Pale Moon's PR Problem

[athenian200]

Not nearly enough time.
I just had to have a thread from 2016 unlocked so I could post a resolution to it after 10 years of inactivity. This is a common, legitimate need.
I've said it a million times now how cumbersome and limiting the settings on this forum are though, so I'll spare everyone more on that.

Off-topic:
I was a forum administrator at one point, and my guess is that phpBB doesn't offer a lot of granular, per-subforum specificity as far as the autolocking, so MC did it this way forum-wide because he didn't want old support threads for stuff like issues with the browser bumped that might be years out of date. This type of issue is... why I overpaid for vBulletin 4.x for my own short-lived/ill-fated forum ages ago. Just looked at phpBB, was a bit disappointed in what it could do, thought it wouldn't make people happy, plus the people I wanted to appeal to were used to vBulletin anyway. It's not really on him, IMO, it's just this is the best that can be done with free forum software, and a big project like this does have bigger priorities than a vBulletin license or similar as far as what funds go towards.

Getting back on topic though, I think another problem that's going to make people groan is... we do not have much of a social media presence. Most people don't really engage with forums anymore. In fact, even when I tried to create a new forum as far back as 2012, everyone told me it was a waste of time and I was creating a dead forum, because everything was going towards social media like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. And in a way, they were seemingly right about the shape of things, though older, more established forum communities did tend to survive. It's like, one of those things I know people are aware of deep down already, but no one wants to deal with because people here all kinda hate social media on principle. Everyone wants IRC, not Discord. Everyone wants forums, not social media. We talk about how to get new people interested, but there are always these constraints, these principles that tie us to a world that no longer exists for most people and keep us from reaching them. Not saying those principles are wrong, but it does feel at times like those very principles that a lot of people here hold make it hard to bridge the gap between our world and theirs.

[Mæstro]

If anything, this thread just confirms what Moonbat said. There is nothing wrong with Pale Moon remaining niche, especially if the alternative is Moonchild posting himself twerking with various emoji and ‘AI’ image filters overlain.

[athenian200]

If anything, this thread just confirms what Moonbat said. There is nothing wrong with Pale Moon remaining niche, especially if the alternative is Moonchild posting himself twerking with various emoji and ‘AI’ image filters overlain.

Umm... I don't think that's the alternative. That seems like a caricature of social media, and the type of approach you describe wouldn't work for a tech-related project anyway.

I guess I'm just one of those people that can never quite let go of the past or turn my back on the future, so I'm always in this uncomfortable middle ground aware of both, and frustrated with both the Luddites and those uncritical of modernity.

[Mæstro]

Indeed, I wished to caricature SNS. Today has been unlucky for me after a surprise houseguest broke my daily routines, and I wanted to agree with your analysis and have some fun.

[athenian200]

Indeed, I wished to caricature SNS. Today has been unlucky for me after a surprise houseguest broke my daily routines, and I wanted to agree with your analysis and have some fun.

Yeah, that seems fair enough. I do totally get where your caricature is coming from, though.

But yeah... I feel like sometimes I wind up in a weird middle ground. I still maintain the old thought patterns and workflows, but want updated stuff. Like, I still use forums and desktop computers rather than social media and smartphones, like everyone here. But I use modern versions of Windows and buy new computers too. So it's like that's the way I've lived, old style/approach, new foundations with better security, like I am determined to make something still supported or still produced work for me even if it's a bit of a pain.

So I wind up looking like a tech optimist and someone that still chases the future to a lot of people here, because I am so determined to stay on a supported platform and not just take the easier path... but I wind up looking retro or old-school to people outside because I suck at dealing with QR codes and look like a deer in the headlights whenever someone wants me to scan one, complain every time I have to use a touchscreen, and only have Facebook and LinkedIn, with no real interest in Instagram or Twitter. Which is oddly sort of like the situation Pale Moon is in, now that I think about it...

[_JaSn]

Getting back on topic though, I think another problem that's going to make people groan is... we do not have much of a social media presence.

Yeah, that's pretty spot on. Centralized platforms are pretty much where it's at nowadays. One could say that hitting the Pale Moon forums is literally the Pale Moon equivalent of making a Mozilla account and going on Mozilla Connect or bugzilla or whatever. The likes of GitHub are where the devs of open source projects are most active.

