(split off) Pale Moon and Windows XP (reprise)

[andyprough]

He stopped?

No. And his builds are still useful even outside of winxp - sometimes it's handy to use them to test off PM (as a beta option)

So Feodor is the only one still doing it?

Fedor has stopped any work with uxp since 29.3. At the moment, he is quite successfully working on the fork of FF68 for win xp, so your attacks on him are outdated by, well, years

Oh that's it, roytam can't figure out how to move off from his fork of Pale Moon 27 and fedor gave up altogether and went with a Firefox 68 fork. Neither one is having any success keeping up, I don't see why you would see any value in their builds.

[Enobarbous]

Neither one is having any success keeping up, I don't see why you would see any value in their builds.

Because I am able to appreciate the work of other people, instead of enjoying my own "elitism"

[athenian200]

Fedor has stopped any work with uxp since 29.3. At the moment, he is quite successfully working on the fork of FF68 for win xp, so your attacks on him are outdated by, well, years

Oh yeah, I already knew about that years ago. For some reason people thought we would be mad about that or that we'd see it as a "burn," but why would we be upset? If he's working on a fork of FF68, he's not using any of our stuff or misrepresenting us. A Windows XP fork of Firefox 68 is actually kind of a cool project and something no one has ever seen before. I mean, the guy got Rust working on XP. That alone is impressive, and he wouldn't be doing that if he were still toying around with an iffy fork of UXP. Our project is about keeping a Rust-free version of the codebase alive on modern Windows, his is about backporting as much of modern Firefox as possible back to XP. Two totally different goals, going in almost opposite directions, and I think if we'd worked together we would have both stalled out meeting in the middle with a big mess based on false assumptions.

Now, I do wish we could have avoided some of the animosity between ourselves and the XP forks, and I think parts of it were avoidable, but we were always going to have the main tensions that revolve around us wanting a cleaner codebase, a certain degree of respect for our branding, and to be totally done with XP support. Like, there was always going to be frustration and tension to a degree, but it escalated way out of control for a few years there. I just hope things never reach that level again. As far as I am concerned, I'm happy with the status quo and have no desire to stir the pot with regards to the XP camp.

[gabrgv]

It amazes me to see everybody making fun about whoever wants to use the “outdated”, “EOLed”, “antiquated”, “obsolete” and “ancient” Windows XP, like the reason why they still want to use XP wasn’t, to some extent, the same why everybody here still uses passionately the throughout “outdated” and “obsolete” Pale Moon.

(I’m not suggesting you to bring the Windows XP “support” back, I’m just saying it’s not fair to be playing Tobin with those people.)

I still can't believe there's people out there who think there's no problem browsing the web with such an antiquated OS.

I may be wrong here, but, for whatever reason, the spirit of PM always was, for me, the exact opposite of this (I mean, you could simply replace “OS” with “browser”, and you’d have the thought of everyone outside PM). Who else on earth doesn’t think that XUL, NPAPI plugins, a skeuomorphic GUI, are anything but old crap?

(I’m not a Windows user, but I may be one of those who thinks that there probably is no problem browsing the web with XP.)

For me, PM is not about “now and the future” or, even less, about “modern” everything, but about being, above all, “user-friendly” in the sense that it doesn’t just keep putting undesirable “features” and ugliness down the users’ throat, and instead of moving on forward, it, in one hand, wisely keep the good things Firefox trashed out for the sake of the modern and the future (Google’s ideas, that is) and, in the other, tries very hard to keep the web browsable for sane people.

I know the two things are completely different, but the concepts share undeniable similarities. So you can’t just make fun and disregard XP in the account of being old, outdated and unsupported because it’ll be almost like you’re rhetorically shooting your own foot.

[athenian200]

It amazes me to see everybody making fun about whoever wants to use the “outdated”, “EOLed”, “antiquated”, “obsolete” and “ancient” Windows XP, like the reason why they still want to use XP wasn’t, to some extent, the same why everybody here still uses passionately the throughout “outdated” and “obsolete” Pale Moon.

I may be wrong here, but, for whatever reason, the spirit of PM always was, for me, the exact opposite of this (I mean, you could simply replace “OS” with “browser”, and you’d have the thought of everyone outside PM). Who else on earth doesn’t think that XUL, NPAPI plugins, a skeuomorphic GUI, are anything but old crap?

I know the two things are completely different, but the concepts share undeniable similarities. So you can’t just make fun and disregard XP in the account of being old, outdated and unsupported because it’ll be almost like you’re rhetorically shooting your own foot.

Well, the fundamental difference in my mind is that Pale Moon gets security updates and is open source. It may be forked from Firefox 52, but it has gotten a lot of patches over the years, and is now almost an entirely different beast while still retaining a lot of the important features of older Firefox, adapted to modern Windows, newer compilers, etc.

