Pale Moon's PR Problem

[moonbat]

Normie-fication ruins everything, starting with the internet itself. It's perfectly fine for Pale Moon to remain niche as long as it is financially stable. As already noted, the desire for privacy and customization has long been trained out of the general public, an entire generation has grown up using nothing but Chrome.

[athenian200]

That's all. Also, put lots of bright shiny colors on your home page, and make your Linux Downloads page look like a simplified version of Veit Kannegeiser's Downloads page - a command for getting his key, a command for adding his repo to your source list, and instructions on running 'apt update' and 'apt install palemoon'. This is what all the big browsers do, since almost all the users are on some form of Debian or Ubuntu. People don't want to come to a Downloads page and say to themselves, "oh man, I have to figure out a freaking tarball?" Just being honest.

I mean, I've wondered about that myself... creating the tarballs is easier, but most projects targeting Linux seem to create .deb for Debian and derivatives, but also .rpm for Fedora and derivatives. That does leave every other Linux distro that doesn't do things the Fedora/RHEL way or the Debian way out in the cold, but it seems to be industry standard practice. I likely would have created .rpm and .deb packages for Pale Moon, saying they're compiled for Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora/RHEL, and hopefully work on any other distros that ship .deb or .rpm packages, but if not, too bad. The tarball thing is admittedly not what I would have picked if I were creating a project like this myself and had no influence from established precedent here. I do that for Epyrus in part because that's just the way UXP applications do things, but before I came here, yes, .rpm and .deb packaging would have been my instinct. In fact, we do have Linux users that do their own .deb packages for the community... but that's considered a community build, not something we ship officially, because that's just one user packaging something for their own distro as a one-off thing, not something generic that would work across Linux distros.

Sometimes it feels like we're kinda screwed if we can't get distros to ship us in their repos. Which is honestly how I suspect it is on Linux sometimes. The distros want to ship our package their way, using their system libs, and just have us be completely hands off, or else they won't touch it if we need things done differently. Combine that with reputational issues, and that's just not happening. Ultimately, I would say that's one of the things I don't like about Linux. It feels like it was a "walled garden" of sorts long before Android and iOS were, with users usually getting their stuff from a repo owned by their distro and compiled for their specific thing, and the developers having no say in how it's packaged or what kind of experience users get because the distro compiles the binaries and ships them their way. It means repos are gatekeepers like Google is with Android, only they are less professional and will reject us for petty reasons or reasons we don't think are valid. And the users... trust their distro and want to use those repos, being hesitant to add a third-party repo. I think Android resembles a Linux distro a lot more than most would like to admit. A centralized Play Store (repo from your distro) people get most of their stuff from, but you can also download other app stores (like adding a third-party repo). Smartphone companies seemingly just took that model, locked it down a bit more, and commercialized that type of trust when creating their stores.

I think part of the issue is our project is just not very... compatible with the Linux way of doing things. We don't really have a lot of respect for distros and their role as repo gatekeepers that most in the Linux community seem happy to accept, we don't particularly want to change how we do things to accommodate them, and they also aren't going to change how they do things to accommodate us. I feel like succeeding on Linux would probably require us to be very hands-off regarding branding and use of system libs, and just generally allow people to ship anything and call it Pale Moon. The open source community... doesn't like rules. And the whole "no rules" approach isn't really our way. There are seemingly fewer Linux users of Pale Moon relative to desktop Linux marketshare, which is already a low number. Our users are disproportionately on Windows, Linux people just... don't like the vibe of this project and honestly we sometimes don't like the vibe of Linux users because it seems like they aren't keen on letting application maintainers control branding or user experience, and want open source to mean nearly public domain a lot of the time. Sometimes I do wonder how successful we would have been on Linux if we just didn't give a crap what anyone did with our application... but we're just not that kind of project, and sometimes it seems like that's what it takes to win on Linux.

I will just admit this... I was a Windows Phone user for a long time and used to hang around in Microsoft fan circles up until about 2018. I'm familiar with the Microsoft way, and what a lot of Microsoft shops do. And the truth is... I felt a lot more at home here in the Pale Moon community than I did around basically any other open source project. But sometimes I wonder if some of the very things that make this place feel like home and that cause me to naturally respect it, are exactly why many Linux users dislike it. I would have to admit I'm likely very different from the average Linux user. It's just not... a good cultural fit for me. LOL.

I don't know much about how Windows users get software, maybe you are already doing that right and they just need to stop hearing anything related to Firefox.