But I think that to switch to something else, even if its something more decentralized/niche like Matrix or XMPP, it removes us from a unique position; PM resources are maintained and available on PM's very own infrastructure. It serves at least two advantages from my perspective:
- We are not beholden to any third-party platform.
- It makes things easier for users to access said resources (Documentation, addons, source code, etc. etc.) since they are accessible from one location.
- It makes Pale Moon appear more polished/professional/legitimate.
- It shows that Pale Moon takes digital privacy seriously.

I don't think that platform obscurity is an issue when it comes to open source projects, as long as the reputation is substantial and positive. Mozilla/Firefox has a significantly better reputation than Pale Moon (a true but harsh fact), and Mozilla Connect is not exactly GitHub, but it is still used.

On the topic, we could learn from Mozilla; they host a mirror of their source code on GitHub, though it is read-only. We could do this as well, if we could spare the resources.

If we may want to go further, we could open up the GitHub repos to issues and pull requests etc. I honestly don't know why Mozilla wouldn't do that. They are a large organization, they can definitely take community requests from GitHub. Without doing that they have pretty much made it a requirement for all contributors to be locked into the Mozilla platform, and for what?


Anyway, in the first place it is essential to focus on the PR. Reputation is the first priority and is definitely more important than accessibility, because this forum is not terribly inaccessible, lol. I'm really new to Pale Moon, and it wasn't a total hassle to get on here. When there's a will, there's a way. We just need the 'will' part.

[_JaSn]

If anything, this thread just confirms what Moonbat said. There is nothing wrong with Pale Moon remaining niche, especially if the alternative is Moonchild posting himself twerking with various emoji and ‘AI’ image filters overlain.

Umm... I don't think that's the alternative. That seems like a caricature of social media, and the type of approach you describe wouldn't work for a tech-related project anyway.

I mean, I assumed that social media or centralized platforms in general was referring to platforms used for open source projects, e.g. GitHub, Discord, etc. we're obviously not gonna be using platforms made for CONSOOOMING CONTENT, probably except for YouTube because OSS has really put down roots there, and long-form content often evokes more intellectual activity from its users.

We are talking about in the context of FOSS, right? I think we probably shouldn't be talking about anything beyond that.

[Mæstro]

But I think that to switch to something else, even if its something more decentralized/niche like Matrix or XMPP, it removes us from a unique position; PM resources are maintained and available on PM's very own infrastructure. It serves at least two advantages from my perspective:
- We are not beholden to any third-party platform.
- It makes things easier for users to access said resources (Documentation, addons, source code, etc. etc.) since they are accessible from one location.
- It makes Pale Moon appear more polished/professional/legitimate.
- It shows that Pale Moon takes digital privacy seriously.

Pale Moon used to keep an official IRC channel on Freenode (I think), with Tobin moderating. This went about as well as one would expect, and was shut down several years ago. Building on what you have said, instant messaging with any protocol or host suffers from its own kind of obscurity. Countless creative affairs are locked behind Discord guilds (‘servers’), where they cannot be found by search engines, are tedious to mirror and preserve and require an account with that site even to read.

[_JaSn]

but I wind up looking retro or old-school to people outside because I suck at dealing with QR codes and look like a deer in the headlights whenever someone wants me to scan one, complain every time I have to use a touchscreen, and only have Facebook and LinkedIn, with no real interest in Instagram or Twitter. Which is oddly sort of like the situation Pale Moon is in, now that I think about it...

Actually, Pale Moon is in a worse position in this sense.

Not being on the biggest social media platforms is not as niche and more common, because the public at large has already become chronically aware of the ills of such media. It's everywhere; iPad kids, dead internet theory, AI slop, degeneracy, etc. social media is a massive time-waster, everybody knows this. People use social media either just because their friends or on it, or to waste time deliberately (e.g. avoiding conversation or killing boredom) or subconsciously (social media addiction is necessarily the result of having nothing else to look forward to). So if I choose to wipe my entire online presence, and have but a phone number as a point of remote contact, people will understand. If they don't, I can easily make them, because they are familiar with the stigma around social media.

Meanwhile, only an incredibly, profoundly small group of people are into alternative web browsers apart from just whatever's available (Chrome/Edge/Safari), and within it there's an even smaller group of people that are truly, consciously aware of Google's web monopoly, and of that group is an even smaller slice that actually wants to do something about it. And then, even most of those folks have never even heard of Pale Moon.

