Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Users and developers helping users with generic and technical Pale Moon issues on all operating systems.

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cooperb21

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by cooperb21 » 2014-10-20, 03:21

BobbyP wrote:
cooperb21 wrote:Had to move back to firefox with firefox addon classic theme restorer. I really like palemoon but to many compatibility issues now. I dont mind doing a little extra work but its gotten to point that to many things dont work on the web and addons not supported.
If you prefer PM, why not revert to the latest version before 25.x for a bit, and let things "catch-up". As a decade+ Fx user, I often would hold back on updating versions, to allow the extension developers time to get caught up, as I use numerous extensions, at least a few of which are fairly complex. Just a thought, since in a few weeks, I bet PM will be most wonderful, again, and going forward.
Or, go with the Weasel for a bit, and check back when things have gotten sorted out....
Because it is not just 25 update...

Alot of my addons just started now saying they wont support firefox 24.

Royzee

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Royzee » 2014-10-20, 03:33

cooperb21 wrote:Because it is not just 25 update...

Alot of my addons just started now saying they wont support firefox 24.
It's not just addons. As an avid player of Farmville2 on Facebook, 25 is no good. Took me nearly a week of rolling back flash players, deleting cookies and cache etc before I caught on to the browser.

If you play Farmville2 on Facebook ( an likely other games ) you will give up important features when using Pale Moon v25. Like sending requests to neighbors. Receiving items from neighbors. Posting on timeline for needed items etc. Also the mouse wheel does not zoom in/out on farm, it is a switch for max in or max out.

I sent the bug information to Pale Moon, but have no idea if they received it, or read it.

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Sajadi » 2014-10-20, 05:33

cooperb21 wrote: Because it is not just 25 update...

Alot of my addons just started now saying they wont support firefox 24.
This will not be better thanks to Australis. Using Pale Moon you have to find sooner or later alternatives to existing add-ons or have to make sacrifices in giving up some for which exists no alternative.

But you could post add-ons which are important for you in the compatibility thread, so even if they are moving in the Australis direction, they can perhaps be forked or made Pseudo-Static and therefor preserved for Pale Moon. And it is also worth a try to write to add-on devs and ask friendly for support of Pale Moon! And many add-ons you can still install even if they are meant for later versions. As long as they do not move into the Australis-only direction, there is in many cases no problem. There are add-ons which override the compatibility check, installing one of these and you can keep on using them in many cases.

Have here one installation of an old Aurora 22 around, where i am still using latest ad-block plus or some others which normally are not supporting 22 anymore, and i have no problems at all :D

Riversky

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Riversky » 2014-10-20, 07:17

The compatibility might become an issue if some devs are not willing to cater to us PM users, true. But adding to what Sajadi said, I want to point out that even when I was still using Firefox it happened that I replaced an extension with a similar userscript. I don't have any example right now but I know that some userscripts do their job just as well as extensions do; so it may be interesting to also take a look at them.

Outdated xpi can also be an option, most of them still have the core features that are needed even though some options or improvements are not available. I am still using Echofon for Twitter and this add-on is not even supported for FF anymore, it's become an iPhone app or whatever.

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2014-10-20, 07:25

Psuedo-Statics are a temporary measure only. Those devs that won't play ball will simply have their add-ons forked as is the case with adblock plus. I am literally preparing a full proper maintained fork of it right now.

This also applies to Adblock Edge where unlike ABP they didn't even respond .. ABP simply said no.. That's ok.. As I said in another thread both users of ABP and ABE will be supported by what I am branding.. Adblock Latitude. The silly split between the Adblock extensions will come to an end because.. I have removed that acceptable ads option.

Similar things will happen for other add-ons that refuse to become fully Pale Moon compatible. HEY, we did it with Firefox.. Why not add-ons...

Also.. Why Adblock <insert name> first? Because that is simply the most used and most critical from a legals standpoint. I am sure you saw the nine hundred threads and posts that sprung up every point four of a femtosecond on v25 release day right? Yeah, because of that! And because I am not gonna pseudo-static update ABP to 2.6.5 when THEY released a new version just the other day and didn't BOTHER to take FIVE SECONDS to add Pale Moon.

Riversky

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Riversky » 2014-10-20, 07:57

Really, it is that simple? Just a GUID issue, nothing to work on from a compatibility standpoint?
Geez I wish I knew how to work on extensions just so I could help fork some stuff. Or provide fixes.

chreid

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by chreid » 2014-10-20, 07:59

While you're at it could you set adblockplus.please_kill_startup_performance to TRUE by default? Or is that a daft idea?

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2014-10-20, 08:11

I would have to implement that.

I branched off at 2.4.1 and reverted australis changes and then cherry-picked relevant non-firefox related commits (those that actually improve abp and not just because MozCo changed something they had to adapt to) through 2.6.5.