Also, there are some actively-maintained XUL extensions, there's nothing stopping anyone from building new NPAPI plugins, and skeuomorphic GUI is a design choice rather than something that is objectively out of date.

Windows XP, on the other hand, is closed-source and has not gotten security updates in a decade. It's a 32-bit operating system designed primarily for single-processor machines. It is completely dead and is not adapting to anything. Now, if Windows XP were open source and the XP users were maintaining a fork of Windows, that would be entirely different. But as it stands, they are holding onto something that cannot be revived or forked in any meaningful way.

I just don't understand how people think this is the same thing at all? To claim that is to imply a false equivalence between an open-source project that can legally be maintained and modified to adapt to modern environments, and a closed-source program that no one is allowed to modify or use without a proper license.

[Enobarbous]

For some reason people thought we would be mad about that or that we'd see it as a "burn," but why would we be upset?

In this case, it was a comment on the position of some people, and not an accusation of the PM team of anything. I'm just a little amused by the "those damn forkers for xp" rant, for some reason still fashionable on this forum...

[Moonchild]

I'm just a little amused by the "those damn forkers for xp" rant

I'm pretty sure that's a misrepresentation. The whole point here that started this reprise was, in fact, the exact opposite: OP of this topic explicitly and clearly laying 100% of blame at our feet for discontinuing XP support, and "all of this could have been avoided if only we would not have dropped XP" (paraphrasing), turning a complete blind eye to the necessity of moving forward with our support for OSes, compilers, etc.; it's been the XP proponents who keep bringing this up, not us. We're happy to let it be, and I'm personally perfectly fine with anyone taking UXP and making it XP compatible -- I just have the critical remark with it that it's really not a smart thing to do. In fact, I've always said that if those people ever want to upstream anything from their forks that would benefit everyone, they would be very welcome to do so -- but no, the "self-made fame" precludes treating Open Source in the spirit of Open Source, apparently.

Take also, for example, the fact that Microsoft still has not solved the instability issues with cross-compiled 32-bit Windows versions in MSVC from Visual Studio 17.4 onwards, and it's unlikely they will because it doesn't seem to manifest for smaller/less complex programs, and I've reported this quite a long while back now with no progress or even acknowledgement it's being researched. We're lucky that the last stable compiler supports our C++ language level needed for what we're currently developing on, or we would have had to drop 32-bit as a target as a whole.

[gabrgv]

I just don't understand how people think this is the same thing at all?

I know the two things are completely different

I was just implying that maybe a change in mindset, if not just speech, would be desirable, to abandon rudeness or contempt like this: “Sorry, granpa, we won’t be supporting your ancient OS and your decade old hardware, period. Because, what’s next? Windows 2000? And then you’re gonna want us to target your homemade bonfire hardware, you cave man? No, you better make yourself a favor and buy a at least AVX2 capable CPU, and put a decent GPU on it too, got that?”. (I’m not saying that you said that, or anything really.) You know, a lot of people use Pale Moon because it is lightweight and they are on weak, and thus probably old, hardware.


Edit: I agree with you when you argue that XP is intrinsically dead and has no future whatsoever, while Pale Moon and UXP, being what it is, although facing some adversity, is well alive and still has a good future ahead. It is just that the mentality that is keeping us from “moving on” to FF, may be, in some way, the same that is keeping XP users from upgrading to 7 or whatever. Just may be, I don’t know; but we should stop with the animosity and at least try to understand, right?

[Al6bus]

(I’m not suggesting you to bring the Windows XP “support” back, I’m just saying it’s not fair to be playing Tobin with those people.)

agree
Tobin has already managed to screw up a lot of things, there's no point in being like him...

[andyprough]

You know, a lot of people use Pale Moon because it is lightweight and they are on weak, and thus probably old, hardware.

I use a lot of ancient hardware. And I do the responsible thing and use GNU/Linux distros with current security updates. Windows XP machines have no security updates, and are often exploited and joined into botnets, which are used to spread nasties like ransomeware. Not good.

[athenian200]

I was just implying that maybe a change in mindset, if not just speech, would be desirable, to abandon rudeness or contempt like this: “Sorry, granpa, we won’t be supporting your ancient OS and your decade old hardware, period. Because, what’s next? Windows 2000? And then you’re gonna want us to target your homemade bonfire hardware, you cave man? No, you better make yourself a favor and buy a at least AVX2 capable CPU, and put a decent GPU on it too, got that?”. (I’m not saying that you said that, or anything really.) You know, a lot of people use Pale Moon because it is lightweight and they are on weak, and thus probably old, hardware.

