What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-03-10, 02:08

CodeLurker wrote:
2022-03-10, 02:02
I suggest setting up a wiki somewhere, and giving a pass to anybody willing to contribute to it to. Perhaps on Wikia.
Once again, scale is the issue. So is the inherently necessary moderation/verification of people entering data, combating spam, trolling and defacing, etc. Wikis in general have failed because too many people are genuinely destructive or have the unquenchable desire to abuse freely editable content on-line.

And once again, they aren't plugins.

So, just use the tools that are available.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by moonbat » 2022-03-10, 08:40

With Pale Moon reverting to supporting Firefox's GUID, I don't even see what the problem is. Get whatever extensions you were using from CAA once it reverts and you can continue using them as usual. And in the meantime learn to search the forum and addons site for alternatives.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by CodeLurker » 2022-05-02, 04:58

As to wikis being hard to maintain, if a spammer gets the login, just change it; or grant individual accounts, and watch. Why many independent wikis don't work, is because access is not, or it is not checked for spam. With individual accts., you could just delete the acct. of a spammer, since you can see who did what in the history. I doubt more than a half a dozen ppl will ask to update the extension compatibility wiki - especially ones who have posted here a handful of times and sound like they have a clue of what they are asking for. Thus, I consider easier than represented.

Moonbat presumably has a point, however. If PM goes back to a PM GUID, and that fixes a lot of CAA extensions, then I'll have no issues except hiding the title bar like in Basilisk with the various bars configured as I like; but this is only an annoyance, not a stopper. I'll hold my horses for now. If enough extensions work in 3.0, then an extension compatibility wiki would be moot point.

Alternately, I would have no grudge against an automatic extension converter such as the one for SeaMonkey, which I remember using from before. Here's the link:

http://www.addonconverter.fotokraina.com/

The source is on GitHub. Perhaps it changes GUIDs; which would be another option to support older extensions.

That being said, I'm still using Basilisk, and loving it. There are a few websites that break; but I can get stuff like YT, Bitchute and Yahoo Mail (I know, I'm looking at getting something better) to work. Bitchute breaks the player, so I must use a GreaseMonkey script to fix it (which breaks the comments and the search, but I can get by by toggling it on and off), and GreaseMonkey does a lot to improve my YT experience. I have to use a recent browser User ID string to use Yahoo Mail right. I look forward hopefully to see what will be done about extension compatibility in 3.0; but expect to keep using Basilisk until it drops.

Basilisk really had come a long way in recent releases. Both PM and Basilisk had a tendency to chew up a lot of CPU cycles when a lot of tabs were open, and Basilisk I remember until recent versions would refuse to shut down pretty often with many tabs open, and had to be terminated, because evidently some tabs or extensions were still running, and wouldn't shut down. In the final Basilisk, it rarely starts wasting CPU like that, and almost always shuts down promptly when I hit File | Exit. The problem is well over 95% better. Thus, it seems ironic that it was cancelled just as soon as most of its issues got fixed. I am not really surprised, however, that you do not intend to support two browsers indefinitely, if one will do.

Don't get me wrong. I would love to transition to PM and be able to use CAA extensions (with or without auto conversion step) and the PM extensions together. I especially like the new CPU usage and memory usage extensions it has. So, it seems like I've switched browsers a lot to get some of those awesome old extensions working: FF to SM to Basilisk to PM to Basilisk, and presumably back to PM; but I am optimistic about PM 3.0.

I'm trying to break myself of the habit of calling them plugins instead of extensions; but old habits die hard. I am trying.

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by moonbat » 2022-05-02, 06:18

As of now, the 30.x branch is abandoned and the next milestone release with reverted Firefox support will be version 31. So it's just a short waiting period :)
As mentioned earlier - you can use the Australium theme and now with the hamburger button extension to get it looking as close to Basilisk as possible.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by back2themoon » 2022-05-02, 12:22

CodeLurker wrote:
2022-02-16, 22:56
PS: I would have lost my work on this message if I hadn't saved it. The BB logged me out before I finished. I suggest a longer time until it logs us out.
You can use an extension like Textarea Cache for such situations. It will recover your text. Or use a text editor for lengthy posts, as suggested.

