Pale Moon Survey 2017

[gracious1]

I see Linux distros in an alliance with Firefox, which made sense at one point, but doesn't make sense now that Firefox is going in a much less customizable direction. I see Linux users who've adopted Chrome or Chromium, because it's perceived as the fastest most happening browser, but it cuts against what Linux is supposed to be all about for some people also.

Yes exactly. This is why I have never installed Chrome.*

*(I did install Chromium, however, because at one point I got frustrated with PM not working at a crucial site I needed, and the site recommended Chrome, so I installed Chromium since it supposed to be open-source version, but then I discovered all I needed to do was to toggle a setting in about:config in PM. So I haven't used Chromium since.)

[Davesnothere]

....SUGGESTION TO ALL PALE MOON USERS: make a manual backup of your bookmarks once per week/month and save that HTML/JSON file in your HDD and/or a flash drive / portable HDD and/or the cloud (Google Drive, MediaFire, MEGA, OneDrive, etc). Trust me: you're not gonna regret....

That's good advice, even if you do NOT use Sync.

I save my whole profile root folder at least twice per week, to a new clearly named subfolder on another computer on my network, and occasionally to elsewhere too.

[gracious1]

So will this be an annual survey, then, to keep your finger on the pulse of the PM community, so to speak?

[Moonchild]

So will this be an annual survey, then, to keep your finger on the pulse of the PM community, so to speak?

No schedule.

[Galaxis]

Age: Interesting that 30% of the users are 45 years or older. 34% are 30-45 years and 36% are younger. Pretty atypical. However, it could explain the importance of older extensions/plugins.

I don't know how that compares to an "web browser users" age distribution in general, but maybe Pale Moon is a choice for people that have been around for a long time...?

My primary motivation for switching from Firefox to Pale Moon has actually been Sync: I've been running my own FF sync server ever since the weave minimal php script appeared. And PM has been working with that without a hitch, while Mozilla abandoned Weave sync to go for a hosted solution as a vehicle to lure users into their identity platform (has that been abandoned by now, too?).

My primary OS currently is Win10, but I'm also using PM on Linux (and Android). [edit] And I'm switching between quite a few systems, depending on where I am and what I'm doing exactly, so bookmark/history sync between all those is essential to have.
I'm an IT professional (datacenter infrastructure) - my programming skills end with simple scripting stuff though, so I didn't check any of the "participate in development" boxes.
It's 2017? Damn, I'm older than 45 too...

Since the end of last year, I've been trying to work with the Vivaldi browser. Of that, I primarily like the tab stacking features. I'm using global search a lot, but then that's mostly what PM does in the address bar. I'll probably switch back to PM, as I don't like some of the non-configurable featues of the chromium platform that Vivaldi is using (and there's no sync).

[troypulk]

I don't remember talking this survey so I was wondering how many people took the survey vs how many users there are in this forum?

[New Tobin Paradigm]

I don't remember talking this survey so I was wondering how many people took the survey vs how many users there are in this forum?

Enough to be statistically relevant.

[Andrew Gilbertson]

I'm sure many people consider that a non-answer. How about am order of magnitude? Tens, hundreds, thousands? (I'd include "millions" but I'd be VERY surprised if there were that many responses.

[PhilK]

Perhaps some distros might think about making it their default browser, or at least maintaining an optimized version for their distro (subject to approval from MoonChild, of course) in their official repos..

I think that would be very beneficial for the project.

I see Linux distros in an alliance with Firefox, which made sense at one point, but doesn't make sense now that Firefox is going in a much less customizable direction. I see Linux users who've adopted Chrome or Chromium, because it's perceived as the fastest most happening browser, but it cuts against what Linux is supposed to be all about for some people also.

The interesting thing is that some open source distributors (eg F-droid for Android apps) have marked Firefox for eventual deletion since according to them:

1. This app promotes non-free add-ons
2. This app tracks and reports your activity
3. The upstream source code is not entirely free

I don't know all the aspects that lead to those labels but I assume part of it is DRM stuff, or tracking stuff not present in PM.

