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  "path": "/viewtopic.php?t=33381&p=272990#p272990",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-29T20:08:55.000Z",
  "site": "http://forum.palemoon.org",
  "textContent": "> Seems like a very hypocritical viewpoint to me. If you were to ask someone from Mozilla why forks like Pale Moon exist, pretty sure they would say this exact same wording verbatim. It's not up for us to tell users that we know better than them. We don't know what their needs are or why they have those needs. They have reasons to want these older tookits, just like we have reasons to stick with browsers that support XUL/NPAPI instead of WebExtensions.\n\nTo clarify, what I meant was that they don't have the skills to build a UXP application, not that I'm making a moral judgment on whether they \"should\" build anything or not. Poor choice of words on my part. I meant that the people who are most attached to GTK2 are often not the most tech-savvy and the most likely to react badly to seeing a pixel or two out of place. And I'm sorry, I'm going to push back and say, in this case we know EXACTLY why they need GTK2 (we have years of user complaints to go on)... and it's either because they want their themes to look exactly right, because they've gone unmaintained... or it's because they use an NPAPI extension that was compiled against GTK2. I know one user was openly telling me he uses it because he's pissed about the way GTK3 handles spillover menus with a large font and expects us to support GTK2 forever because he thinks the new way \"looks ugly.\" So yes, I am whining a bit about picky users who aren't the brightest complaining about every pixel they see out of place and holding up GTK2 as the answer and cheering it on, not realizing what that means for the developers or what position they are putting us into by making that their \"solution.\"\n\nI'll tell you why I don't see this as hypocrisy, but I don't know if you'll get it. The difference is that NPAPI and XUL are part of our project and still actively maintained. But the _price_ of keeping those developed and actively maintained, in my opinion, should be that we move them to a newer base and keep them alive as more than museum pieces, otherwise we are not much better than people using old binaries of FF52. My philosophy, and I am not saying you have to share it or that anyone else on the project shares it, is that we are about taking older technologies like XUL and NPAPI into the future, not keeping the past preserved in amber forever. Furthermore, if you look at my past, you'll see I have never shipped Epyrus with GTK2, always told people who want that to build it themselves, and actually did the Python 3 port in part so people who do self-build Epyrus would have an easier time, so I am if anything being consistent here.\n\nI mean, and how far do you want to take this? What if someone only has a computer with GCC 7 installed? Should we support GCC 7 forever? We used to be compatible with that, too. Maybe porting to Python 3 wasn't the right call and we should have stuck to Python 2 because we are an \"old stuff\" project and should be dependent on and compatible with the oldest things even if it causes inconveniences on modern Linux? I was always afraid that was the mentality of people around here, and frankly... I didn't sign up for this thinking we were curating a museum. I never got the impression that was MC's goal here, even if some of our users kinda wish it was. I mean... the only difference between GTK2 and those other things, is that GTK2 just unfortunately happens to be user facing and thus people have an aesthetic preference for how it looks, which I guess in your mind and that of others, means using it less and trying to steer away from it is some kind of betrayal. But... in my mind, GTK2 is a tool, just like Python or GCC. We use it to be compatible with Linux. We don't use it on Windows or Mac. If modern Linux isn't very compatible with it anymore... then obviously it's not doing its job.\n\nNow, does that mean we can't have a GTK2 build targeted to older Linux, or other Unix-like systems that still ship it? Of course it doesn't, we _will_ likely do that, just like on Mac we support PowerPC even though that's obviously not the primary Mac platform anymore. But I think at some point we need to acknowledge that's what it is rather than pretending it's still relevant to any modern system and letting people keep the false notion that modern Linux gives them a choice (without regard to the few people who will somehow get it working by hacking around and inspire others to go down rabbit holes and get mad at us when they get confused because it's \"not easy\"). Please note my exasperation with how users behave around these deprecations and how the expectations of the users make our lives harder and they start making annoying demands or complaints even though the situation is mostly not our fault, as hypocritical and annoying as you may find my viewpoint.\n\nIf I'm being honest, I'm a bit sad that I'm having to have this disagreement with you, and that it's become this heated. You are a developer too, I would think you'd \"get it\" at least a little.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Platform Development • Re: Future of GTK2 and Pale Moon",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-29T20:08:55.000Z"
}