Wow.

- Mozilla made architectural changes to address limitations in Firefox that inhibited the pace of improvements

- We didn't like the changes Mozilla was implementing

- We forked Firefox to revert the changes

- We spent years insulting Mozilla engineers for the changes they were making

- We realized that we can't implement changes because of architectural limitations

- We are going to re-fork Firefox from a later version

- We still think the Mozilla engineers don't know what they are doing

- This is a totally new browser product and a fork of Goanna, not Gecko!

I am a huge Mozilla fan-boy, and an ex-employee, but come on, this is just off the wall silly.

The changes are architectural but also ethical. I particularly don't like Firefox switching to a walled garden for extensions, adding digital rights management black boxes, baking in commercial software like Pocket, intending to abandon XUL for better security of non-technical users. But there's also much more (https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5).

Your implication that he's calling it a unique new browser is either intentionally disengenous or confused. A "browser product" is a product made from an existing browser: Firefox. There's nothing in the linked post that presents it how you do.

Pale Moon's fork fixes some important ethical (and aesthetic) issues I have with Firefox's current direction. I'm glad that both (and icecat, iceweasel, etc) can coexist because they're open source. Re-forking from a later version seems reasonable to me since not that many people think the above issues are important. As the post said, there aren't enough contributors to keep up with the evolving web. Re-baseing from an acceptable later Firefox version would give me another few years of breathing room.

The only part of this I don't agree with is the existing Firefox extension ecosystem not being compatible with the new Pale Moon. But I guess as Firefox abandons them the value of the old ecosystem dimishes.

- switching to a walled garden for extensions

With respect, this argument falls flat on it's face. Both Firefox and AMO (old and new versions) remain open source. The additional requirement of signed extensions allows Mozilla to exert a light increment in control.

- Adding digital rights management black boxes

Fair enough, I didn't like the additional of EME either, but I also like netflix, despite the DRM constraints. As a user I am ok with this choice, because it enabled me, as a user, to choose to either consume DRM content or not, while using the browser of my choice.

- baking in commercial software like Pocket

Yep, that one left a bad taste in alot of peoples mouths. It would have been better if an API had been published and more than one provider had been supplied (cough cough social API, looking at you).

- intending to abandon XUL for better security of non-technical users

Palemoon does absolutely nothing to protect it's users. The Palemoon devs and project leads never miss the chance to take pot-shots at Mozilla and the Firefox engineering team, but the only reasonable claim they can make about security is "Pale Moon is based on the Mozilla release source code that has a large community of developers and security-aware people, next to having seen over a decade of development by now."

The problem, which the Palemoon devs have now stated clearly, is that they can't improve on the legacy version of Firefox they forked, and even when I still worked there were only able to take up security fixes with diminishing capabilities due to deviations in the code base.

Finally, Mozilla is not abandoning an old ecosystem, they are making a substantial investment in building out a new ecosystem while providing tools, documentation and an upgrade path. I recognize that there are still people who like to use old software, but at some point you have to take a good solid look at things and think: ok, lets try this again and apply the lessons learned.

Palemoon is an insecure knockoff browser that leverages open source in all of the worst ways without giving anything significant back, and even worse, they weasel around what they are doing and make claims about performance and stability that are flat-out indefensible (not that they could prove it since they have no mechanism to collect the data outside of their own build machines).

And Firefox is becoming more and more a Chrome imitation browser, because Mozilla thinks only following very close the Google Chrome train will bring them back all the users who they have lost towards Chrome.

And for all this they abandon power users. If there is a real shame for all Open Source, it is Firefox.

Not being able to install or edit my own extensions without Mozilla's approval is not a light increment in control. It crosses a very distinct line.

You can, on developer or nightly. Regular users get a safety on the footgun. YMMV, but it really isn't the end of freedom that people like to play it up as...

Using an alpha (developer) or unstable nightly is not a reasonable alternative. Now if they actually produce the unbranded version of Firefox like they keep saying they will it'll be a start.

Any semblance with the current Bitcoin situation is merely a coincidence, I'm sure

Mozilla engineers do not know what they are doing. If they did they would not be planning on removing all existing extension, they would not have listened to the designers and implemented australis, they would not be trying to make a chrome clone.

I wouldn't have phrased it that way.

I have removed my fair share of malware from other peoples machines though and I have yet to observe that Firefox extensions has been the attack vector a single time.

For that reason I do find it puzzling that they want to irrevocably destroy their single biggest advantage (in my and many other vocal supporters eyes): real, USEFUL extensions. (Even Lastpass has to add an extra binary to my OS to fully work under Chrome IIRC.)

Also while I should mostly not say much about design I do find it odd that so many projects attempt to look Mac OSX and I think it is the same frustration some people have with Firefox starting to look like Chrome: not everything the big boys do is necessarily better.

> they would not have listened to the designers and implemented australis

I happen to think australis looks way more spiffy, old design looked kinda clunky, but then I also love minimalist design of Chrome.