That I'm pretty confident Moonchild is handling right, we distribute our own .exe files, and even have a listing in the Windows store, though honestly most Windows users don't use the Windows Store, it wasn't too hard to get Microsoft to list us in it just in case.

This is just marketing 101 kind of stuff. I may be wrong on some of my assumptions, but probably not. Who among us has ever known a long-term, commmitted openBSD home desktop user? Who among us has ever known a mypal user who wasn't an XP extremist (or we ourselves were trying it to get internet access on an XP box)? The long-term plummeting, cratering, death spiral Firefox user base numbers speak for themselves, and even THEY claim "latest, greatest, most private, secure thing ever" to try to prop themselves up, but hardly anyone is buying it any longer.

I don't think you're wrong, for what it's worth. I see where you're coming from, I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project. Maybe Pale Moon should not do Linux itself, and someone with a better understanding of the Linux community should build their own browser on top of UXP and ship that, no association with us? That's the only way I can think of to promote UXP on Linux... do something like a Linux equivalent of what dbsoft is doing with White Star and his own forum, maybe Green Penguin or something with Tux in the name? LOL.

[Mæstro]

I will just admit this... I was a Windows Phone user for a long time and used to hang around in Microsoft fan circles up until about 2018. I'm familiar with the Microsoft way, and what a lot of Microsoft shops do. And the truth is... I felt a lot more at home here in the Pale Moon community than I did around basically any other open source project. But sometimes I wonder if some of the very things that make this place feel like home and that cause me to naturally respect it, are exactly why many Linux users dislike it. I would have to admit I'm likely very different from the average Linux user. It's just not... a good cultural fit for me. LOL.

I think this leaves you as another kind of Windows refugee.

It's perfectly fine for Pale Moon to remain niche as long as it is financially stable. As already noted, the desire for privacy and customization has long been trained out of the general public, an entire generation has grown up using nothing but Chrome.

Splintering due to animosity from people who forked off from us to go "full retro", which was never one of our goals.

It really looks like the browser engine monoculture may be here to stay. Microsoft couldn't beat Chrome, Firefox is losing despite being funded by Google and them using kid gloves to avoid killing that project, so... I hate to say it, maybe Chromium is just too entrenched in the ecosystem now for people to ever have a choice of browser again. Maybe everyone who ever wanted something different has already lost and we're all just too stubborn to give up anyway.

Pale Moon has ended up retro by default, for the simple reason that, now that there are adults who have been using nothing but Google, Microsoft or Apple ‘apps’ since early childhood and cannot imagine anything else, preferring something else ipso facto places us in an IT cultural milieu which is almost fifteen years removed from popularity.

The only at all plausible way I could see the situation changing now would be geopolitical: Brussels, Moscow or Peking take enough interest in the matter to recognise that letting US-based Google stipulate web standards on a whim is unwise, and instead promulgate an official, normative alternative standard for the respective jurisdiction. Whether the cure is worse than the disease is another matter, but it would surely be more stable, for bureaucracy is slower than Silicon Valley. I am reminded now that Korea ruled for a while that all online commerce must use a specific ActiveX plug-in for security.

[athenian200]

Pale Moon has ended up retro by default, for the simple reason that, now that there are adults who have been using nothing but Google, Microsoft or Apple ‘apps’ since early childhood and cannot imagine anything else, preferring something else ipso facto places us in an IT cultural milieu which is almost fifteen years removed from popularity.

Yeah, I feel like that's a huge problem because I don't see developing some retro thing that has no future and caters to sad people who live in the past as worthwhile... if that's all we CAN do, then I'm not sure if I regard that as a worthwhile goal and may need to reassess a lot of things in the next couple of years. I have a lot invested in UXP, but as I've stated a few times, I don't really want to do "retro," and sometimes it feels like that's the only thing people want from us. UXP is way too much work for it to just be someone's nostalgia trip.

[andyprough]

I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project.

I'm just saying, the PR problem for Pale Moon is not to do with these little yapping adversaries from the past, it's the fact that people mentally associate Pale Moon with Firefox. People do not want Firefox, as you pointed out they are down to 3% market share and dropping like a rock. And I can't think of a single Firefox-based browser that is currently gaining any market share, or that has more than a tiny piece of the market measured in tenths of a percent or hundredths of a percent. On the other hand, people get excited about independently developed alternative browsers. Lady Bird gets tons of positive press, even though every time I try it, it renders pages pretty badly. But it's different, and new, and not associated with Firefox or chromium, and so people romanticize about what it might become. If Pale Moon could be promoted as it's own, independent thing, with strong security advantages over existing browsers (both of which are completely true), without any association with Firefox, you could have a surge of popularity.

