First Impression feedback - Palemoon on Windows 7

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Excuse my presumptuous post assuming anyone would want to hear what I have to say but here it is anyway...

I am running Palemoon 32bit on Windows 7 64bit, that is the version I chose to install but I do have plans to try the 64bit version very soon.

My reason for trying Palemoon is due to Firefox ESR being so unstable with my chosen extensions, those instabilities comprise regular audio stuttering issues, very high CPU usage during flash/html video play, regular hangs or freezes, generally running far more slowly than older versions of Firefox. In addition I have to face the fact that Firefox ESR has a limited life span and that I am going to have to migrate to FF quantum at some point in the future. If I have to migrate to another browser that has none of my familiar extensions, reduced functionality and an unproductive UI then I might as well move entirely to another browser, Chrome, or another that has all the facilities I require. So, onto Palemoon.

I have migrated all my favourite extensions from Firefox to Palemoon, Element Properties, Password Exporter, pwgen - Password Generator, Save Button for Pinterest, Saved Password Editor, StartupMaster. All installed with ease and run faultlessly. I also used the Classic Theme Restorer on FF to allow square tabs, the close tab button in the original location (rightmost) and regaining the original look and feel on Australis which I feel was efficient and optimised for the desktop, the Classic Theme Restorer of course not required on Palemoon...

I only had one extension that failed to co-operate and that was an old favourite of mine, Secure Password Generator 1.0.8. It caused PM to hang when the option button was clicked upon. Adblock Pro has been discarded in favour of Adblock latitude.

I exported my FF passwords and imported them using password exporter, I added a master password and tested the password editor. I exported and imported all my bookmarks. All well. Finally, only tabs to restore.

I failed to export and import all my hundreds of tabs. I tried several extensions and each in turn failed to export tabs from the FF default session, or managed only to export a text list in a very clunky and unusable format. Eventually, I resorted to manually dragging all of my tabs one by one to a new bookmark folder, exporting that bookmark list and re-importing into PM.Then I had to manually open each bleedin' bookmark in order, opening to a new tab. Closing and restarting PM and restoring the browser history was enough to give me my tabs and the end result of making PM look and feel just like my friendly old FF prior to Australis.

The migration of tabs is one area where the PaleMoon devs could really give a user like me a helping hand. I know that this facility is what the FF devs should really be providing but they are unlikely to facilitate a migration to Palemoon or any other browser. When PM starts it asks if it should import from IE but I would suggest that the most likely route for a migration to PM is a user coming from Firefox.

My impression of Palemoon 32 bit? Well, on Windows 7 64bit on a Dell Latitude e5400 laptop with a mere 2,5ghz core2duo, PM 32bit is running significantly faster than Firefox ESR 52.5.0 64 bit, Palemoon is noticeably more responsive, feels faster to such an extent that it feels like an injected version of Firefox, not quite a turbo version but certainly injected in comparison to Firefox's carbs.

I am impressed by Palemoon from the outset. I love the stable and desktop optimised GUI. I love the familiarity of the interface and the compatibility with Firefox. I cannot comment on the stability as I have not used it long enough but I will comment here later when I have more experience.

So far PM feels like my new default browser.

[Moonchild]

You could have used the "bookmark all tabs" function in Firefox, transplant the bookmarks, and then "open all in tabs" in Pale Moon, to save you probably a frustratingly long time of doing it one by one.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Blast and damn - I needed to know that earlier... Is there a wiki for these bits of vital info?

Thanks anyway.

PS. PM is using a mere 30%-50% of the cpu that FF used to hog all the time it was playing videos. I can now play youtube videos at 720 HD where as I was previously limited to a mere 480 on Firefox.

[gracious1]

My impression of Palemoon 32 bit? Well, on Windows 7 64bit on a Dell Latitude e5400 laptop with a mere 2,5ghz core2duo, PM 32bit is running significantly faster than Firefox ESR 52.5.0 64 bit, Palemoon is noticeably more responsive, feels faster to such an extent that it feels like an injected version of Firefox, not quite a turbo version but certainly injected in comparison to Firefox's carbs.