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by CodeLurker » 2022-06-04, 16:31

I see the new vers. of Pale Moon has dropped, and am enthusiastic about testing it. I now have pretty close to what I consider an ideal configuration of Basilisk, and will see how close I can come in the new Pale Moon - incorporating the theme and other extension suggestions you guys have made. I anticipate a hearty endorsement that PM will be the true spiritual successor for the pre-e10s FF community, and that it seems to me that extension devs should expect it to be a stable platform for their labors for many years to come; as well as making my modest donation. I am having some personal issues occupy my time right now, but anticipate doing the testing and writing the final chapter of my little saga on this issue soon; at which point Basilisk, to me in any event, would be a moot point.

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Sajadi » 2022-06-04, 21:39

CodeLurker wrote:
2022-06-04, 16:31
I see the new vers. of Pale Moon has dropped, and am enthusiastic about testing it. I now have pretty close to what I consider an ideal configuration of Basilisk, and will see how close I can come in the new Pale Moon
There is really not much difference in the end between both, if you have the fitting theme, you will feel at home in Pale Moon too :)

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by WiseWolf » 2022-06-05, 02:50

Moonchild wrote:
2022-03-10, 02:08
So is the inherently necessary moderation/verification of people entering data, combating spam, trolling and defacing, etc. Wikis in general have failed because too many people are genuinely destructive or have the unquenchable desire to abuse freely editable content on-line.
I would hope people would have enough rationale to not try to be destructive or deliberately add lies to a wiki...

That being said, I will admit, I have in the past added weird stuff to wikipedia.org...

;)

Some of it is too inappropriate to mention here, but here is an example of something I did to a microsoft page once:

microsoft is insecurity hell, SO GET RID OF IT!

AND UPGRADE TO DIRECTV!

I probably added other text in between both sentences, but yeah,

Stuff like that, is especially amusing to me for some reason, especially if people don't notice it for an extremely long time.

:)

My point being, not all trolls are harmful, there are some here and there that just do silly nonsense to waste people's time.

I used to know someone on a specific linux forum, who called himself Jodiendo, who did similar stuff.

But yeah, Moonchild is right for these reasons alone, let alone those who actually try to do more malevolent stuff.

Not sure how many trolls go that route, but I can be sure of this, it will always be more than there should be.

:/

Btw one edit, that tends to be my kind of trolling if I do it ever on places like wikis, etc...

I prefer to avoid doing it in the places I respect most.

I cannot imagine how nuts political forums must be spammed and flamed with trolls...

I don't want to imagine, either!

xD

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-06-05, 08:23

WiseWolf wrote:
2022-06-05, 02:50
I would hope people would have enough rationale to not try to be destructive or deliberately add lies to a wiki...
You may wan to look into what "Astroturfing" is and how wikis are prime channels for it.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by WiseWolf » 2022-06-05, 14:00

Moonchild wrote:
2022-06-05, 08:23
WiseWolf wrote:
2022-06-05, 02:50
I would hope people would have enough rationale to not try to be destructive or deliberately add lies to a wiki...
You may wan to look into what "Astroturfing" is and how wikis are prime channels for it.
Oh don't worry, I have seen john oliver's episode on it once.

People pretending to support a cause and/or lying to get a specific agenda passed is very much legal and annoying.

It really should not be legal tho.

I don't know if you have seen the episode I speak of, but here is an example:

https://culturess.com/2018/08/13/john-o ... nizations/

There is some weird story within it about someone leaving candles on a crib which, sounds insane, because it is.