I was thinking about this earlier. You remember in the Fellowship of the Ring movie, in Moria, when Gandalf was breaking the bridge, and the Balrog was falling into the abyss? You did not want to be standing near the edge of the abyss like Gandalf was, because the Balrog was certain to grab you by the ankles with his fiery whip and drag you down with him. The analogy is that Firefox is the Balrog, plummeting without any hope of stopping down to the bottom of the abyss, and it has wrapped its fiery whip around the ankles of the various Firefox-associated browsers. Pale Moon is standing too near to the edge of the abyss and is being dragged down by association. The lesson? Step back from the abyss. In fact, run, as fast as you can, away from the abyss.

That does leave every other Linux distro that doesn't do things the Fedora/RHEL way or the Debian way out in the cold, but it seems to be industry standard practice.

You could still keep the tarball, nothing wrong with it and it will be a huge help to people not on the most mainstream of distros. But I would eventually move it off to the side and make a primary Linux installation page like other browsers have with at least the .deb install commands, if not also the .rpm install commands. You could link the tarballs at the bottom of the page "For other distros", something like that. Moonchild just changed the Downloads page to be a bit more friendly to the GTK3 tarball, so no reason to make a big change immediately, but long-term, if you want a lot more Linux users, yes that would help a lot. And not being associated in any way with Firefox.

[gabrgv]

Literally no one on earth (maybe a tiny handful of the most extremist fringe security people) uses openBSD as a home desktop.

The exact kind of people who would prefer Pale Moon over other bloated browsers, and wouldn't mind incompatibility with a few sites. I think it's worth to seek peace with them.

Literally no one on earth (maybe a tiny handful of the most extremist fringe xp users) uses mypal.

These literally would use Pale Moon if they could.

Pale Moon has ended up retro by default[...].

I agree.

Just as a side note, the IRIX and Plan9 folks are also without a browser. Just saying...

(Note: When I say here "Pale Moon", most of the times I mean "Goanna-based browsers".)

I don't think it's worth pursuing to cater to trendy Linux users because they would think Pale Moon is ugly and laggy. But, if you really want that, one "easy" thing someone could do is to provide one theme mimicking the interface of Chrome and another mimicking interface of Firefox (would be a lot of work keeping it always up do date, though). And you'd really have to implement CSD on the GTK3 version.

When it comes to packaging for Linux, it looks to me as the thing preventing it from being packaged for major distros, besides the lack of interest, is the licensing problem, at least historically (vide Debian vs. Mozilla). Another thing that may be preventing the packaging is that most distros don't seem to package Firefox and Chromium forks, and they wrongly perceive Pale Moon as being one of those. I don't think that providing .debs and .rpms would be easier on normies: if it's not on the repos, it's gonna be hard for them. Maybe a step-by-step how to "install" and run from the tarballs would be enough.

For me, it looks like Chrome and Firefox "privacy" forks (and Firefox itself, too!) are implementing built-in ad blockers just to circumvent the limitations of Manifest V3. That said, having an (not built-in, but easily installable) ad blocker could make Pale Moon stand out (I know it kind of does). Better yet if it could be advertised (xD) as being the faster and most powerful ad blocker of them all (XUL extensions are more powerful, right?). Having a built-in ad blocker makes a browser looks unprofessional to me (except for Dillo, which totally rocks).

Another thing that could increase the userbase is making a clear statement against the use of AI-generated "code" to contribute to the project and then request the inclusion of Pale Moon on this list. The only sensible browser they endorse is Waterfox, but, being it based on Firefox, AI slop is inevitable. (Yeah, their politics annoys me, too.) Also, making it to the Lunduke's Non-Woke Software List would be very much desirable, as he, too, doesn't has any browser to recommend (Ladybug is vibecoded, and Brave is a meme, at best).

Also, would be good to advertise that Pale Moon is the only up to date browser that supports NPAPI plugins. Maybe writing a page explaining what that is, and comparing it to Ruffle and to modern Web things that are "basically the same thing but for some reason don't get labeled as insecure" would be good.

The thing that, in my opinion, Pale Moon gets politically wrong is that it insists on being "modern" when it clearly is not. Not that it does not has JavaScript support or is not able to display modern Websites, etc.; I don't mean "modern" vs. "old", I mean "modern" vs. "traditional". And I think that's what Pale Moon is and what it should strive to be. Anyway, that's the way I see it, maybe I'm the one perceiving things wrong here. Please, clarify if that's the case.

(I know that you guys are lacking manpower, I made suggestions here purely ex suppositione.)