Pale Moon as a browser truly matters in many ways. It is the final home of the XUL extensions system that was deprecated by Mozilla. It is the largest truly independent browser. It is as customizable as a browser can get. Yet, in the microscopic ecosystem of true browser competition, even in the world of FOSS, it is not even the dust under their feet.

[_JaSn]

...with Tobin moderating...

[_JaSn]

Building on what you have said, instant messaging with any protocol or host suffers from its own kind of obscurity. Countless creative affairs are locked behind Discord guilds (‘servers’), where they cannot be found by search engines, are tedious to mirror and preserve and require an account with that site even to read.

Yeah, good point actually. And plus, someone is required to make an account in one of these major platforms, which may have undesired strings attached to them, etc. you know how it is.

Off-topic:
I don't think anything in Discord is worth contributing to or giving attention to anyways, because Discord is too atrocious of a platform. I would know, I used it for more than half a decade. Modern-day Discord is basically part actual Discord (gaming/hobbyist centric), part TikTok/Twitter, part 4chan. And that's just in terms of content. There's more. I wish for its utter destruction with every bone in my body.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:
About auto-locking threads on the forum:

Ben, you can blame the people who don't use common sense and don't read the forum rules and just start necro-posting because they have this burning opinion about a long-irrelevant topic that's been discussed that they feel absolutely compelled to get out.
In the very rare case that a thread should be unlocked, all it takes is a simple request to staff, as you've seen. You want to know how often I have to do that in a year? Maybe once or twice (so yeah you've used up the normal quote recently )

[plumsh]

I remember someone saying they remained on Vivaldi rather than Firefox because Vivaldi offered (more) customization, so I do think emphasizing customization is a good idea. Same with being lightweight and single-process. I do think capitalizing on being "fully AI-free" would've been a good idea since the only browser doing that to my knowledge is Servo (which is still in an alpha/experimental state, and is Rust-based), and it would've caught many eyes since Firefox forks "will use Firefox vibecode sooner or later," but there doesn't seem to be much interest in the idea.

Also, I don't understand the issue with "being associated with Firefox." People's main complaint about Mozilla and Firefox these days is the "AI" stuff, so wouldn't they seek non-"AI" alternatives rather than non-Firefox ones?

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.

I don't see code as all that different from writing or art, especially since code can be part of the latter. But I'm not a coder, just an artist.

The Amish do not reject technology based on whether it's "modern" or not, but based on whether it aligns with their values.

Being selective with (modern) web technology is something the UXP team has been doing too, with regards to multi-process, Rust and WebExtensions among others. That's why PerformanceObservers used to be disabled by default until recently. The people behind UXP are critical of certain new Web advancements, but not to the point of rejecting modern technology altogether. It's a matter of striking a balance.

That was one of the big reasons why I got interested in Pale Moon, and why I likely wouldn't leave it for something like Ladybird, where the lead dev sees no issues with Google quickly churning out a ton of web standards or with implementing all web technologies, including insecure ones.

If copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow largely contributed to pollution and encouraged the building of several datacenters in a world that likely doesn't need any more of them, then yeah, I'd be against that too. As far as I'm aware though, it doesn't.

I have no issue with people using AI coding assistants [...] 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.

Those who object to both are not conflating the two. We're against LLM use in general, meaning we're against both.

Pale Moon's development is focused on the backend, which is good given its nature. But we should change something that is a visible benefit to users; this way, we can attract attention from OSS users.

Pale Moon's UI remaining the same is one of its strengths to me. I like having one thing that doesn't change for the sake of change.

[BenFenner]

There is nothing wrong with Pale Moon remaining niche

I wanted to touch on this idea. Certainly this is not a rare thought. Some of us want Pale Moon to go mainstream or whatever, and others are happy for it to stay niche. I waver back and forth on that topic, but IMO what should not remain niche are contributions (both monetary and time) to the project.

If we're going to discuss some supposed PR problem that Pale Moon has, I think it would make more sense in the context of:
How do we get more people to support the project, help the dev team out, give more than they take, and similar?

[athenian200]

I wanted to touch on this idea. Certainly this is not a rare thought. Some of us want Pale Moon to go mainstream or whatever, and others are happy for it to stay niche. I waver back and forth on that topic, but IMO what should not remain niche are contributions (both monetary and time) to the project.

Yeah, when I say appeal more to the mainstream, I don't mean become fully mainstream... I'm just saying that the niche we're in is really small and we need to appeal to a somewhat broader audience. Not necessarily the average Chrome user, but just... people with a tech-oriented mindset who were actually born this millennium.

