Well, depends on whether you're talking about the application code or the UXP backend. The UXP backend is simple, that's based on ESR 52 with a ton of backports and custom code added on top. Also a lot of features we didn't want were carefully ripped out, and I believe a couple of features from older platforms were forward-ported to UXP in the process. What's less simple is the application side of things... that code comes from a far more highly customized base that is much older than UXP, and was adapted to it. UXP was a platform that had to be built to run Pale Moon, Pale Moon wasn't built on UXP originally. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what version of Firefox the Pale Moon GUI/Application is based on. I want to say it's somewhere between Firefox 20 and 26, because the code clearly comes from a pre-Australis Firefox, but other than that I am not sure.
The point is that it has elements of both original code and multiple versions of Firefox. It's been slowly but surely becoming its own thing, though still taking as much as it can from Firefox in the form of applicable patches.
fretless wrote: ↑2023-12-25, 14:28
Firefox itself is just Netscape Navigator with some new bugs and compromised functionality.
I mean, back in early 2000s... there was no difference between Netscape and Mozilla because they were using the same codebase, so there was a brief period where you could have said that and been correct. Most people thought Mozilla/Netscape 6 was a lot less reliable and useful than Netscape Navigator 4.x. I can imagine it going something like this:
"Mozilla is just Netscape without the branding." (First Mozilla releases, circa 1998).
"Firefox is just Mozilla without the e-mail and composer parts. Who would want that?" (First Firefox releases).
"SeaMonkey is just the Mozilla Application Suite without the branding. Why change the name?" (First SeaMonkey releases).
"SeaMonkey is a weird cross between Firefox and Thunderbird that isn't updated as much. Who would want that?" (Later SeaMonkey releases).
And yes, I'm sure Pale Moon itself has been through all those stages, and that some people will never see it as its own thing. Just like some people will never see Firefox as anything but a lot of bodges on top of old Netscape code, or will never see SeaMonkey as anything but a lot of bodges to keep the Mozilla Application Suite alive after Mozilla decided to go in the Firefox direction.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind