BLOG: Mozilla to deprecate... itself, really.

[Go_To]

Unfortunately, Ghostery and Greasemonkey both said they were incompatible. Hopefully I can edit their source files to hack the allowed version numbers.

Last version that is compatible with Pale Moon is 5.4.4.1, here's a link of the previous versions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... /versions/

[LimboSlam]

@Go_To:

I was quoting what other have said on the Mozilla Blog, this was not me speaking.

[Falna]

Mozilla to deprecate... itself, really

Yes, a well chosen title for this thread. What are they thinking?
As a result, and after being a FF user since version 1.5 / 2006, as of today I've switched to Pale Moon
I imagine that there will be some more people heading your way.
Thanks to everyone here for your work making Pale Moon an attractive alternative.

[Babar au rhum]

I think this situation is actually alarming. If Firefox moves in a new direction for their addons similar to Chrome and that Pale Moon remains with the old model, then Pale Moon, which had an architecture that was already becoming a lot more marginal and not compatible with vanilla Firefox, will become a very marginalized browser.

Worse than that, people use Firefox because of the plethora of add-ons. Nobody is going to want to make add-ons for a browser with a super tiny marketshare like Palemoon. It effectively means it's going to get stuck with outdated add-ons that maybe a tiny handful of people will attempt to modernize for the Palemoon fork as years pass... but Palemoon is more and more going to become unable to use any add-ons.

Personally I think this is a mistake. If I lost all my add-ons then Palemoon loses any appeal to me and I'm sure it's the same for the majority of its users.

[Moonchild]

Nobody is going to want to make add-ons for a browser with a super tiny marketshare like Palemoon.

The thing is, we already have thousands of extensions that are compatible. We have Firefox extension compatibility for a reason (even though we technically could have chosen not to implement this, which would have been the mistake).

You can turn this around too, in that nobody is going to want to rewrite add-ons for a browser with a rapidly declining market share like Firefox; that is what Mozilla is asking. Basically asking everyone who already did their extension development once, to do it all over again.

So we won't suddenly lose the ability to run existing add-ons. Add-on developers who may have seen little use in supporting us before might be more inclined to develop/update their existing add-ons for us in lieu of completely rewriting it (if even possible) using specialized APIs that may or may not be created by Mozilla in an unknown time frame. In addition, many add-ons don't need a lot of active development because they are very task-specific, and if they work, they work. This whole constant need for updating in Firefox has been caused by Firefox and their rabid release schedule.

I think the future is quite different. People who love using extensions will be more inclined to switch to Pale Moon because it offers an existing framework with many existing extensions, instead of having to throw a lot of them out that aren't going to be available or rewritten for Firefox.next.

[Loggy]

You have guys read all of the Mozilla blog, there are lots of people suggesting Pale Moon! WOW!!

Yep, I'm here trying it. Firefox user since netscape, but these strange decisions with no conventional about:config options have driven me away. It's clear that the traditional Firefox philosophy of "power to the users" is dead at Mozilla. I also heard suggestions for "cyberfox", but they don't have a linux version, and imo, Windows 8/10 are even more concerning than Firefox 40+.

I'm worried by some of the criticism of Pale Moon, that it is just "Firefox 24 stuck in time", and "No new addons". But I'll use Pale Moon for as long as it can stay relevant and optimistically wait for the dust to settle over at Mozilla; maybe Firefox can get better, and once again appeal to power users. Apparently Pocket and Hello are going to be just "Pre-installed addons which can be turned off" in firefox 43? Developer version still allows unsigned addons... And they're saying that once the new addon system is fully thought out, "It will, in fact, not break very many addons"? I dunno, the future seems bleak.

[Trippynet]

Also worth bearing in mind is that if your bleak scenario does begin to come true (which I also doubt incidentally), I don't think there's anything that I know of to stop Pale Moon in the future adding support for WebExtensions as well, but also retaining XPCOM and XUL for existing and some more powerful extensions. It's certainly an option, and one that I expect would be examined if it was felt there was need for it.

Right now of course, it's a pointless feature and MC has far more important things to focus upon.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Chrome's Extension Model is very limited even if Mozilla expands a few select APIs it will never have the power ours does.. WebExtensions will never be able to fundamentally change the browser's operation in any meaningful way.. It simply is not intended to. It is geared to modifying page content and providing entry points to web services.. Anything more is a unique case and would be the exception and not the rule.

