Will Firefox and Pale Moon work together in the future?

Frequently Asked Questions about the Pale Moon browser and their answers.
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Moonchild
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Will Firefox and Pale Moon work together in the future?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2011-09-26, 18:47

Will Firefox and Pale Moon work together in the future?

Since Mozilla has obviously chosen to follow a different path at the management level, it doesn't seem likely that Pale Moon and Firefox will ever see a unification or joining of forces.

There have been and are growing conflicts of interests between Pale Moon and Firefox as far as the so-called UX (User eXperience) developments are concerned. This results in a different user interface approach in Pale Moon. For example, less stress is put on minimizing the size of UI elements or saving every pixel possible to benefit the content area - in this day and age of full HD monitors and laptops that seems to be very counter-intuitive. Australis is considered unacceptable, and will not be used.

On the flipside, some developers seem to complain that Pale Moon "is no different than other optimized builds out there", meaning other people who have built Firefox from source on Windows machines, which might be true to some very limited extent (since they are both Gecko-based browsers). Following the step-by-step instructions in the Mozilla Developer Center, and probably with some trial and error, anyone with a decent level of computer knowledge could build Firefox on Windows (if you have the right hardware and software), but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be stable or efficient. As Pale Moon has developed, so has the amount of individual code for the browser, steadily diverging Pale Moon from its sibling in the direction aimed for in this browser - having transformed it from an optimized build into a true "fork" of Firefox.

Some have even claimed that the Pale Moon project as such was given shape to gain fame -- they should consider that the popularity was unexpected. Pale Moon is, and has always been released in the hope that it might be useful to its users, nothing more. It is a full-time commitment (between developing/building, releasing, website maintenance, and providing e-mail support and running the forum), and I'm happy to see it finding good use among its users.
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