When developers call Pale Moon a "legacy" browser and refuse to support it…

[gracious1]

When asked about making a certain extension compatible with Pale Moon, here is one developer's reply:

I have no plan in supporting legacy browsers. Sorry.

I think it is very important that as many of us as possible write to developers and politely ask them to make their wares compatible with Pale Moon. Sometimes this works, such as in the case of FEBE (which performs backups of extensions, themes, passords, etc.) by Chuck Baker.

Sometimes this fails, such as in the case above with Adblock Protector 2.

So... what to do when you get a developer who thinks that Pale Moon is a "legacy" browser?
What can you say to disabuse him (or her) of this notion???
I certainly don't think we should harass anyone(!), but what sort of things can you say to show PM is not "legacy" but progressive, modern, etc.
For that matter, what can you say to an end-user who thinks Pale Moon is a "legacy" browser?

Pale Moon is not a "legacy" browser, so how to deal with it when someone makes this remark?

[Sajadi]

The major issue we face today is that tons of people today think that everything which is not minimalistic or simplistic is bloated and unwanted And who is not fully supporting what Google shoves us into the throat these days in every single aspect possible (ignoring reasoning for why not supporting/why not possible to support) is clearly seen as outdated.

If you actually really met with such a person, best advice is to ignore it

Also, where Mozilla willingly abandons their own technology to become instead even more a Google shill - it gets more and more hard to make developers of add-ons deciding to create something for the technology we all love but most people (including Mozilla) today see it simply as abandoned and not attractive anymore to develop something for it.

As it is always for a smaller project - the community has sooner or later to step in and get ready to create add-ons on their own they want, or if they want to keep them alive.. fork them and go on with that afterwards. That also means that certain functionality like that annoying new "web standards or drafts" have to be partly delivered with patches by community members either by doing themselves, finding tutorials or getting the knowledge on external sources (either to manage to help on their own or bring people over who would do it) because while other browser projects have the manpower do do that on their own because they have special people with certain knowledge around, Pale Moon and other small projects do not have that benefit which would make it the same way as easy. So, the term "patches are welcome" should not be seen as offensive for obvious reasons stated already.

Anyway. The train of big XUL add-on support has already left the station and it is clearly never coming back.

That's the sad reality we are facing.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

We will see how "Legacy" Pale Moon is when I get done porting it to UXP.

http://personal.mattatobin.com/files/ae229743-6db3-4be0-b22b-4488320ad91e.mp4

[hujan86]

Personally I wouldn't have cared too much if the majority thinks PM is an "obsolete" product. It's only when Mozilla made the decision move to support exclusively WX. We can be counted lucky as we still have uBlock Origin & Greasemonkey.

[Admin]

Legacy isn't necessarily the same as obsolete. It may be carried over from a previous era, but that doesn't mean it's automatically obsolete just because someone decides they want to implement a change.
The truth is simple: Mozilla makes these changes because they want to get rid of this whole notion that the (their) application isn't the only thing that matters. Does anyone else know how to use this new Photon interface they thought up or how to tinker with it/change it? No, because they don't want anyone to. They want to enforce their branding and look, no alternatives allowed. Does that rigid, brand-centric approach suddenly mean that anything that's not that approach is suddenly obsolete or should be discarded? No. Sorry Mozilla, but you're dealing with actual open source communities here, and that means you not only have the convenience of getting free development and community-checks on your code, it also means that people can and will fork if you do something really stupid or go in a direction that people don't want.

Give it some time. People will likely get tired real quick of the "newness" when they find they can't do what they want with their browser any longer. Extension developers who insist they only want to support WebExtensions and have been drinking the KoolAid™ -- they have likely forgotten why they wrote Browser extensions (and not Web extensions) in the first place. Hint: the clue is in the name.

[Sajadi]

They want to enforce their branding and look, no alternatives allowed.

And they forget about one thing: Just because Google does it, does not make it the only viable way which should be shoved into users throats. But what can one expect from a company which sees Google (Chrome) as the utter pinnacle of "browser evolution" and therefor glorifying everything what they do

No matter what they do, they always stay Mozilla and never will become Google, no matter how hard Mozilla tries. Even selling their own soul and dumping previously hold up high believes and visions will not change anything

[gracious1]

We can be counted lucky as we still have uBlock Origin & Greasemonkey.

And we only have Greasemonkey because GMforker, thank goodness, is able and willing to port it to Pale Moon. (SeaMonkey has the same predicament). (So grateful, GMforker!!)

I think uBlock Origin is still available because IIRC gorhiill said something about how it is still pretty easy to implement patches/fixes to the XPCOM edition and keep it up with WebExt edition, and until it became too difficult, he would continue to maintain both for the time being. I am trying to find that post; it was either at Github or Reddit.

[coffeebreak]

I am trying to find that post

github wiki:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-WebExtensions#future-of-ubolegacy

and older: Drop support for very old browser versions #2612

[back2themoon]

I don't think you can -or should- do anything more. Insisting won't help and it's hardly elegant. If they have created browser extensions they certainly don't need users explaining browser-stuff to them.

As Admin said, calmly let time do its thing and I'll add, do your best to support users over here.

[joe04]

Pale Moon is not a "legacy" browser, so how to deal with it when someone makes this remark?

Unfortunately it is in the important sense of Mozilla labelling all XUL/XPCOM addons as "legacy" technology. (In terms of rhetoric it's an effective and frankly, necessary, thing for Mozilla to do; they have to justify and bolster their Webextension decision, no?)

As for how to deal with it, I like what Admin and back2themoon already wrote here.

[lyceus]

Actually anyone can fork an extension if it's in open source (and variants). Some cases are shown here in the long run. Like ABP refusing to support Pale Moon, despite that they only need to change 2 lines of code for made the add-on compatible. Hence ABL did born and life goes on.

Most sites just block Pale Moon because their UA sniffing is not what they expect of, but that is a minor trouble in the end. I would be worried if Pale Moon were "legacy" in the rendering engine or handling web protocols.

[Donotfillintheblank]

Personally I wouldn't have cared too much if the majority thinks PM is an "obsolete" product. It's only when Mozilla made the decision move to support exclusively WX. We can be counted lucky as we still have uBlock Origin & Greasemonkey.

Shouldn't anyone be able to conclude for themselves whether any piece of software is obsolete, simply by observing the number of people using it?

[Donotfillintheblank]

Legacy isn't necessarily the same as obsolete. It may be carried over from a previous era, but that doesn't mean it's automatically obsolete just because someone decides they want to implement a change.
The truth is simple: Mozilla makes these changes because they want to get rid of this whole notion that the (their) application isn't the only thing that matters. Does anyone else know how to use this new Photon interface they thought up or how to tinker with it/change it? No, because they don't want anyone to. They want to enforce their branding and look, no alternatives allowed.

I think I understand now. It is just a way of enforcing a monopoly.

[Donotfillintheblank]

We can be counted lucky as we still have uBlock Origin & Greasemonkey.

And we only have Greasemonkey because GMforker, thank goodness, is able and willing to port it to Pale Moon. (SeaMonkey has the same predicament). (So grateful, GMforker!!)

I think uBlock Origin is still available because IIRC gorhiill said something about how it is still pretty easy to implement patches/fixes to the XPCOM edition and keep it up with WebExt edition, and until it became too difficult, he would continue to maintain both for the time being. I am trying to find that post; it was either at Github or Reddit.

I certainly hope he will go on maintaining it for as long as possible. I find UBlock Origin one of the most useful add-ons I ever used, if not THE most useful one (BTW, there is not that much difference with UBlock legacy, it's largely the same save for some fine-tuning controls).