If we're going to discuss some supposed PR problem that Pale Moon has, I think it would make more sense in the context of:
How do we get more people to support the project, help the dev team out, give more than they take, and similar?

This is exactly the right direction. One of the big worries I have is that people aren't contributing to Pale Moon in terms of either code or monetary donations like they used to. We need to at least get back to a sustainable point where we are attracting contributors and pulling donations like we were before, at least that's my opinion.

[andyprough]

Also, I don't understand the issue with "being associated with Firefox." People's main complaint about Mozilla and Firefox these days is the "AI" stuff

Then you should look at Firefox's plummeting market share numbers from 2009 to 2026, they are abysmal. And 99% of that loss of users was before Mozilla's recent AI pivot. So the problem with being associated with another project whose popularity has been plummeting like a rock for 17 straight year is that the force of gravity will pull your own project down with it. Did you read the earlier Balrog analogy? People will associate your browser (nice, lovely Pale Moon) with a browser they strongly dislike (Firefox), and they won't give Pale Moon a second thought.

[athenian200]

Then you should look at Firefox's plummeting market share numbers from 2009 to 2026, they are abysmal. And 99% of that loss of users was before Mozilla's recent AI pivot. So the problem with being associated with another project whose popularity has been plummeting like a rock for 17 straight year is that the force of gravity will pull your own project down with it. Did you read the earlier Balrog analogy? People will associate your browser (nice, lovely Pale Moon) with a browser they strongly dislike (Firefox), and they won't give Pale Moon a second thought.

This is a big problem we have as well, I admit. And it's one I've been kinda worried about as far as Firefox marketshare. That our userbase will be a subset of those who would otherwise use Firefox. In fact, given that we spoof the UA to be Firefox so websites will not turn us away at the door in a lot of cases... who knows how much of the reported Firefox marketshare is really Firefox and not Pale Moon or other forks, anyway? I noticed their usage fell from 5% to 3% around the same time we had a dip in users...

I just wonder how we can... you know, not be chained to Firefox? It's like, we started off rebasing the browser on Firefox every few years. Then it got harder and harder until we stopped at UXP, but kept backporting stuff from Mozilla for a long time. Now more and more complex stuff has to be done by us from scratch. But it seems like it's hard to break out of that and establish an independent identity...

[andyprough]

I just wonder how we can... you know, not be chained to Firefox? It's like, we started off rebasing the browser on Firefox every few years. Then it got harder and harder until we stopped at UXP, but kept backporting stuff from Mozilla for a long time. Now more and more complex stuff has to be done by us from scratch. But it seems like it's hard to break out of that and establish an independent identity...

The stuff we are talking about in this thread (or should be talking about) is just marketing. How does Pale Moon describe itself to the public? Is there some way to get people to put their attention on something that's so much more positive - like "European led development that's not associated with the EVIL American big Tech corporations". And "Single process has a smaller attack surface than the other browsers - more secure by default". Stuff like that, that's easy to point to, that gives you a big advantage over others.

[Mæstro]

[We simply need to appeal to] people with a tech-oriented mindset who were actually born this millennium.

How had we got Job Bautista aboard? His profile places him (aged 23) within your target demographic. If we could steadily find more people like him to join our ranks, I think this should suffice for our declared interests.

[jobbautista9]

I first found out about Pale Moon when I was using a laptop stuck in Windows XP. At the time the browser still supported XP I think, and I was finding an alternative to Chrome which dropped support for it. My first impression wasn't good, as I felt the UI looked too old to me, so I quickly dropped it for Firefox instead which looked Chrome enough. I guess you could say that Australis worked in attracting people like me...

Then I was forced to switch to Linux as my daily driver after I accidentally nuked the Windows 10 installation of my newer laptop (during that Win10 time Firefox was my primary). I was constantly hopping between Chromium and Firefox ESR as my primary browser, and then I somehow got tired of those two and rediscovered Pale Moon alongside many WebKit and WebEngine browsers (funnily never even bothered with anything Gecko-based). I'm still not sure how I settled with Pale Moon (I guess at that point I've become more open-minded about UIs), especially when I did drop it again for SeaMonkey for several months (I still miss the UI which is why I use Moonscape as my theme, developed the Website Navigation Bar and put the close tab button as a dedicated toolbar button), before I borked the latter's profile and then went back to PM as my definite primary browser.