Well, now that's a separate issue. I would say that the arguments against AVX as a minimum requirement are probably stronger than the arguments against Windows 7 as a minimum requirement. Realistically, a machine that can't even handle Windows 7 is not going to be a good target for Pale Moon anyway. But I'm very glad we have Nuck-TH helping us out with the SSE2 builds, simply because I think AVX as a hard requirement would sting a lot more than dropping XP support did. Now, obviously we can't officially support SSE2 as the official baseline forever... but leaving in support for building without AVX isn't a maintenance burden for us, so third-party builders are actually free to provide those versions. So yeah, I think we've always wanted to accommodate people on older stuff where it was workable/feasible without a huge burden on ourselves. There were SSE builds for Athlon XP and Pentium III at one point too, as a transitional option when the SSE2 baseline was set.

Edit: I agree with you when you argue that XP is intrinsically dead and has no future whatsoever, while Pale Moon and UXP, being what it is, although facing some adversity, is well alive and still has a good future ahead. It is just that the mentality that is keeping us from “moving on” to FF, may be, in some way, the same that is keeping XP users from upgrading to 7 or whatever. Just may be, I don’t know; but we should stop with the animosity and at least try to understand, right?

I do think the animosity is overstated a bit, and mostly isn't an official position. Though I will admit that in the computer industry in general, things move very fast and programmers in general find it frustrating and limiting when they can't take advantage of newer hardware/OS features that would improve the experience for 80% of users, because maybe 20% of users will get mad and protest loudly if you drop support for their old stuff. It's not really about animosity, it's about chafing under the limitations that accommodating such hardware and software requires us to work under. It's not about people at all, if anything I feel bad for the people, our minds are naturally just more focused on the software and hardware, what it can do and how well it can do it. It's a product of an impersonal focus on performance and functionality, rather than a desire to be rude or hateful.

And yeah, I suppose on a purely emotional level, Windows XP users are nostalgic for an older way of doing things, and so are Pale Moon users. But the similarities end there, and the ways in which we go about dealing with those feelings of nostalgia tend to be very different. Pale Moon users are, at their best, people who want to create their own vision of the future that strives to incorporate the good things about the past into something new, while Windows XP users keep their feet firmly planted in the past and tend to see any deviation from it as a bad thing.

Obviously, we unfortunately sometimes attract the latter type of user who has misunderstood our community, and they are often the most disillusioned by our direction. But I think if you look back, you'll see we always aimed to incorporate the past into a unique vision of the future rather than remain locked to the past.


Another awkward thing is that it feels like the legacy support trail demanded just keeps growing and growing as we get further from the late 2000s. It used to be that no one expected support of anything more than 5 years old. Then it turned into anything more than 10 years old. And now it's becoming more like 20+ years on, you still can't drop support for anything without someone making a fuss. People don't seem to realize it, but they've slowly gone from wanting 5-10 years of legacy support, to 20 or 30 years of legacy support, something that was once unheard of except for big corporations who wanted to keep stuff designed on old COBOL-based mainframes running, and they paid IBM heavily for that support. Now people want that level of support just as a matter of course, and it's not really clear why the window keeps reaching further and further back every year while acting like nothing has changed.

[ron_1]

Windows XP machines have no security updates, and are often exploited and joined into botnets, which are used to spread nasties like ransomeware. Not good.

This is exactly why I used the the word "antiquated" when referring to XP; not because it's necessarily old, but because it doesn't get security updates anymore.

[frostknight]

Fedor has stopped any work with uxp since 29.3. At the moment, he is quite successfully working on the fork of FF68 for win xp, so your attacks on him are outdated by, well, years

I was aware of this for a while. I looked at his github and found he is forking FF quantum.

No idea why... but yeah.



Known for like a year at least.

I don't know what caused him to do this though.

[andyprough]

I don't know what caused him to do this though.

Probably because modern Pale Moon literally will not build on Windows XP, at some point you just run out of all the tricks you can possibly throw at it and it's game over. Same reason roytam is stuck on Pale Moon 27 from 6 or 7 years ago. When your underlying OS never updates at all, it's going to be pretty much impossible to keep up with building an active modern web browser.

[Nuck-TH]

I don't know what caused him to do this though.

Probably because modern Pale Moon literally will not build on Windows XP, at some point you just run out of all the tricks you can possibly throw at it and it's game over. Same reason roytam is stuck on Pale Moon 27 from 6 or 7 years ago. When your underlying OS never updates at all, it's going to be pretty much impossible to keep up with building an active modern web browser.

Or because without responsible repository keeping hacks eventually piled up into unmaintainable mess. I've always had impression that this is why Tobin refused to work with them.

---

And about Win XP - my stance is that in isolated lan you can do whatever you want with whatever old OS your heart desire. But when contacting with outside world it is very irresponsible(both to possible other users of said lan and outside world - it can become another node of some botnets or be one more nest for virus spreading) to use software that is not security maintained.

