The 'COMPATIBILITY' feature?

[geradra]

Hi,

Under 'Preferences' > 'Advanced' > 'General' tab, Can anyone please tell me which of the 3 options (Native, Gecko or Firefox) I should choose in 'Compatibility'?

Can you tell me the main purpose & benefits of each of the 3 features, and which is the best option to choose?......for instance (rightly or wrongly) I was thinking that if I chose the 'Firefox' option, then pm might be more liable to be FF 'add-on' friendly?

[back2themoon]

Press the Help button and this page will appear.

The setting has nothing to do with Add-ons compatibility, but with the user-agent string which in some cases can affect how the website will appear. I'd suggest you leave it at the default setting (which I believe is currently the Firefox mode).

[Isengrim]

From what I understand, this setting only changes your user agent, which websites have a habit of using to determine if your browser is "compatible" with their site. It's the equivalent of reading your nametag to determine if you're suitable for a job.

"Firefox compatibility" uses a Firefox user agent to tell websites to give Pale Moon what it would normally show to Firefox, so sites tend to "just work" more often. "Native" uses the native Pale Moon user agent, which sites may not like as much but it's more truthful about what browser you're using, and lets sites know that there are more than three browsers in the world. "Gecko compatibility" is a sort of half-way point between the two.

Firefox Compatibility:

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/4.1 Firefox/52.9 PaleMoon/28.0.0

Gecko Compatibility:

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/4.1 PaleMoon/28.0.0

Native:

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:52.9) Goanna/4.1 PaleMoon/28.0.0

[Night Wing]

I go with the default setting in Pale Moon for Compatibility which is "Firefox". I've never run into any problems using this default setting.

When it comes to addons, I don't use a lot of addons like most people do. I have only two addons and they are: NoSquint and Adblock Latitude.

As for addon "friendly", if an addon found on the Firefox website is a web extension, it won't run on Pale Moon even with Firefox Compatibility. This is the long and short of it.

[vannilla]

For what is worth, I always have it set on "Native", and pretty much everything works fine, including some websites that are often reported as being broken.
I suggest giving it a spin when a website is broken, some site admins/web framework are smart enough to give a "low requiremens" version when the user agent doesn't show the latest release.

[back2themoon]

It seems Pale Moon 28 is far less likely to encounter website errors than PM27 when using Gecko/Native modes. Even though I've now switched to "Firefox mode" with PM28 to "blend" with most users who use the default mode, I had about 15 "FF-mode" necessary overrides when using v27 in Native mode.

None of these are now required in PM28 Native/Gecko modes.