If PM can be viewed as free of those things (tho it's hard to imagine how allowing 3rd-party devs to create addons which are not free/open-source could get away from the first label), then its credentials would presumably be "purer" than Firefox these days. And Linux users tend to appreciate more attention to privacy issues than more 'mainstream' users do.

Re: Chrome, technically Chromium is open-source but just like with Android, Google uses this fact as a carrot, but their stick is that they keep increasingly intertwining the commercial (Chrome) product with tons of proprietary and tracking junk that yes, seems rather at odds with the mindset of many Linux users who are in general far less tolerant of such things than 'mainstream' users are.

(There are probably at least a couple of rational reasons for people to opt for something Chromium-based: firstly the fact that the rendering engine is the most popular on the web right now and as such will probably have fewer site compatibility issues than alternatives for now, and second the JS engine on Chrome/Chromium does seem to be very quick. There are a lot of very sharp people working on optimizing things like that over at Google I am sure.)

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Okay, PhilK officially doesn't know what he is talking about.. Ignore him.

Linux distros and almost everyone else refuse to build Pale Moon correctly.. Additionally, F-Droid.. really? You need to lurk and use search more.

[PhilK]

Okay, PhilK officially doesn't know what he is talking about.. Ignore him.

Linux distros and almost everyone else refuse to build Pale Moon correctly.. Additionally, F-Droid.. really? You need to lurk and use search more.

Perhaps if you explained exactly what you are referring-to your post might make some sense to me.

Off-topic:
As far as advising other people not to listen to another poster.....

[Moonchild]

I'm sure many people consider that a non-answer. How about am order of magnitude? Tens, hundreds, thousands? (I'd include "millions" but I'd be VERY surprised if there were that many responses.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15147&p=109516&hili ... 00#p109516

[xyzzy]

The question in the survey about gamepad support was very misleading.
I was under the impression that it only regarded controlling Pale Moon itself, so I gave it a 1.
..but apparently, it also regarded HTML5 gaming!:
https://github.com/MoonchildProductions ... ssues/943/

I can't remember the exact wording of the question, but I had the impression that it meant "should we spend more time/effort developing gamepad support further, i.e. HTML5 & more complex games evolve?" I was happy with existing support (I just periodically play with the Internet Archive's vintage games library), so I voted "1." It didn't even cross my mind that the question might actually mean "should we rip out all existing gamepad functionality?"

I have to wonder how many other people made a similar mistake and for whatever reason (not noticing yet, blaming their OS, etc.) just haven't posted about it here.

[Moonchild]

Considering the general response rate on this forum, if anyone using Pale Moon would suddenly not have been able to use their gamepad with the browser while expecting to, we would have seen an average of one new topic for each user (since nobody searches when they want to complain), give or take.
Since we haven't seen the first one, it's pretty safe to bet that people clearly understood the question.

[Tomaso]

I have to wonder how many other people made a similar mistake

More people will probably notice the lack of gamepad support in Pale Moon as time goes by.
Especially when more users starts to migrate from the "dying" Firefox.

A quick web search reveals a lot of code projects related to gamepad APIs.
I'm not sure, but I guess it should be possible to provide support in PM through the use of an extension.
..but of course, the problem would be to find someone willing to take on such a task.
If I knew anything about this kind of stuff, I would probably have given it a try myself.

[Moonchild]

Sorry I don't do divination or wild guess work.

This is why the survey was created to begin with. I'd say that the question was pretty clear. "Gamepad support" implies "being able to use your gamepad with this application" and not much else. If people actually used their gamepad with the browser for anything, they would have put 2 and 2 together, and answered differently to that question.
"But it might change" is a fine argument, but unless and until that happens, gamepad support is disabled in Pale Moon.

If anything, read again over our general information and especially the "striking a balance" part. If something is not used by a significant number of users, it is in the realm of being considered undesirable, to keep the browser efficient and focused on its primary tasks.