[suzyne]

But when contacting with outside world it is very irresponsible(both to possible other users of said lan and outside world - it can become another node of some botnets or be one more nest for virus spreading) to use software that is not security maintained.

If a computer had a separate firewall device that allowed only https through (absolutely nothing else!), so Windows XP was on one side, and the internet on the other, would it be possible to use the computer and safely visit sites with a browser without fear? (And I guess I am assuming that the user doesn't click links to questionable web pages.)

[moonbat]

your attacks on him are outdated by, well, years

Couldn't give a shit who's building it for XP now, those 2 names came up because they were the ones originally doing it. Let anyone fork it for XP but also have the decency to support their users instead of offloading them here. If people want to use XP or anything else going back to 3.1 on the open web, that's their prerogative

[jobbautista9]

If a computer had a separate firewall device that allowed only https through (absolutely nothing else!)

You will need DNS too which runs in UDP port 53. Unless you also run it through DNS over HTTPS so you can have only TCP port 443 opened outbound (and all incoming is closed)... Is there software in Windows XP which lets you use DoH?

A lot of people nowadays are behind NAT which firewalls like all incoming ports anyway, which is why a lot of Windows XP diehards can probably get away with turning on internet in their insecure machine... I'm not sure if firewalling is completely foolproof though.

[CrimsonAkiha]

Let anyone fork it for XP but also have the decency to support their users instead of offloading them here.

You've made a lot of noise about this, but I don't think they actually are "offloading" any of their users here. They have their own (admittedly very messy) support thread/forum, with thousands of posts over multiple years by now (In fact, I think the only way to download their browser may be through that thread, although I don't use it, so I can't really say). If anyone is asking for help here, I think it's just their own fault, because as far is I know no one is going around cracking an evil laugh and whispering "Go bother the Pale Moon forum about it, heheheh" into people's ears all day, as you (and others) seem to be implying? Correct me if I'm wrong, though. Maybe the problem is more nuanced than that, but you just seemed pretty angry about it.

Oh that's it, roytam can't figure out how to move off from his fork of Pale Moon 27

This also seems to be misinformation as well. As far as I can see, Roytam's browser has feature parity with, and closely tracks upstream commits of, the very latest UXP. They do not appear to have any trouble getting modern Pale Moon's code working on Windows XP, although there are ways I personally think they could've done it more cleanly and with less legacy tools. It also doesn't seem to perform worse than Pale Moon when compiled equivalently in my testing either, which makes me skeptical of Moonchild's somewhat vague comments about the NT5 kernel earlier as well (I do already know that NT5 doesn't provide an API for SRWLocks, I am more wondering about what actual discernible effect this has on his browser). Again, I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm so wrong as to justify you automatically referring to Roytam as if he were just a stupid kid. That seems a bit arrogant to me.

I don't use Roytam's browser or Windows XP at the moment, so I don't have any skin in the game, but I guess I kind of worry that a lot of the discussions like this that take place on this forum seem (to me) to be fueled primarily by incredible outrage, bad assumptions, and bad rationalizations. As a relative outsider, I don't think this really improves Pale Moon's public perception of being needlessly outraged over people who experiment with their code.

Edit: I totally missed that this topic starts with a quote from moonbat referring to Roytam's browser as an "unsanctioned build" of Pale Moon, too, even though Roytam seems to have always had his own code and goes out of his way to compile the browser with unofficial branding. Geez. "Oi mate, do you have a license for that git clone?"

[moonbat]

They have their own (admittedly very messy) support thread/forum, with thousands of posts over multiple years by now (In fact, I think the only way to download their browser may be through that thread, although I don't use it, so I can't really say). If anyone is asking for help here, I think it's just their own fault, because as far is I know no one is going around cracking an evil laugh and whispering "Go bother the Pale Moon forum about it, heheheh" into people's ears all day, as you (and others) seem to be implying? Correct me if I'm wrong, though. Maybe the problem is more nuanced than that, but you just seemed pretty angry about it.

They need to make it clear to their users that their browser is a separate fork (just as Pale Moon is with regard to Firefox; it would be similarly pointless to go to Mozilla for help with Pale Moon) and to not keep pestering us here. Unfortunately, for whatever earlier disagreements with Moonchild, they don't seem to be bothered. A web browser is a complex product and is often the most used piece of software, it requires an ongoing commitment to support if there's any intention of building a community. This isn't some random library on Github that you use at your own risk after all. Why are they still dependent on MSFN forum threads instead of having their own clearly marked separate domain and forum like the one here? That in itself will make it clear for their users where to look for help. I get mad at those who show up here because it's a total damn waste of time when nobody here is browsing the net with XP.