CADT squared?

I don't really know what kind of browser they want to make, but if I would make one, I'd add some p2p networking on it, like IPFS or a minimalist databse that runs on a DHT. The end goal would be to have your data hosted and automatically spread on clients, instead of servers. Currently I can't really name a p2p platform which has some usable interface, where you can share content like the web allows it. There is zeronet, but I'm still waiting for a browser all in one package to make it usable.

p2p is the future... (and don't tell me about websockets, they're not true p2p)

The title of this submission has been changed now, but it was originally "Pale Moon may drop Firefox codebase and write a new browser from scratch". Which does not seem to match the post:

> the idea has come up to make a new browser product, re-forking from a later point in the Mozilla source tree

The current title doesn't seem to match the post that much better either. Clicked to see what awesome new idea about a next generation browser I will encounter. Was not quite what they were talking about.

See my other comment in the thread.

Palemoon lacks the resources to drive a modern browser fork. Rather than trying to maintain the current fork they have, the proposal is to either rebase, or create a new fork (or some other definition of "re-fork" that I am not able to parse).

The irony in this is that the reason they need to do this is because they were deeply unhappy with the changes Mozilla was making to correct technical debt due to the age of the codebase. Those changes allowed the features to be implemented that the Palemoon devs are lamenting in the post.

I would also like to take this moment to bang the security drum and remind everyone that Palemoon has been developing new browser features for 6 years, while taking up some, but not all, Mozilla security fixes, without a security team of their own. Read into that as you will, but also consider how successful people have been in forking Chromium (or just grab a bowl of popcorn and read through https://twitter.com/taviso if you don't know the history).

This is why I like open-source and the community we are creating with it. If you don't like something or if you don't agree, start making changes right away.

Don't like what it has become? Change it again.

Between all the flaming going back and forth, we still respect each other and work on making the world a better place, one line of code at time.

What even is the purpose of the Pale Moon browser? Their entire website can't give me any concrete reasons why someone would rather use this over Firefox.

As a user I can can explain. I was unhappy with Mozilla implementing a walled garden for their extensions. I am not an extension dev but it's a rare month where I don't pop open an xpi and edit something to my personal preferences. In a walled garden I can't do that. They are taking control of the browser away from me.

Their choice to implement the W3C's disasterous digital rights managment technology in the form of EME was too much. At the very minimum including this DRM in the browser opens up any devs or researchers trying to port to other platforms/OS to legal liability and attack.

Additionally Mozilla's choice to bake in bloatware like Pocket is very unpleasant. Basically every time I do a fresh install of Firefox I have to go through a long series of config to de-bullshit it (ref: https://gist.github.com/haasn/69e19fc2fe0e25f3cff5).

Palemoon is more Firefox than Firefox these days.

We hoped they would manage to run a fork of the browser we used to love and advocate for: the free and open and technically superior Firefox with real extensions like scrapbook (userfriendly recursive web page/site scraper), tree style tabs (if you do research on the web and haven't given it a try do it now) etc etc.

Others were unhappy about the new Firefox skinning that was backwards incompatible (I think).

If anyone remembers the Netscape 6/7 days, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was a breath of freh air from the bloated mess that Seamonkey had become. All that was needed was for Blake Ross to write a new, lighter, UI for the thing.

Someone should just make a UI for servo, and release it for people. It's probably as good as Gecko was when it was first shipped in Netscape's products, considering the rapid development.

Can someone provide a bit of context? Reading the post I'm confused if this is by a mozilla engineer and what the product is, or what Gonna is.

Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. Goanna is their current and quite new rendering engine: http://betanews.com/2016/01/26/pale-moon-adopts-new-goanna-b...

I mean, it sounds like it's basically just a fork of an old version of Gecko/SpiderMonkey, because it looks like it definitely doesn't have the same latest standards support that current versions of Firefox have (based on the Pale Moon website).

Which, as an aside, I think is hilarious, because they claim standards compliance as one of their biggest features.

So, they have issues already with implementing Promises and handle the older less complicated technology wise seen engine 24 - and they are seriously thinking about forking a much later code base and try to keep their old ui, remove Australis, DRM and so on?

Sounds totally unrealistic. This product will be dead on arrival.

I have never heard of palemoon before but I agree with these points but not the conclusion.

Probably to some extent that prescription makes sense however it can never be successful. Search can never be decoupled from the browser. It just can't. I keep twitter spamming Brendan Eich with this for the Brave project.

Guy is way smarter than me.

Created the language I use sloppily.

Has more credibility, team, ect than I ever will.

However, I still think I am correct. No one gives that much of a fuck (within reason) what UI you wrap around Google.

To palemoon. Please build a search engine. I have only tracked a few teams working on this. Probably could get a 1 year headstart before this becomes "hot".

More competition in the search engine market benefit us all. I don't like the power that Google posses over Mom & Pop stores. Don't like it, they can just block it and they can just close.