Arguably it is MORE compatible directly with Pale Moon than the current Pseudo-Static.

If I did include that feature it would still be off by default.

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Trinoc » 2014-10-20, 09:46

Putting discussion of add-ons aside for a moment, can someone please remind me why it was necessary to change the default user agent string so that it no longer advertises that Palemoon is compatible with pre-Australis Firefox (presumably at least the v24 long term support version, and I see the PM24 string says version 28). If the recommendation for accessing sites which revert to earlier features (like Farmville2 mentioned above) is to put Firefox back in the user agent string, would it not save a lot of problems (and problem reports) to put it back in the default?

I may be missing something, but I thought the main purpose of the user agent string was to tell web sites which features a browser supports. So, just as virtually every user agent string contains "Mozilla", surely it wouldn't be sacrificing any of Palemoon's pride by indicating that it can do anything that Firefox 24 (or 28) could do.

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Sajadi » 2014-10-20, 09:51

Well, you could switch the Firefox compatible mode on again, but then the problem would be that Pale Moon could be considered in the long run as outdated browser. What would really be necessary is to change the Pale Moon User agent from scratch, best would be "cloning" some other browser's UA - aka Chrome dev 39, Maxthon, whatever... This would prevent out of the box many sites to break in a bad way.

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Trinoc » 2014-10-20, 10:12

Sajadi wrote:Well, you could switch the Firefox compatible mode on again, but then the problem would be that Pale Moon could be considered in the long run as outdated browser. What would really be necessary is to change the Pale Moon User agent from scratch, best would be "cloning" some other browser's UA - aka Chrome dev 39, Maxthon, whatever... This would prevent out of the box many sites to break in a bad way.
Surely the point is that Palemoon would be considered a browser compatible with Firefox 28, which it is, so at least web sites won't revert to "unknown browser" safe mode when they could have made use of Firefox 28 features. Of course Palemoon will now diverge from Australis Firefox, which is intentional and a good thing, but sites that continue to support Firefox 28 features would still give better functionality if those capabilities were advertised. In the long run some sites may recognise a Palemoon user agent, but they will be a tiny minority, and no amount of badgering the millions of site admins to support Palemoon will do any good.

The problem is that the majority of Palemoon users will not be readers of this forum. All they will see is a browser that doesn't show web page features that Firefox did, and most will say "Oh, just another minority interest browser that doesn't do the things the mainstream ones do", and give up on Palemoon, which will be a terrible shame since it is really a lot better than that.

Existing users of Palemoon 24 will see that web pages which worked well until a week or two ago now do not use all of the available features. Like it or not, most users will not look into the reason why and find advice on the forum (even if they want to plough through all of these messages), but they will simply decide (mistakenly) that Palemoon no longer does the things they want it to do and will reluctantly move to one of the mainstream browsers instead. Far from providing a haven for Australis-haters to move to Palemoon, we may well be encouraging a lot of non-techy existing Palemoon users to move away and just put up with Australis etc., as the way things are going to be from now on.

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Sajadi » 2014-10-20, 11:31

Trinoc wrote:
The problem is that the majority of Palemoon users will not be readers of this forum. All they will see is a browser that doesn't show web page features that Firefox did, and most will say "Oh, just another minority interest browser that doesn't do the things the mainstream ones do", and give up on Palemoon, which will be a terrible shame since it is really a lot better than that.
As i said, Pale Moon should instead feature an out-of-the-box complete override for all websites, faking itself as another browser. As you wrote, not many pages will accept the role of Pale MOon as stand alone browser, the more necessary would be such an out-of-the-box override in my opinion.

Non technical Pale Moon users see the change in Pale Moon 25 and because they do not like to fiddle around with options or install third party software also known as add-ons, they will most likely switch to another browser. Such a standard fake UA would prevent many many threads with questions for site compatibilities from happening!

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-10-20, 13:39

Considering the AMO override is in place, I can probably "up" the firefox compat version number to something more applicable to Pale Moon's level of compatibility, hopefully avoiding some of the issues with sites complaining "browser too old, outdated firefox, upgrade now!!!" although many will insist everyone keeps on the "latest" version "at all times" where it wouldn't help.

I do, however, stress once more that simply pretending to be a specific different browser is a bad idea. It has its own set of attached issues, not in the least the sites assuming a browser has an exact match of x and y features that Pale Moon might not have. I do understand the practical implications of not doing this, as well, and how potential Pale Moon users might think it's just "not worth it" to fiddle with workarounds. But that once again is a matter of impatience and the status quo where websites using UA sniffing (and there really is no reason to do this in 2014 anymore) will just be given exactly what they want and will never change their bad practices.