[Mæstro]

Yeah, I feel like that's a huge problem because I don't see developing some retro thing that has no future and caters to sad people who live in the past as worthwhile[…] I don't really want to do "retro," and sometimes it feels like that's the only thing people want from us. UXP is way too much work for it to just be someone's nostalgia trip.

I see the matter another way. Nature does not know the year. There is no inherent reason that sensible browser design like yours, which permits far more than ‘consume content in a web app surrounded by flat design’, ought to be confined to the realm of nostalgia, even if Google and friends want it that way because it means more profit for them. The future is made of human choices. We are among those who reject Google’s vision in favour of one which was more popular in 2010, and will therefore appear antiquated. If it were not for Google constantly undoing your work, I do not think that conflicts between you and the true retrocomputing users would erupt nearly as often.

But, if you really want that, one "easy" thing someone could do is to provide one theme mimicking the interface of Chrome and another mimicking interface of Firefox (would be a lot of work keeping it always up do date, though).

This already exists, for those out there who really want to think of Pale Moon as an ‘app’ that will let them ‘consume content’ from the most up-to-date ‘platforms’.

Another thing that could increase the userbase is making a clear statement against the use of AI-generated "code" to contribute to the project and then request the inclusion of Pale Moon on this list.

This has already been done with other lists of LLM-free softrware, but more surely helps.

Lunduke's Non-Woke Software List would be very much desirable

Declaring Pale Moon non-woke would itself associate Pale Moon with specific, highly controversial political opinions. Pale Moon is a browser, not a platform, whether for ‘web apps’ or Political Ideology X.

[athenian200]

I was thinking about this earlier. You remember in the Fellowship of the Ring movie, in Moria, when Gandalf was breaking the bridge, and the Balrog was falling into the abyss? You did not want to be standing near the edge of the abyss like Gandalf was, because the Balrog was certain to grab you by the ankles with his fiery whip and drag you down with him. The analogy is that Firefox is the Balrog, plummeting without any hope of stopping down to the bottom of the abyss, and it has wrapped its fiery whip around the ankles of the various Firefox-associated browsers. Pale Moon is standing too near to the edge of the abyss and is being dragged down by association. The lesson? Step back from the abyss. In fact, run, as fast as you can, away from the abyss.

Definitely get the reference here... I think part of the problem is our identity is very tied to XUL and NPAPI. Those things are associated with, basically, old versions of Firefox. Hence our branding problem. I remember when I was trying to search for Pale Moon a while back, the top autocomplete results I got were "pale moon use old firefox extension" and "pale moon use flash player" or something similar, which really does highlight the problem. People seeking out Pale Moon are the ones who want to use an old extension or plugin Firefox can't run anymore. Effectively making us open-source legacy support for Firefox users that Mozilla didn't want to provide, whether we want to be or not. And that is still in many ways our primary selling point. I sometimes wonder if we need... something else. I just don't know what that would be. A "killer app" based on XUL that people would download Pale Moon to use? Or maybe engine improvements that don't come from Mozilla but are rooted in independent development.

I came to this project because I was a bit excited about the idea of developing an alternative browser engine... not because I specifically cared about XUL extensions or even NPAPI (though I admittedly enjoy Flash player). Sometimes I wonder if the "way out" is to focus on doing something no one has done before, rather than on the things we can still do that Firefox can't anymore. The stuff about UXP that seems exciting to me is when we move forward with things like newer compilers, porting to other operating systems, newer libraries, newer toolkits, options opening up to use different memory allocators, etc. But all that is under the hood... what can we really do that is visible to users and not just nice to look at under the hood?

You could still keep the tarball, nothing wrong with it and it will be a huge help to people not on the most mainstream of distros. But I would eventually move it off to the side and make a primary Linux installation page like other browsers have with at least the .deb install commands, if not also the .rpm install commands. You could link the tarballs at the bottom of the page "For other distros", something like that. Moonchild just changed the Downloads page to be a bit more friendly to the GTK3 tarball, so no reason to make a big change immediately, but long-term, if you want a lot more Linux users, yes that would help a lot. And not being associated in any way with Firefox.

Oh, he liked the idea? That is good to hear. I am glad it's no longer listed as the first option. Anyway, I do know how to package .rpm myself, and could do that in our current build environment fairly easily. .deb is actually the one that would be a little more challenging since I don't know my way around Debian-based distros. I used Linux-Mandrake back in the day, and played around with Mandriva and Mageia a few times after that, and also have worked with a lot of RHEL or Fedora-based systems at this point because that became "the corporate standard." So by an odd coincidence, most of my Linux experience is on RPM-based distros, and the only real exposure I've had to .deb is installing Ubuntu for a friend about a decade ago because I heard it was easy to use, and maybe running Mint in a VM one time to troubleshoot a user's problem. Of course, I also ran Gentoo and followed the LFS handbook one time.

