Nonetheless, its still mildly concerning that smaller players in the browser space are finding it difficult to keep pace with all the new APIs being introduced to the web these days. Even Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine in favor of a Chromium fork.

It's a tricky situation with no obvious solutions. The Pale Moon dev's plea to slow down isn't going to work; devs want these new features and they're not going to stop using them just because a smaller browser developer with no significant market share can't keep up.

There is, perhaps, the beginnings of a solution with the Extensible Web Manifesto[1], which aims to shift the focus of browsers from implementation of many high-level features to instead focus on smaller, simpler low-level features which high-level features can then be built on top of. (Though ironically, web components are a part of this movement.) CSS Houdini[2] is one such feature which seems like it might be relevant in this specific situation (though whether it's helpful I have no idea; in the short term I suspect it might just translate to a lot more work).

[1]: https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Houdini

All the more reason to cherish Firefox.

firefox is in the sites of Google, don't worry about that. They will find a weakness and exploit it to try and become the only "true" browser.

> devs want these new features

Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them and it was ultimately the downfall of IE.

> Microsoft sort of gave up and killed their browser engine This will be the downfall of chrome. Google will ultimately be fined under anti-trust, chrome funding will dry up and browsers will stop supporting these absurd features. Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.

> Devs wanted Flash and real-player plugins pack in the day too. They wanted ActiveX plugins too. No-one else wanted them

The idea that users didn’t want Flash is laughable. It was enormously popular and enabled all kinds of multimedia presentation that the web couldn’t come close to rivalling.

> Have a nice time rewriting all your webcomponents in javascript in 5 years.

Web components are JavaScript. And it’s a standard agreed upon by all the major browser manufacturers. They aren’t going away, no matter what happens to Google.

Had it not been for iPhone, and we would all still happily using Flash, instead of waiting 10 year to still catch up with what was possible in 2011 regarding 3D on the browser.

Small players were never viable in the space. If they were people would care about, for example, Opera. Instead, probably 12-ish people care about Opera.

> devs want these new features

Except that they didn't asked for them, as shown there (and note that Google removed <style scoped> from Chromium):

1. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/552#issuecomment-17810...

2. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/bl...

Also, even Mozilla is having problems with Google WebComponents. There are 100 bugs open in Bugzilla about it.

But what are they afraid of?

I can run Firefox or whatever for modern websites, and Pale Moon or 10 year old sites running deprecated technology.

No one will ever build a website using WebComponents and NPAPI, so what's the problem?

The only possible explanation I see is that Pale Moon team desires and thinks that Pale Moo can become more popular than Firefox or Chrome simply by hoarding their discarded old tech. It's delusional, like selling computers with parallel ports and VGA cables and begging people not to use DislayPort monitors.

> No one will ever build a website using WebComponents

WebComponents is adopted by Chromium (and with difficulty by Firefox).

I think they meant that no one will ever build a site using WebComponents and NPAPI together, since NPAPI has already been discontinued before WebComponents has taken off.

I think you missed an association there. (WebComponents AND NPAPI)

Imagine they started working on hypermedia browsers 30 years ago, and were now admonishing everyone for not sticking with standard SGML. Yes, I'm sure DSSSL had a way of doing scoped styles. Scheme has scopes, right?

Side note: from reading the comments on that Reddit, it sounds like there's some weird affiliation with the 8chan alt-right crowd in the Pale Moon community?

I don't know if it's 8chan, but there's a really weird cryptofascist--barely even "crypto", tbh--strain in that community. And I can see why. The community that huddles around outdated and bad tech for the reasons they do is going to skew regressive and is going to get progressively (ha!) more upset and resentful over time. That self-selects for the kinds of toxicity that share significant comorbidities with the "alt-right" and worse groups on that axis.

I've noticed this too, and I've also noticed it stems from their team members. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22614144

Ahh Good ol guilt by association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

I had never heard of PaleBla before today. After seeing the BSD issue mentioned above, a short visit to their forum, and what’s being said by their supporters here I can unequivocally say it’s the most toxic and incompetent community in tech I’ve ever seen.

It’s weird and cult-like, but without drugs, dancing, or women. It’s sort of alt-right, hating gays and foreigners just as much as post-2008 JavaScript, but there just isn’t any reasonable model explaining how that connects.