Does Basilisk include big # of tabs improvements

[nemuroto haetoni]

Hi,

Congrats on new product release

Firefox 55+ has big improvements on handling big # of not loaded tabs (reduced memory usage and improved startup time)

Details can be seen here https://www.onmsft.com/news/firefox-can ... -55-and-56

Does Basilisk contains these patches? If not, I would appreciate if you could think about backporting them. Tax on startup time and memory usage is significant after few hundred tabs or so and these patches should help with it.

Note that there have also been several fixes in Firefox 56+ for regressions introduced with these patches, so please bear them in mind in case you decide to backport it.

Thanks

[MoonExplorer]

See viewtopic.php?f=61&t=17202

"Will basilisk support/have {feature X}?" - "Does Mozilla Firefox from early 2017 support/have {feature x}? If so, then yes. If not, then no."

Every improvement Mozilla has achieved since the beginning of the 2017 is not considered as such by MoonChild so don't expect it to be introduced any time soon (if at all).

[MoonExplorer]

However, if you need it, you can try WaterFox that features all these major improvements, supports almost all Firefox extensions (except those specifically targeting Firefox 57 and 58 at this point, as opposed to Pale Moon that doesn't have full support of SDK addons and Basilisk being still experimental and only partially supporting WebExtensions) and also containers support. In a couple of days Waterfox 56 ESR is going to be released. You can install it alongside Pale Moon or Basilisk, and even open links with it using Open With addon.

[nemuroto haetoni]

Thanks, I suspected so, that's why I'm asking here.

I found the original blog post here: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

You can ignore the Quantum PR part of the post since this improvement is independent of quantum work.

It also links to main bug report here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=906076

Backporting should be possible (though tracking down necessary patches and later fixes might be laborious)

[MoonExplorer]

Biggest problem is that the usual response to such requests is "we aren't interested in Firefox hacks" (that's almost a direct quotation). However, if you submit a pull request I think it will be accepted, so go ahead

[Sajadi]

The biggest problem is actually that there is a shortage of people capable of doing complex tasks, this is also a reason why it is such a challenge to have ecmascript features implemented.

If you can help with stuff like that, Pale Moon team would for sure highly be interested in you helping them, otherwise... you know, nothing stops you from visiting various coding boards or other coding related resources on the web and ask if someone would be interested to support Pale Moon/Basilisk Even if you could retrieve only some helpful hints or small tutorials how to implement stuff... every help, no matter how small is for sure appreciated by Moonchild

Point is, without people who possess special knowledge, it is either extremely hard or almost impossible to get a couple of tasks done!

Here you can find the gith repository with the open tasks for both Pale Moon and Basilisk: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions

[Moonchild]

"we aren't interested in Firefox hacks" (that's almost a direct quotation)

Biggest problem is "I'm here to promote other projects because I'm not going to help THIS one, and while at it try and discredit the maintainers of" (that's almost a direct quotation as much as yours is).

So, once you're done with that, please see if there's anything you can help with, instead of praising others for work they haven't done (Waterfox = minimal Firefox rebuild, takes 5 minutes of work to update and launch a build).

[MoonExplorer]

I'm not here to promote other projects, I only mentioned the possiblity to use another fork alongside Pale Moon just in case it is really important to that person to have that feature. In fact, the only reason I'm here is that I want the Pale Moon project as the most viable successor to Firefox to prosper.

Waterfox = minimal Firefox rebuild, takes 5 minutes of work to update and launch a build

It used to be like that, but it's not accurate anymore. Actually, it took its developer more than a month to pull out the newest Waterfox 56 ESR, featuring the latest security fixes from Firefox 57 and Firefox ESR branches. You can find the extenstive list of these security patches on Waterfox reddit. (Btw - some of the vulnerabilities fixed also affect Firefox 52 (and probably 38) and thus (quite probably) the two Pale Moon browsers as well).
So in fact the developer of WaterFox has started making the same thing Pale Moon does - he created a new browser on the basis of Firefox 56 with security updates from Firefox 57+, just as you support a fork of Firefox 38 with privacy and usabilty tweaks, and security updates from Mozilla. I don't know what the future holds, I don't know if Waterfox 56 will be supported for long (for we all understand it really is a one-man team... But come on! Isn't that something one can only praise?!
I only wish there was more collaboration between the Pale Moon team and WaterFox team. Kudos!

[Moonchild]

Security patches being ported from v57 to v56 will not be much work. Also, porting sec bugs is something that will have to become part of his routine if he wants to keep doing this, and it will become increasingly more challenging as the version gap increases (no more using "patch -p1 -i {patch file}" to get it done in a second). If porting sec patches takes him a month, then there's not much time left for actual other development, is there? Take another week for release engineering and... oops the 6 week cycle is almost up again, time for the next round of sec patches

As for collaboration... I offered collaboration to Alex, but he didn't agree with my intended direction of developing a platform (UXP) instead of just a patched-up browser (so his "ESR" status for Waterfox is accurate, at least). He also wasn't interested in long-term forking at the time, and was giving me some huff about the organization of things, and preferred to go it alone. That's fine, but he pretty much burnt that bridge, so it is unlikely to happen in the future.