I'm using pre-configured workarounds for sites that have indicated simply never to want to support Pale Moon :thumbdown:, and will put in temporaries for some major sites that are "pending" corporate office responses (like Netflix and Google), but the main, default, setting for Pale Moon should remain the request for sites to do something about this problem, not for Pale Moon to just "satisfy" whatever arbitrary demands there are -- and in turn supporting UA sniffing by matching the script instead of the script matching the browsers (as it is supposed to do).

See also the following quote (from 2011):
The biggest problem with UA sniffing is the “UA” part, because browsers lie. A lot. They started lying with the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0, and they continue to lie to this very day. Browsers lie about who they are and what they can do all the time. Sometimes it’s not even the browsers themselves who do the lying, but proxies adjusting UserAgent strings along the way without the browser’s or the user’s knowledge.

In the past few years, more often than not the lying isn’t intentional, but that makes no difference to a website doing UA sniffing. It’s especially noticeable when new browsers show up on the scene, based on an open-source rendering engine that’s been around for a while. While egregious inconsistencies between the browser’s claims of supported features and the reality of those claims are often quickly fixed in subsequent updates, UA sniffing strings are updated far less frequently.
Source: http://farukat.es/journal/2011/02/499-l ... r-sniffing

Another thing to consider is that a default override will also prevent those very problematic sites from seeing the amount of traffic from Pale Moon clients (it'll be counted towards whatever is faked) and if that result in "insignificant traffic" from this client, the sites will simply not do anything about it (because it's not worth their time).

Does this clarify the status quo and the inherent dilemma with "just faking the UA"?
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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by back2themoon » 2014-10-20, 15:42

Matt A Tobin wrote:As I said in another thread both users of ABP and ABE will be supported by what I am branding.. Adblock Latitude. The silly split between the Adblock extensions will come to an end because.. I have removed that acceptable ads option.
That is great news, thanks a lot for your hard work and for Latitude. A thought on the acceptable ads option: isn't removing it completely exactly what Edge did? Some ABP users might be looking for it and complain... I usually disable it but can understand its existence. The best way to go to make everyone happy, would probably be to include the feature but leave it disabled by default (unlike ABP does). Your work, your choice of course!

Jonguy30

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Jonguy30 » 2014-10-20, 15:49

back2themoon wrote:
Matt A Tobin wrote:As I said in another thread both users of ABP and ABE will be supported by what I am branding.. Adblock Latitude. The silly split between the Adblock extensions will come to an end because.. I have removed that acceptable ads option.
That is great news, thanks a lot for your hard work and for Latitude. A thought on the acceptable ads option: isn't removing it completely exactly what Edge did? Some ABP users might be looking for it and complain... I usually disable it but I can understand its existence. The best way to go to make everyone happy, would probably be to include the feature but leave it disabled as default (unlike ABP does).
I would suggest this too. Because some people like supporting websites through ads, and removing acceptable ads would require people maintaining whitelists again. The best would be to include it, but disabled as default as per above quote. That would also satisfy the user's who always disable it.

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2014-10-20, 16:00

Well maybe i should start a poll since it would be effective the Pale Moon official adblock addon

like have it off by default ..optin instead of optout should satisfy abp and abe users

among other things is making sure backhanded telemetrics and call home junk is also stripped out and mirror the block lists so you know what you are getting and from where ..

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by ron_1 » 2014-10-20, 16:06

My question would then be: Would Latitude just use the ABP acceptable ads list, or would you make one up of your own?

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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-10-20, 16:24

There will be no "acceptable ads" in ABL since we don't need to monetize our blocker.
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Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by Supernova » 2014-10-20, 16:54

Jonguy30 wrote:Because some people like supporting websites through ads, and removing acceptable ads would require people maintaining whitelists again. The best would be to include it, but disabled as default as per above quote. That would also satisfy the user's who always disable it.
Acceptable ads are not here for people wanting to support websites through ads, but to allow the sites on the whitelist to not suffer from the blocker. (I also read rumors about ABP adding sites to list vs money ; I don't know if true or false but wouldn't be surprising)
The acceptable ads list is definitely not needed for a user wanting to support a certain websites : ABP & ABE both have option to disable per site, easy to use with the toolbar icon, which is exactly what a user wanting to support a site (and that, of his decision) would use.
Obviously an opt-out ready whitelist leads way more people to some ads (aka, not hurting money of some sites), but I'm not convinced that opt-in would be better than the manual solution : the whitelist has great chances of not including what the user want, and even greater to include some things he don't want.

New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Can we freely discuss the new Palemoon direction?

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2014-10-20, 17:11

I am not ready to produce an adblocker with this feature until i know the full story behind it. ABPs motives and opetations still being very much in question the removal of this feature stands. That is not to say it is dead or the issue isn't worth discussion or future reevaluation. That being said, IF in the future this can be done fairly and without bias or ambiguity it shall be an opt-in feature and never enabled by default.


But as it stands it will not be in ABL
Last edited by New Tobin Paradigm on 2014-10-20, 17:12, edited 1 time in total.

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