Another thing I do think about a lot, is whether we are developer-friendly. One thing I've learned is that a lot of times, the platform that's easiest to develop for succeeds because it draws the most contributors, and all those contributions build up an ecosystem that starts improving itself and holding itself together quickly. That is one lesson I learned from being a Microsoft fan and hanging around those people. The N64 doing worse than the PS1 because of developer tooling and storage issues despite being more powerful on paper also hammered that home. That is, the key to success is creating a platform that appeals to developers as much directly appealing to users. If developers like working with your stuff, they will build on it, and the stuff they build will attract users even if the foundation isn't the best, even if it's as buggy and transitional as Windows 9x was.

From this perspective, our real problem may well be that it's not easy to develop for Pale Moon. It's not always easy to dig in and start contributing code, not easy to write XUL extensions or new UXP applications, there's very little documentation and not much to hold your hand. That just isn't stuff we've taken the time to prioritize because we're too busy maintaining what we have rather than doing work that doesn't have an immediate tangible benefit and which isn't guaranteed to pay off. I don't know if that angle is worth considering, but it is one my mind keeps going back to naturally.

[andyprough]

Literally no one on earth (maybe a tiny handful of the most extremist fringe security people) uses openBSD as a home desktop.

The exact kind of people who would prefer Pale Moon over other bloated browsers, and wouldn't mind incompatibility with a few sites. I think it's worth to seek peace with them.

So you would a) waste the time negotiating with people who previously proved themselves completely unwilling to negotiate, and b) waste the time setting up proper build environment, for c) pretty much zero additional users.

This is the kind of backwards thinking that kills open source projects.

[andyprough]

Definitely get the reference here... I think part of the problem is our identity is very tied to XUL and NPAPI. Those things are associated with, basically, old versions of Firefox. Hence our branding problem. I remember when I was trying to search for Pale Moon a while back, the top autocomplete results I got were "pale moon use old firefox extension" and "pale moon use flash player" or something similar, which really does highlight the problem. People seeking out Pale Moon are the ones who want to use an old extension or plugin Firefox can't run anymore. Effectively making us open-source legacy support for Firefox users that Mozilla didn't want to provide, whether we want to be or not. And that is still in many ways our primary selling point. I sometimes wonder if we need... something else.

You already have something else - the only modern browser with single process security. Everyone used to be extremely concerned about speed. Now that black-hat hackers with AI tools are exploiting everything in site with increasing speed, there's going to be a growing cry for a more secure browser, even if it isn't as fast.

Sometimes I wonder if the "way out" is to focus on doing something no one has done before, rather than on the things we can still do that Firefox can't anymore.

It definitely is the way out. 97% of people don't care about Firefox or they have outright dislike for Firefox and/or Mozilla, as you know. And that disinterest/dislike is accelerating.

The stuff about UXP that seems exciting to me is when we move forward with things like newer compilers, porting to other operating systems, newer libraries, newer toolkits, options opening up to use different memory allocators, etc. But all that is under the hood... what can we really do that is visible to users and not just nice to look at under the hood?

Well, if you aren't tied to keeping alive a past that is largely disliked at this point, then the world is your oyster. You could be as creative as you wanted to be. Obviously one thing that is going to drive adoption over the next several years is going to be providing security from the impending AI-enabled internet apocalypse.

the only real exposure I've had to .deb is installing Ubuntu for a friend about a decade ago because I heard it was easy to use, and maybe running Mint in a VM one time to troubleshoot a user's problem

Trust me, you've got tons of people in this community with the exact experience that would probably be more than happy to lend a helping hand or guide you in the mystical, arcane, cultic ways of deb packaging.

From this perspective, our real problem may well be that it's not easy to develop for Pale Moon. It's not always easy to dig in and start contributing code, not easy to write XUL extensions, there's very little documentation and not much to hold your hand. That just isn't stuff we've taken the time to prioritize because we're too busy maintaining what we have rather than doing work that doesn't have an immediate tangible benefit and which isn't guaranteed to pay off. I don't know if that angle is worth considering, but it is one my mind keeps going back to naturally.