The Pale Moon Extensibility framework and platform will always provide superior capabilities when it comes to having your browser, your way.

What one has to realize is the shift in focus for Mozilla and their intent. They want to cash in on the hope that Chrome Extension developers will support Firefox with a very low bottom line on development resources and time on all sides. They merely only have to follow the Chrome Extensions API and throw those couple of pacifiers to the absolute MOST popular Firefox extensions that get them usership.. Everything else is irrelevant.

Obviously those users who left Firefox for Chrome don't particularly care for extensive extensibility because Chrome doesn't have it.. To win those users back they want the transition for users to be almost seamless and they want developers to copypasta a tiny bit into their Chrome extensions so they work on Firefox for their recaptured Chrome users.

I see this as a fools ploy.. and it will make web browser differences largely irrelevant.. Apparently EDGE is suppose to be getting the same extension model.. In this (X) as a service future the Web Browser is a bootstrap platform to get you to the cloud and nothing more. It becomes your pseudo-operating system and really any distinction between browsers will be virtually non-existent..

Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla control the web (non)standards, they control the browsers, they control the extension API, they control what sites you can and can't look at.. They control search.. It is all really pretty awful as a concept. Despite it's tinfoil, big brother, extremest appearance of such a concept.. They are actually accomplishing these tasks step by step.

[Moonchild]

I'm worried by some of the criticism of Pale Moon, that it is just "Firefox 24 stuck in time", and "No new addons".

It's something that a certain group of Firefox fans has been evangelizing despite all the clear evidence to the contrary. It's sad and tiring to see this time and again. We're a fork - this means that yes, we have a common ancestor and decisively split off from Firefox in the v24 era when we re-based our fork the last time on Firefox, but it doesn't mean we are equal to that point in time when we split off.

Our development goes much further back, with own code carried across from much earlier versions with each re-basing, as well as much further forward in that we did not just clone and then build (like other Firefox derivatives have done) but actually develop our own code and port relevant code across from much later Firefox versions if it is desirable and applies to us.

"No new add-ons"? Like the now-already-deprecated SDK ones that focus on Australis? I don't think that would be much of an issue either -- and we do have an increasing number of Pale Moon specific add-ons; but it's a slow process, of course.

[Eleventy_Threeve]

PM isn't "stuck on 24." Remember that inflated version numbers or adding catastrophic changes doesn't equal innovation.

If you like the concept of a decimal point and gradual improvements then PM is your choice.

[Babar au rhum]

Nobody is going to want to make add-ons for a browser with a super tiny marketshare like Palemoon.

The thing is, we already have thousands of extensions that are compatible. We have Firefox extension compatibility for a reason (even though we technically could have chosen not to implement this, which would have been the mistake).

You can turn this around too, in that nobody is going to want to rewrite add-ons for a browser with a rapidly declining market share like Firefox; that is what Mozilla is asking. Basically asking everyone who already did their extension development once, to do it all over again.

So we won't suddenly lose the ability to run existing add-ons. Add-on developers who may have seen little use in supporting us before might be more inclined to develop/update their existing add-ons for us in lieu of completely rewriting it (if even possible) using specialized APIs that may or may not be created by Mozilla in an unknown time frame. In addition, many add-ons don't need a lot of active development because they are very task-specific, and if they work, they work. This whole constant need for updating in Firefox has been caused by Firefox and their rabid release schedule.

I think the future is quite different. People who love using extensions will be more inclined to switch to Pale Moon because it offers an existing framework with many existing extensions, instead of having to throw a lot of them out that aren't going to be available or rewritten for Firefox.next.

I'm very thankful for the Palemoon project, but I unfortunately doubt it. Unless Palemoon were to gain a great deal of marketshare and even then, I don't see for instance Lastpass dedicating specific ressources to maintain a version of their add-on.

We'll see what happens I guess.

[Moonchild]

I unfortunately doubt it.

You are certainly welcome to your opinion and doubts

I don't see for instance Lastpass dedicating specific ressources to maintain a version of their add-on.

That is, entirely, their choice (and their loss). There are plenty of alternatives to use.

[dark_moon]

I don't see for instance Lastpass dedicating specific ressources to maintain a version of their add-on.

That is, entirely, their choice (and their loss). There are plenty of alternatives to use.

For example KeePass with the KeeFox addon.

[Trippynet]

I'm very thankful for the Palemoon project, but I unfortunately doubt it.

