make sure that the Firefox compatible version on AMO is set to 24 or else AMO won't allow Pale Moon users to download it. However, I can work around that in the entry on our own Add-ons site by either a direct link to the XPI or mirroring it on our site if that is acceptable.

[michieldewit]

Just my two euro-cent.
Which is not a criticism.
I think I do not need a start page, since on one hand I have a personal home page (I mean, pointed at at in the profile, not my public one) where I have a search engine among a list of "medium frequency used sites" (once or twice per year I move bookmarks into my database ... the generic bookmarks are for "low frequency used sites" or for "interesting ones waiting to be stored in the db"), on the other hand for the "high frequency used sites" I keep their tabs permanently there, usign the session manager addon.

Makes sense. I personally have a number of different pages I keep. One I use for the low frequency ones. Another one contains the sites I use everyday, combined with RSS feeds (e.g. with latests forum posts and news about Heroku, etc.) and some charts to keep me updated on server performance.

[lyceus]

My 0.02

I saw the news of the new page and in the first loading time, I saw just boxes since the icons were slow to load. I live in Mexico and our internet is slow (1mb in paper, 512kb real, is the norm down here). I like old page since it has some sites I visit daily and was loaded in a snap, but now if I will need to wait like 2 minutes for see the icons loading and a plugin+login for put my sites in the start page... I will stick better with the old recipe of blank page + "start folder" in bookmark menu like I used to do in the past.

Nothing against the change, is because I don't want to see icons loading when I need to browse my sites. Sadly several ideas are hampered with slow internet in 3rd countries.

[Moonchild]

The new start page should be very fast because it is, as I understood, backed by a CDN just like the current start page is. If that CDN somehow fails to deliver, that needs to be looked into. Can you get details about which point of presence you are connecting to? It should be fairly local.

Also, you don't need a plugin/extension to use the site, and soon you also won't need a login if you want to customize it -- and as it is all the current links are ported over to the new page already, so you should have everything you had before?

[lyceus]

Actually this is more a geopolitics thing than a technical one.

Background: Mexico was one of the last countries that kept the long distance fees, so for illustrate this: 1 minute from the capitol Mexico City to Morelia, Michoacan (around 450km away) costs like 0.95 USD, plus the call fee itself. I mention "was" because the local President, made a law for remove the long distance fees since in this year we have intermediate elections.

So what does the Telecom monopoly Telmex/Telcel about this? Easy, just provide worst services for force people to buy luxury services. The common so called 1Mb internet service included in the basic package, now is somewhat slower than the 512kbs and sometimes it just turn off. Or their DNS yells service unavailable pages at random.

In phone cell they are not better, I got subscribed by force to some SMS services "for free" but I do not cancel within a week, they start to charge to my prepaid card. Despite the geopolitical stuff that happens in my country, I see that the "old" page pops all loaded. But the new one is faster but still needs to load like 30-60 seconds. Maybe it need a cache setting or else will need for fix this. Because I agree that I need to download the icons in the old page, but why the new page is slower?

[Moonchild]

They use a different CDN than I do. CloudFlare is extremely efficient and because it's anycast, not easy to discriminate against in the Telmex way (as far as I understood the protocol).

Please do provide details about which point of presence you are connecting to? It should be fairly local.
Do a traceroute, or better, pathping, to see where the problem lies.

[lyceus]

They use a different CDN than I do. CloudFlare is extremely efficient and because it's anycast, not easy to discriminate against in the Telmex way (as far as I understood the protocol).

Please do provide details about which point of presence you are connecting to? It should be fairly local.
Do a traceroute, or better, pathping, to see where the problem lies.

I will post the files in private note for security.

[KNTRO]

Hi KNTRO,

Hi Michiel. Sorry for this delayed reply.

Thanks for the congratulations on behalf of start.me. We are very excited about becoming the new start page for Pale Moon.

Me too!

About the three things you mentioned, the add-on, customization and support for Argentinian locale: I am more then happy to work with you on those.

I'm currently getting in touch with start.me's CEO and I've done near 70% of the es-AR locale already! I'm probably gonna fishing it this weekend. Then I will provide local content providers for this es-AR locale.

Can you tell me a little more about the problems you experience with the add-on? Our current add-on is developed for Firefox. In what ways would it have to be adjusted to become compatible with Pale Moon (if at all possible)? Would you be able to assist on that?

x-15a2 has replied to this.

Customization is one of the spear points of our development efforts. Still, we believe there already is a lot of customization possible with start.me. What kind of options are you missing, specifically?

I'm a Netvibes user from long time. Starting from this point, in start.me I'm missing:

• A "saved articles" widget —a widget where you can saved manually selected articles from any other webfeed.
• An analytics tool for articles or social accounts —for instance.
• A reader view mode.
• Alerts.
• An official, full featured Twitter widget —not just an embedded mobile HTML.

Hope this little feedback helps start.me to make it better!

Off-topic:

Or their DNS yells service unavailable pages at random.

Lobo, can't you chance your DNS servers? I've set Google's and they're working so damn great down here. According to that CircleID article, OpenDNS is the best choice for Mexico.

Best regards!

[michieldewit]

I'm currently getting in touch with start.me's CEO and I've done near 70% of the es-AR locale already! I'm probably gonna fishing it this weekend. Then I will provide local content providers for this es-AR locale.

So I've heard! As soon as the translations are done, I will make sure they will be imported and deployed! Thanks for the great work!

I'm a Netvibes user from long time. Starting from this point, in start.me I'm missing:

• A "saved articles" widget —a widget where you can saved manually selected articles from any other webfeed.
• An analytics tool for articles or social accounts —for instance.
• A reader view mode.
• Alerts.
• An official, full featured Twitter widget —not just an embedded mobile HTML.

Those are more or less the same items we have on our wishlist! In the near future we hope to integrate more RSS features, including a reader mode and some better tracking of read and favorite articles. The Twitter (and Facebook) widgets need work, for sure. When time permits, we will be updating those, too.

[lyceus]

Off-topic:

Lobo, can't you chance your DNS servers? I've set Google's and they're working so damn great down here. According to that CircleID article, OpenDNS is the best choice for Mexico.

Best regards!

Actually Telmex have their DNS servers delivered from the router so I cannot do something for configure that from my side.

[CraigPD]

Off-topic:

Actually Telmex have their DNS servers delivered from the router so I cannot do something for configure that from my side.

Lobo, Compruébelo

[cooperb21]

Wait what does this affect? Just http://start.palemoon.org/?

I prefer to just use the start page with just pale moon icon and your default search provider not the one with all these useful links and ads at the bottom.