I don't know, seems to me I've seen people dropping in more frequently to share contributions and extensions in recent months than I've ever seen. I'm sure that the AI coding assistants are a huge help. I've been thinking of trying to code a couple of extensions myself, since I already have an expensive AI subscription I could tap into. And I know literally zero about coding for XUL, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I could do it with the help of a competent AI coding assistant.

[jobbautista9]

Literally no one on earth (maybe a tiny handful of the most extremist fringe security people) uses openBSD as a home desktop.

The exact kind of people who would prefer Pale Moon over other bloated browsers, and wouldn't mind incompatibility with a few sites. I think it's worth to seek peace with them.

I don't think the OpenBSD people care about bloat more than being obsessed with security theater. The project founder prefers Chromium over Firefox because it does multiprocess better: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2

Perhaps he may be right that Chromium does it better, but the email also shows that he thinks the multi-process model is a must for web browsers (and as many components should be separated into their own processes), which we disagree with.

[jobbautista9]

Sometimes it feels like we're kinda screwed if we can't get distros to ship us in their repos. Which is honestly how I suspect it is on Linux sometimes. The distros want to ship our package their way, using their system libs, and just have us be completely hands off, or else they won't touch it if we need things done differently.

At this point it might be worth a try to change our attitude a bit in this front. Maybe we should let distros use system libs (and that's our only concession) while allowing the use of the Pale Moon name, but as a condition they should change the default start page and first install page to one that makes it clear to the user that they are using their distro's build and should report any bugs there first. We could require changing the About window and Help menu as well to link to their bugtracker instead of our forum. That way they would be incentivized to fix any issue that comes with system lib usage, and perhaps they might give back by upstreaming their fixes as what FOSS should be. It's a compromise, but one fairer to us than the deal Mozilla did with Debian for the latter to quit using their own Iceweasel branding. Having more eyes and hands on the third-party libraries would be a nice outcome; I'd imagine NSS and ICU benefiting the most from this (currently I don't think it's possible to use the latest upstream version of those two libs, even if we haven't yanked system lib support out of them).

I don't think you're wrong, for what it's worth. I see where you're coming from, I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project. Maybe Pale Moon should not do Linux itself, and someone with a better understanding of the Linux community should build their own browser on top of UXP and ship that, no association with us? That's the only way I can think of to promote UXP on Linux... do something like a Linux equivalent of what dbsoft is doing with White Star and his own forum, maybe Green Penguin or something with Tux in the name? LOL.

It would be another Iceweasel situation IMO, and I don't think mainstream distros would want to repeat that for a browser even smaller in reach than Firefox.

[athenian200]

I don't know, seems to me I've seen people dropping in more frequently to share contributions and extensions in recent months than I've ever seen. I'm sure that the AI coding assistants are a huge help. I've been thinking of trying to code a couple of extensions myself, since I already have an expensive AI subscription I could tap into. And I know literally zero about coding for XUL, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I could do it with the help of a competent AI coding assistant.

Yeah, this is one reason why I was reluctant to reply to this guy above's post (I can't ever remember his username, but it sounds like garbagev or something) where he suggested we try to get on some kind of Codeberg list for people who reject AI. The problem is... our project is actually a position where AI could really help us out a lot, and you just highlighted a big reason why.

Most projects turn into AI slop because the developers used to carefully code new features themselves from scratch. In our case, we actually spend a lot of time trying to adapt half-busted code Mozilla wrote to our own architecture by hand, and that's where most of our experience lies... cleaning up bad or broken code that makes wrong assumptions and testing to make sure everything behaves as expected even if we didn't write every line ourselves. So guess what that means as far as us being prepared for what AI can offer?

From what I can tell, using AI generated code to accomplish something is a lot like using Mozilla's code... the output won't be perfect and you'll have to fix it up, but it will be "close enough" in a lot of cases that you can turn it into what you want with a little effort. Much less than starting from scratch.

I mean... we don't have a ton of developers. Something like AI could help our existing developers do more, and maybe even help tech-savvy people in the community make the jump to writing actual code. I do worry about us using it though, precisely because we have a lot of old-school users who would see AI as bad. My view is... using AI for code is very different from using it for art or writing. I can understand people's objections to it in those contexts, but I honestly feel like refusing to use AI would almost be like refusing to use an IDE that does code completion type stuff, or refusing to look up code snippets on Stack Overflow and copy/paste them and adapt them to what you need if they're "close enough," and in general would be like going Amish in the technology sense.

[Mæstro]

Well, if you aren't tied to keeping alive a past that is largely disliked at this point, then the world is your oyster.

How do you mean?

[andyprough]

Well, if you aren't tied to keeping alive a past that is largely disliked at this point, then the world is your oyster.

