Ultimate dream : android version of Pale Moon

[mestir999]

Hello, I find Pale Moon browser very powerful and at the same time lighter and more practical and comfortable and more energy efficient than other very heavy web browsers that wear out the battery and increase the temperature of our notebooks and smartphones !

So our ultimate dream please is a version of Pale Moon compatible for Android os !

It seems to me that I read there was a project started in 2013 of a special version of Pale Moon for android but unfortunately, this magnificent project was stopped in a mysterious way....

We know the technical complexity of all this projects and we thank a lot and we are so grateful for the Pale Moon team for all their efforts for the desktop version, and I'm even ready to use an emulator on android to use our so beloved Pale Moon but I can't because no such emulator exists for android

[Moonchild]

So our ultimate dream please is a version of Pale Moon compatible for Android os !

Sorry to shatter your dream but that will not happen.

For a while I published an Android version of the browser but it was simply not feasible to continue supporting it while developing the fork, least of all the moving target of Android OS which is actually quite hostile to non-Google browser engines.
It is also no longer possible to build the Goanna engine for Android as the support code for it was removed quite a while ago as a result of limiting our scope and focusing on desktop development.

[andyprough]

Last time I checked, my steps for installing Steve Pusser's ARM version of Pale Moon in a Debian vm running on an Android tablet still worked: viewtopic.php?f=65&t=28104&p=226856#p226856

I think you'd be using Steve's armhf.deb package now instead of his old raspbian package.

[Moonchild]

I don't think the average user would be running a Debian VM on their phone
Heck... I didn't even know you could do that.

[andyprough]

I don't think the average user would be running a Debian VM on their phone
Heck... I didn't even know you could do that.

It's definitely only for oddball people like me. And running Pale Moon on a phone would be terrible - with Pale Moon's UI you need a a decent sized tablet. But, on the bright side, all kinds of things are run in small vms and containers now, so it's not really that unusual. And it runs pretty good, even plays videos, although I think that getting sound to work is a bit of a problem, don't recall if I figured that out.

[mestir999]

I understand, thank you

it's a pity that the installation of non-chromium engines browsers is difficult, it seems to me that there is a smartphone produced by a company and the os of this smartphone is a cutsomized linux distribution apparently ....
we also hope that open source developers will be able to revive firefox os, maybe there would have been Pale Moon on smartphones if firefox os survived.... apparently firefox os is not completely dead and it survived under the name of B2G OS...

[back2themoon]

I'm still amazed at how limited and annoying smartphones are. Yes, they can be useful (here and there...) and there's a lot to admire in their confined space. But while being mostly a great gadget, IMO they remain a huge step backwards as far as computing is concerned.

There's a limit to what Web browsing, or anything else can achieve on a smartphone. So, no need to waste precious time on it. The only worthwhile goal seems trying to preserve some form of privacy - hence, not computing-related.

I guess the definition of computing has been altered though...

[moonbat]

It is now 10 years since internet traffic via smartphones overtook that on regular PCs - that was the beginning of the end as far as UI/UX usability of websites as well as regular desktop applications was concerned.

Even here you see people dismissing desktop UI as oLd aNd oUtDaTeD - because clearly it is much better to have gigantic fonts, icons that look like a 5 year old drew them with crayon, and tons of wasted whitespace forcing you to keep scrolling endlessly. Menus that are hidden behind hamburger buttons even though you've got a gigantic widescreen display and websites can perfectly well detect your display resolution and orientation to be able to show the menu as well the content without having to hide them as on a portrait mobile display.

The most frustrating thing is that it is perfectly possible to build a website that adjusts its font size and onscreen elements based on what your device is - and there do exist such sites, but they are the exception.

[distantpluto]

The most frustrating thing is that it is perfectly possible to build a website that adjusts its font size and onscreen elements based on what your device is - and there do exist such sites, but they are the exception.

I feel your pain, the web could be so much better without all the unnecessary cruft. I maintain my Father's site (musician), which is fairly small and basic admittedly but all hand written in a text editor and scales via CSS to fit the screen size. Does exactly the job he wants it to and not a single line of Javascript. If I can do it, so can anyone!

[Moonchild]

The most frustrating thing is that it is perfectly possible to build a website that adjusts its font size and onscreen elements based on what your device is - and there do exist such sites, but they are the exception.

Even more so, there have been not one, not two, but many specs and standards introduced to absolutely fluently respond to screen size changes (a lot of our current CSS complexity has to do with this directly - media queries, flexboxes, etc.). Yet in the end very few use them, and even fewer use them properly. Nobody really seems to understand what responsive design really is.

[athenian200]

Android version of Pale Moon would require a custom GUI for smartphones that looks nothing like what people are used to on desktop, and probably not be compatible with most XUL extensions anyway. I feel like if Windows 10 Mobile had survived, I probably could have gotten Pale Moon to compile on Windows for ARM and managed to get the Metro frontend working (Mozilla actually had an unfinished Metro-based frontend for Windows at one point), but I don't know anything about Android, honestly.

The other wrinkle is that it wouldn't be possible to make an iOS version because Apple only allows WebKit on their platform, and encouraging Google's monopoly by targeting only Android doesn't seem like a great plan to me. Also, the UXP codebase really isn't optimized for smartphones anyway, while Firefox and Chromium are optimized primarily for that platform nowadays. The niche Pale Moon fills, in my opinion, is desktop-first design that takes advantage of what a real laptop or desktop PC can do. Firefox is morphing into a half-baked browser clearly designed for mobile with desktop as a poorly-maintained afterthought, and I think an Android version of Pale Moon would suffer a similar fate, but in reverse... you'd likely wind up with a half-baked browser that is clearly designed for desktop with mobile as a poorly-maintained afterthought.

[Moonchild]

clearly designed for desktop with mobile as a poorly-maintained afterthought

This was one of the main reasons (next to not being a Java person which is required for Android) that I stopped trying to have an Android version. It would never be very good, and would just be half-baked, poorly maintained, and with little support. Reducing scope allowed the project to move forward trying to be the best it can.

[RealityRipple]

Imagine if someone had made a legacy Gecko-centric platform for mobile devices.

[suzyne]

I think an Android version of Pale Moon would suffer a similar fate, but in reverse... you'd likely wind up with a half-baked browser that is clearly designed for desktop with mobile as a poorly-maintained afterthought.

Totally agree. Except for the possibility of syncing data all the mobile versions of desktop browsers, only share a name (for effective promotion and mind-share) but never really share enough in common in terms of function and feel to truly deserve being labelled with the same desktop name.

Imagine if someone had made a legacy Gecko-centric platform for mobile devices.

Imagine if they didn't, and instead put all those resources into a better desktop browser. (Yes, I saw the sarcasm.)

[Mæstro]

The most frustrating thing is that it is perfectly possible to build a website that adjusts its font size and onscreen elements based on what your device is - and there do exist such sites, but they are the exception.

Wikipedia with the Monobook theme already does this, as can be seen on desktop by shrinking the browser window to mobile proportions, which makes the recent site design all the more baffling.