General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

I think I first found out about Pale Moon through Wikipedia, a few years ago. I got the idea that it was an old fork of Firefox from back in the old days that prioritized performance, and that then it got discontinued. It's only until I got back into trying to cut as many GAFAM from my life as possible that I found out Pale Moon not only was still being developed, but had a completely independent web engine. However, the website that (re-)introduced me to PM had a whole list of reasons for why Pale Moon was no longer good, supposedly. I looked through them all, and they were either never true (NoScript being blacklisted for breaking webpages), were no longer true (the use of Cloudflare), or were blown out of proportion (being unable to directly download add-ons is not an issue when you can simply retrieve the files in the "extensions" directory). I ended up using Pale Moon anyway.

So I do think misinformation plays a role, though I also think Pale Moon being largely unknown is why it hasn't attracted as much attention.

I've seen the "insecure" argument being used for all forks of Firefox because they don't get security patches as quickly as upstream, like here (the deleted comment is me pointing out that Pale Moon was not affected by Meltdown/Spectre).

And then there's Pale Moon. You can count the advantages listed here, Pale Moon rules them all, except for speed, and I guess maybe the community. Maybe we can leverage this?

I don't really expect people primarily using a Chromium fork to really care for Pale Moon. If they don't mind using a web engine based on Google's browser (rather than use something based on Gecko), why would they actively seek a browser with an independent web engine?

Even some of the people aware of Pale Moon and none of its stigma don't tend to use it. They either don't know about its advantages (single-process, XUL, customization, lightweight, etc) or don't really care about them. They find using a Firefox fork sufficient (and probably more convenient/useful to their needs, like access to Widevine-protected services). The fact you can't transfer profiles from Firefox (the way you can with modern Firefox forks) probably doesn't help. People who are satisfied with their current browser don't tend to change it for something else.

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.

Honestly, websites that don't work on Pale Moon are pretty rare for me. And among those, the ones I need to use (which are not a one-time deal or something I can progressively stop using) are ones I could connect to a few times per year, if not once per year. I'm honestly considering using a different OS/machine to avoid this "backup browser" issue. It's probably good practice too security-wise, to have one OS where I pay for stuff and another where I do everything else.