How do you mean?

Firefox's plummeting marketshare. Did you know it's down to 0.5% in mobile? Ouch. Doesn't mean Pale Moon devs can't continue to do what they are doing, but, at some point in the future, promoting it as a new browser that is untethered from Firefox's past would be useful. In fact, not mentioning Firefox at all, anywhere, would be quite an exciting experiment to try.

In fact, re-writing and replacing everything that is licensed in any way to Mozilla would be quite exciting. Like Richard Stallman replacing every piece of Unix with self-written GNU, GCC, emacs, etc back in the day. Probably an enormous task. But at the end you'd have a whole new thing. And who in their right mind would not want to try a whole new thing, that, unlike recent versions of Lady Bird, actually browses the web. And leaves less attack surface than other browsers because it is single process.

Now that's something to think about. I wonder how many full time devs it would take to re-write and replace anything licensed to Mozilla? Probably a lot. But boy would it be cool.

[Moonchild]

promoting it as a new browser that is untethered from Firefox's past would be useful

We've already done that for years, unless you mean promoting it as something that has no historic links to Firefox and doesn't draw on Firefox/Mozilla development, and that would just be an outright lie which we will absolutely, without question, be called out for. Then we'll get to deal with being called "fake" alongside other terms opponents are already using. If I wanted to kill the project, then that would be a very good way to do it. Fixing our PR? No way.

In fact, re-writing and replacing everything that is licensed in any way to Mozilla would be quite exciting.

You mean every single one of the 100,000+ files in our tree? I'll get right on that...
(might as well make it non-FOSS if we're going to do that, instead of just handing all that work on a silver platter to characters who are happy enough to take and not give back).

---

I did have a good read through the discussion here once more and there are a few things I think are an issue.

• Our adoption rate in Linux is low. Is that tied to our licensing? Maybe, maybe not. If I wanted to just throw my hands up in the air and let distros or BSDs do their own thing with official branding slapped on, then I could, but would that actually improve our PR or would that be seen as abandonment of Linux? Also, would that actually help with our project being contributed to? Doubtful, and certainly not any time soon. It's like playing "hope chess" -- you hope that a few moves in the future you'll get an opening, or that the opponent remains oblivious to what you're doing, instead of actually having a strategy.
• Closely related: "The distros want to ship our package their way, using their system libs, and just have us be completely hands off, or else they won't touch it if we need things done differently."
  So, how would us packaging RPMs and DEBs help there? It wouldn't, because the distros would still want to do it their special and unique way. That, and perceived bias for any specific philosophy because "we're publishing package format X or Y associated with distro (and philosophy) Z". Requesting that they change their firstrun page in the browser to indicate they are responsible, or any other restriction, is likely also going to get more pushback unless we give them full freedom over it and effectively making it public domain. The only real solution would be completely stepping back from the entire *nix-like ecosystem. Once again though: would that be good for PR? Or seen as just abandonment?
• "normie" users, regardless of O.S., are just not interested in what we're doing. The current generation's approach to things clashes pretty hard with my approach to what we're doing here. Everything has to work right away, with literally zero effort. We can't deliver on that, because we aren't in control of the levers that make that possible, because it is a web browser. Is that a problem with our PR? No, not really. Unless, once again, we're going to just lie about who we are and what we're doing. I don't like to, as the Dutch say, "spin a wheel in front of someone's eyes" (effectively being deceptive in-your-face and distracting users from real matters)
• I have no issue with people using AI coding assistants - but it has to, much more than normal, be scrutinized in the review process. That would, in turn, put a lot more pressure on reviewers and likely leading to the state a ton of other FOSS projects are in with hundreds or thousands of pull requests just sitting there and going stale for months or years on end. which is pretty disrespectful to the people who actually made the pull requests. I've been clear from the start that using the best tool for the job is actually a thing I strongly believe in. The problem I have with AI is integrating it into the end user's workflow. Are people really conflating the two, now? They are entirely separate things.
• Re-definition of "modern". A modern browser, in my definition, is one that aims to use modern standards. It has zero to do with optics or "looking `modern` i.e. flat and drab". It contrasts with the whole "old Firefox". Calling us "traditional" won't solve that either. Would any term really work there? People are going to interpret it how they want to see it, either way, I think. If there's a language-shift consensus then I'm happy to adapt the wording on the website accordingly, but it has to be clear and globally acceptable.
  Leaning into the "single-process security" might be a good angle, though. I'll give it some thought. Effectively, IPC is exposing the guts of the application to the O.S.
• "Non-woke"... While I understand the angle here and I agree there's a ton of PR fluff around some browsers about being "super-inclusive" and what not (to a fault), I don't want to be broadcasting such a message. Not in the least because I'm neither "woke" (also: define that for me, please? I've heard plenty of weird explanations what it's supposed to be; I have my own definition of it. And also, it's why I don't actually use the term, because it's ambiguous or people using it as excuses) nor "non-woke", and don't want to put any sort of label or political/cultural/religious message on Pale Moon. Yes, snagging a specific demographic would be easy with the right propaganda, but that would really go against what the project was founded on.
• Our identity is closely tied to XUL and NPAPI. But that isn't Firefox. Should we lean heavy on NPAPI? If so, there has to be a healthy and vibrant ecosystem of plugins in active use... and I don't see that. The constant hammering on the lie that "NPAPI is a security risk" by mainstream has done its job.
  XUL? People don't even really know what it means. I really do wish there were more people building XUL applications on the platform, demonstrating XUL's flexibility. Maybe someone needs to make a XUL application framework (other than the rather clunky XULrunner), maybe an IDE written in XUL to easily make XUL applications with UXP as a runtime, or what not. It would be an interesting project but not something I personally could put time in.
• Pale Moon being "retro" by default? I really disagree with that sentiment. For me, retro not only means "not the current trend", but it means actively targeting obsolete hardware or platforms by design. I do not want to have the "retro" label slapped on, because that completely misses the mark.
  But hey, maybe Pale Moon just needs to stop trying to integrate with the O.S. completely and ship with a fully overriding theme that is "new and unique" to get rid of that stigma (along with the Firefox one, if the majority of people really want to dissociate with that)