;)

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by CodeLurker » 2022-10-01, 08:31

One thing about a semi-closed wiki, i.e. one where you give out accts. you can cancel when needed, is you don't have to worry about malicious editors popping up out of nowhere. Wikipedia has the Wikipedia Foundation, and thus an army of editors that can quickly undo malicious editing (or the addition of suppressed information). For a small instructional wiki, leaving it wide open IMHO would invite spam.

I've tested the new PM, and I have to say, all the CAA extensions that I care about still work; so I'd say it is a great success to have changed its GUID from my perspective. IMHO, PM is now a first-class spiritual successor to pre-e10s FF.

FWIW: I decided to try to use PM extensions whenever there wasn't a better one in the CAA archives. Above, I've covered (with some necessary redundancy, due to not being able to edit old messages) ones that exist in the CAA that aren't on the PM site. I do have a few wrinkles do add to the above, however.
  • I tried again to use FireShot, but once it expired, it refused to do ANYTHING, and kept popping up the page to buy it. If you want to buy it, that's reasonable and fine, but I was happy to go back to the CAA ScreenShotter.
  • Print Friendly & PDF is indeed a one-site extension, but very handy for getting PDFs from a webpage. The site's Download as PDF button was broken for a few weeks, but is working again. However, in the meantime, I found a more powerful one in the CAA, which gives you better editing capabilities, and can also save to PDF: Print Edit 18.4. It's under GPL 3.0, and would probably make a nice one for the PM extension page.
  • Popup Blocker Ultimate 8.1 (Mozilla Public License, version 2.0) or Simple Popup Blocker (also Mozilla Public License, version 2.0) are both pretty nice from the CAA, but there are GreaseMonkey scripts to do popup blocking, too. However, in practice, I found one GreaseMonkey script to miss some popups, and there's no whitelisting sites for popups in it (which Popup Blocker Ultimate can do). I'm surprised there's no PM popup blocker yet.
  • Sasuga is an adequate substitute for UAControl Options, but one thing the CAA extension has that it doesn't, is the ability to have a default user agent string. Sasuga has the nice ability to immediately create an entry with the current tab's domain, so you don't have to copy or type the domain name, but a default user agent string is nice.
Thus, the direction you chose on going back to the old FF GUID was evidently the right one.

So, finally, we come to the one really great thing about Basilisk that's not in PM: menus in the Title Bar. Sure, it's just one little title bar, but with the Menu, Bookmarks, Navigation and Status bars enabled (not to mention Search), it would really be nice to reclaim the height of one of those bars. It would be good if it also worked when Tabs on Top wasn't checked. I tried a number of things to try to get that to happen:
  • Moonbat suggested using the Australium theme. While it does put the menu bar on top quite nicely, there are two problems with it: It's the only theme that does, whereas the default theme IMHO looks nicer (although I have just discovered "Firefox4 Aero bkg. color and moon", which has a nice moon theme too, but is lighter for readability: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/firefox4-aero-color-and-moon/). Basilisk had menus on the Title Bar with all its themes. Furthermore, if you open a new window, the Australium theme's menus are no longer on the Title Bar.
  • The PM extension "Menu On Top" seems to have no effect. It is listed as being compatible with "Pale Moon 25.0 to 28", but with all the toolbars showing and without Tabs on Top selected, it seemed to have no effect, when its support site suggested it should.
  • PM's Titlebar Tool puts Tabs in the Title Bar, which isn't what I'm looking for, although it would admittedly free up some room, but doesn't work with the menu showing.
  • The CAA extension Layout Plan only results in putting the menus at the far right.
  • The CAA extension Tabs always in Titlebar doesn't work if the Menu Bar is enabled.
  • The CAA extension Personal Titlebar 2.0 has enabled menus in the Title Bar by pressing F10, but went away on restarting the browser, and then seemed to quit working even for that.
  • The best CAA extension was Hide Caption Titlebar Plus 4.1.1 (which is also GPL 3.0), but after a Print Preview, it no longer shows the menus at the top, nor does it when you open a new window.
Thus, none of the available solutions is as good as Basilisk always showing the menus in the title bar, when they were enabled. The many attempts to do this demonstrate that the idea has been popular. Someone could make it an option in Preferences, or just make it the default in Basilisk; or else update one of the above extensions to work, or just wait for one of their authors to get it to work.