This is part of the catch 22 situation that smaller browsers can find themselves in. If they don't have the users, they don't get many bespoke/supported addons. And if they don't have many addons, it's difficult to get a lot of users. Well, unless you're a big company like Microsoft that can force-feed a new browser to people of course.

Since Australis, Pale Moon has been faced with two choices. Implement the guts of a deeply unpopular user interface (and the baggage it comes with) and continue to shadow Firefox development closely (continued compatibility with most Firefox addons, but the browser's direction will be heavily influenced by Mozilla's frequent bouts of insanity), or fork the pre-Australis codebase and go down a different path of development.

Of course the latter is what has happened. Because there's no Australis and a different GUID (plus other divergent bits), not all addons will work unfortunately, but the advantages are that Pale Moon continues to avoid a lot of Mozilla's recent dreadful development decisions, whilst still having a pretty large base of powerful and compatible addons available. Not 100%, no. But still way more than most other minority browsers.

I don't have a crystal ball to look into the future, but I personally use Pale Moon precisely because I do not like Mozilla's recent direction with Firefox. If Pale Moon were to try and maintain near 100% addon compatibility with Firefox, the browser itself would suffer a lot as a consequence. Will the situation change over time? Undoubtedly. But Pale Moon has been through doomsday predictions like this before. A year ago, everyone on Mozillazine was shouting on that Pale Moon would not be able to survive without adopting Australis. However a year on from that, the browser is still Australis free and going strong.

[LimboSlam]

I would like to update everyone on some apparent "spamming" (us they say) going on at the Mozilla Blogs. Now I don't how true this is, so here I will quote you the exact conversations:

Anonymous wrote on August 21, 2015 at 12:46 pm:

@Nils Maier, I know how you feel! So I suggest you make the switch to Pale Moon as I have heard they are not a Firefox clone, but a fork that is and will support XUL and XBL code for making extensions.


Riik wrote on August 23, 2015 at 3:20 am:

So you have heard. Annoying spam.


Jacob Hill wrote on August 25, 2015 at 2:30 pm:

@Riik: I know you may be standing up for Firefox (I was too at a point) and don’t want to believe the hard truth, but Pale Moon is actually a pretty good browser, for it being based/fork off an old Firefox and the lack of add-on compatibility. Though I’m sure they will get a handle on it as more and more devs come around. Also, I’m actually using their Pale Moon as I type to see if these so called rumors are true, or just as you say spam. And to be honest it’s quite smoother and very memory efficient. They also do support XUL, XPCOM and XBL as they say: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=8756. So does this mean I’ll be using Pale Moon, I don’t know.

But it’s just my opinion/ovulation and I do know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so the decision is up to, either believe the what others are saying is “spam” and criticize this browser all you want, or check it out for yourself and then you can say it’s truly spam (if that is what is).


**NOTE:** Pale Moon Users, please don’t spam off-topic here. If it’s any good and stands on its own two feet, then you have nothing to worry about. But for the love of Russell’s Teapot, take your advertising elsewhere. Thanks!

[Babar au rhum]

Fine, while my concerns are still there, I guess I've been too skeptical too soon. I don't like what Mozilla is turning into and how it is throwing its userbase under the bus to become a Chrome clone either.

Consider me back on team Palemoon.

[Eleventy_Threeve]

@ Babar: If it will make you feel better you should know that you aren't going to lose your add-ons. I am a beta-tester on a project for power users. We exclusively use PM and run over 120 extensions and things have never worked better. Yes, when we look through the catalog some wont work. The truth is many of them wont work for FF. They either wont work with 29+ or they never worked at all. Stay with PM and you are going to gain firepower.

[half-moon]

The truth is many of them wont work for FF. They either wont work with 29+ or they never worked at all.

This is what the anti-PM crowd doesn't understand yet.

[LimboSlam]

It won't hit them until one of their favorite add-ons is incompatible because of the deprecation of XUL, XPCOM and XBL or the dev stops updates because he is unable to keep up with Firefox rapid releases and all their drastic changes on how AMO works add-ons.

[11ryanc]

Content based GUI must be on route next. I was honestly expecting to see it before anything else. Wonder how much longer Gecko as we know it will stay afloat?
Anyway what's been troubling me to think about is the addons AMO at Mozilla. If XUL extensions are being killed, will Mozilla allow the old AMO's to stay up on the Add-ons site? Quite reliant on older FF extensions. Starting to collect XPI's on the hard drive.