So, not saying these things are all insurmountable (although some are really putting the future onto a knife's edge) but they do need to be considered very very carefully.

[frostknight]

"Non-woke"... While I understand the angle here and I agree there's a ton of PR fluff around some browsers about being "super-inclusive" and what not (to a fault), I don't want to be broadcasting such a message. Not in the least because I'm neither "woke" (also: define that for me, please? I've heard plenty of weird explanations what it's supposed to be; I have my own definition of it.

I really wish the word woke was being used correctly by the world. It really just means you just became awake.

Also, based is taken out of context to mean the opposite of woke.

Both of those words are used in ways that are BS.


enough said there.

People do not want Firefox, as you pointed out they are down to 3% market share and dropping like a rock. And I can't think of a single Firefox-based browser that is currently gaining any market share, or that has more than a tiny piece of the market measured in tenths of a percent or hundredths of a percen

Why anyone would use chrome is just beyond me.

Chrome is made by google...

Supporting google is basically like saying, let's kill privacy for good!

[UCyborg]

I think one reason for the downfall of Firefox is that it wants to be Chrome and failing at it miserably, so one might as well just use real Chrome.

And I have a hunch that Pale Moon is underfunded. Last time I checked, software development costs €€€.

[Moonchild]

And I have a hunch that Pale Moon is underfunded.

No need for hunches. I've been very transparent about this. Things are very tight.

[back2themoon]

Pale Moon has ended up retro by default

I don't really want to do "retro," and sometimes it feels like that's the only thing people want from us.

I don't think it was ever about "retro". If anything, the goal was always to make things better and in more sensible ways. Sure, the term "modern" is now omnipresent and mainstream venues will hardly ever apply it on Pale Moon. Doesn't mean we are "retro" though.

Also, making it to the Lunduke's Non-Woke Software List would be very much desirable.

Ugh. Just... no. I won't waste further words on that.

...promoting it as a new browser that is untethered from Firefox's past would be useful. In fact, not mentioning Firefox at all, anywhere, would be quite an exciting experiment to try.

This is very interesting, the entire Firefox debacle. As mentioned, you cannot possibly erase/cancel the Firefox history but you can smartly re-brand the whole thing in your favour.

"Remember when browsing was fun?", "Take control back" and even more aggressive stuff like that. You are not erasing the past - make it an asset instead.

Furthermore, and this should be within the Team's reach I hope: carefully pick a few, powerful extensions than can do stuff not possible elsewhere, or at least not as good. Make a showcase out of it: "See what you can do? It's a click away". Should be prominent in the home page with examples, images and all that attention-grabbing stuff people love.

Take these extensions under your wing and make them sort of official i.e. maintain and update them.

Moonchild is already handling Suspender, for example. I did not have Suspender in mind but surely you can take on a few powerful extensions and publish/fork them as "The Pale Moon Team" or something. They will not be installed by default, but as a "See what YOU can do?" boost, I think it could help a lot.