I am impressed by Palemoon from the outset. I love the stable and desktop optimised GUI. I love the familiarity of the interface and the compatibility with Firefox. …

So far PM feels like my new default browser.

Welcome to Pale Moon! Thanks for sharing this!

[coffeebreak]

Blast and damn - I needed to know that earlier... Is there a wiki for these bits of vital info?

Mozillazine knowledge base:

• Bookmark or save multiple tabs
• Category:Tabbed browsing

The Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) section of this forum:

• See sticky thread Some known issues when upgrading to Pale Moon 27
  and look under subheading "Tab contents don't want to load after upgrading to v27" - It has what you needed.

Search the forum :)

• Try searches like export tabs or migrate tabs.

[JustOff]

I only had one extension that failed to co-operate and that was an old favourite of mine, Secure Password Generator 1.0.8.

You can download Version 0.5.1-signed.1-signed and install it from file.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

I am sure I tried the version on the PM extensions list and it was the one that caused the browser hang. I will try it again and see if it does the same.

Only issue so far, one that others have encountered, the issue with Google maps in satellite mode where the map seems divided diagonally and the upper top right of the map is a mirror image of the portion bottom left.

[coffeebreak]

Only issue so far, one that others have encountered, the issue with Google maps in satellite mode where the map seems divided diagonally and the upper top right of the map is a mirror image of the portion bottom left.

There have been some (rather different) reports of mirror-imaging issues with Google maps, that were solved by adjusting a webGL setting. Maybe that solution will work for you too, see this post by Moonchild (plus here and following).

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Thankyou coffee, changed webgl.angle.try-d3d11 to false, problem resolved. Palemoon continues to thrill me, I may be a little sad but I am thrilled by these things and the performance boost of PM32 over FF ESR has made my old cooking laptop feel like it has a recent hardware upgrade.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

One problem seems to have been resolved. In Firefox when playing a video with sound I would encounter occasional audio problems. At first the audio would play but when I moved the position slider and let go, the video would play from the new position but the audio would not. Further moves of the slider would then restore the audio. This was a consistent issue on FF that was not resolved by any tinkering with audio drivers or settings. I tried.

There was possibly a connection between high cpu usage and FF's sound capability. On PaleMoon the audio problem has not resurfaced once. Consistent sound throughout my testing.

Using PaleMoon has fixed an audio issue that has troubled this test PC for some time!

[yereverluvinuncleber]

One issue that is a retrograde step in PaleMoon is the inability to cut/paste web objects from other applications on the Windows desktop. There may well be a solution to this, so please let me know if there is.

I have previously used NVU HTML editor to create a document complete with images from IMGUR and then I've been able to copy the whole document, text, images &c into a journal on Deviantart, example: https://yereverluvinuncleber.deviantart.com/journal/Goodbye-Firefox-old-friend-my-browser-no-more-719284295 just by selecting the contents in normal view mode.

When I select an image and try copy it into the same journal using PM all I see is the alt text. No image is copied.

The image is hosted on IMGUR and the html to display the image is not being copied across. I was able to complete the task using FF ESR as my backup browser but I'd like to be able to do this in PM. I have been working like this for a long time in FF so I suggest this is an issue unique to PM. Any thoughts?

The workaround is simple enough, I simply copy the html source code for the embedded image alone and it works, just adds another step and an inconsistency in the way I operate between the two browsers. For a document with just one embedded image it is a minor issue but an issue nonetheless. For a web-document with multiple images it is a real pain as each image has to be added individually.

At the moment this is just feedback and I can easily raise this as a separate issue on the forum for more visibility, is there a formal method for raising bugs such as JIRA?

[SpockFan02]

At the moment this is just feedback and I can easily raise this as a separate issue on the forum for more visibility, is there a formal method for raising bugs such as JIRA?

By posting on the Bug reports (Windows) forum and on GitHub.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Thankyou for that!