In short, all of the extensions I care about work in PM again, and the menus in the Title Bar issue is no stopper. I think there are some ideas in this post that could be followed up on (maybe even some by me if I get the time), but it seems well on its way to being a first-class browser again, with an exceptionally strong extension ecosystem; and without the political baggage of some others. It seems like things have gotten back on track around here.

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-10-01, 13:57

FTR, Basilisk is currently developed again by someone else. See its dedicated board. If you really want basilisk for its Australis interface you can use it. Entirely up to you.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by CodeLurker » 2022-10-01, 20:26

Just pointing out one thing, maybe the only thing of consequence to be lost, and of course, Basilisk is dead in the water. Maybe you missed what I was saying: "... it's not a stopper." Just pointing out that the recommended solutions aren't as good. The devs may not realize that. Perhaps the Australis theme could be modded to work on new windows, also. Myself, I'm trying to relate good news, in that in my mind, that's the ONLY thing PM doesn't now do as good or better - and I can say this as someone who uses a lot of extensions, has tried both browsers extensively, and has documented my experience, FWIW. BTW: Other tests for a good Australis-style GUI would be 1) Are the menus still at the top when not maximized, and 2) when not maximized, can you move the window by dragging the Title Bar. Just pointing these out, whether anyone ever does anything with them or not. Readers from the community might consider this an admittedly subjective and non-dev reassurance that IMHO, PM is currently the best browser available, from my POV - in spite of its current and recent challenges.

I would also say it's a good idea to run it in Sandboxie, or similar sandbox. (Note that in SBIE, the image on the splash screen is missing; when I rename a folder, it doesn't refresh automatically; and there is a very occasional crash when doing Save as on a link, when running from Sandboxie, it appears to work flawlessly in it. These are evidently SBIE issues, as it doesn't do that for me outside of it; and are worth-while tradeoff for me.) Running in a virtual machine would be another option. Oh yeah. And, don't surf the Web as Admin on Windows unless in a VM. That stopped about 60% of the hacks at one hackathon I saw a vid of.

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Basilisk-Dev » 2022-10-11, 22:11

CodeLurker wrote:
2022-10-01, 20:26
Basilisk is dead in the water.
This is false.
Basilisk Project Owner

viewtopic.php?f=61&p=230756

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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by moonbat » 2022-10-12, 03:25

Off-topic:
CodeLurker wrote:
2022-10-01, 08:31
Wikipedia has the Wikipedia Foundation, and thus an army of editors that can quickly undo malicious editing (or the addition of suppressed information).
And as we know they are all so totally unbiased and don't engage in edit wars or do the suppressing/bias themselves.
I remember when the site used to enforce a neutral point of view, and flag articles that were biased in providing information with a 'the NPOV of this article is disputed' banner. That has long since disappeared now and you should never use it for any political research.
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Re: What I'll Miss About Basilisk, and Thoughts About Direction

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-10-12, 08:30

Off-topic:
CodeLurker wrote:
2022-10-01, 08:31
Wikipedia has the Wikipedia Foundation, and thus an army of editors that can quickly undo malicious editing
That army of editors also continuously undoes legitimate changes they "do not agree with", i.e. Wikipedia has become more of an opinion resource than a factual one. Articles and edits to articles the mods agree with have a very low burden of proof bar. Legit edits they don't agree with are nigh impossible to make "stick" and not being undone by the army of editors which are extremely biased. I know, because I've spent a disproportionate amount of time getting the Pale Moon article approved and it literally took years of persistence (and up to 100 references) to even have it be recognised as something legitimate and worthy of an article.
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