General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

From my perspective, there are several things that contribute to this. These are what I believe to be the biggest ones:

People say our codebase is "old and insecure" because it's forked from an older version of Firefox. The truth is that UXP does regularly get security updates, both as backports from upstream Firefox as well as security issues we find on our own.

Going back to the topic of being an older Firefox fork, people think that we're using the same engine as Firefox so there is no reason to use our browser. While the "same engine as Firefox" statement was true at the time UXP was created, it is no longer true. At this point, we could be considered our own separate thing. Sure, there is some code that exists or did exist in both engines, but we drift apart more and more every single day.

There were past events that made people dislike the Pale Moon community and contributors. Examples being the MyPal and OpenBSD debacles. I won't go into detail here, but it definitely rubbed people the wrong way and unfortunately the stigma stuck.

The performance is a bit slower than say Firefox or Chrome due to the lack of multiprocess. On a personal level I agree with Moonchild's decision to exclude Mozilla's e10s multiprocess implementation, but that being said I could see how that might put people off from using the browser. I have to use Firefox/Chrome for some sites because they are slower in UXP (usually these sites are horribly written garbage that pull in tens of megabytes of JS code).

There is also the issue that UXP can't browse some sites due to some JS/CSS features not being implemented. I've been working heavily on improving this this year and other contributors have worked on this as well, but there are still sites that can't be used in Pale Moon at this time due to lack of JS features. People don't want to use a browser that can't browse the sites they want to visit.

This is good stuff.

From my observations, I think that the Goanna engine is sort of underdeveloped, such as in the ways that you mentioned, and that really contributes to the PR problem.

And this does meaningfully impact the user. For example, jumping around old forum convos, A lot of users here use a 'backup browser' when Pale Moon doesn't work on some site or something. Sure, WebRTC and DRM we tend to do without, more so than with other browsers. We know we won't be using websites as applications that do crazy stuff beyond stuff like displaying images or playing media from a database. Yet this practice of using a 'backup' browser is predominant among the userbase, because it's often required to load some sites.

Honestly, I kind of find it wrong that if you're a Pale Moon user you need to have another browser installed as a backup. It's just off-putting that you discover this alright browser that is significantly less bloated than the others, takes up less system resources, carries a great deal of customizability and personality, and is very privacy-friendly, and sure maybe it's kinda slow sometimes, and then realize that you will probably also have to install some other browser to do the stuff you want, which BTW also supports tons of garbage you won't be loading sites with 90%+ of the time, and thus is bloated and probably takes up something like gigabytes of space on your computer for no reason other than those websites.

That's why I want to support Pale Moon's development and attract contributors. I think Pale Moon is complete in terms of its approach/philosophy, and its custom of serving its users, but not 'complete' in terms of its technical capability/compatibility.

In other words, one could easily say that this browser is under development. Then, OSS user thinks, "Wow! An INDEPENDENT browser in development that is significantly less bloated than Chromium/FF and derivatives, is currently actually stable, and aims to be a viable alternative to those browsers? Hey, maybe we could improve this -- make it faster or compatible with a few other web technologies! I wonder what are the devs are up to."

But then, Pale Moon's PR problem kicks in.