General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

I will just admit this... I was a Windows Phone user for a long time and used to hang around in Microsoft fan circles up until about 2018. I'm familiar with the Microsoft way, and what a lot of Microsoft shops do. And the truth is... I felt a lot more at home here in the Pale Moon community than I did around basically any other open source project. But sometimes I wonder if some of the very things that make this place feel like home and that cause me to naturally respect it, are exactly why many Linux users dislike it. I would have to admit I'm likely very different from the average Linux user. It's just not... a good cultural fit for me. LOL.

I think this leaves you as another kind of Windows refugee.

It's perfectly fine for Pale Moon to remain niche as long as it is financially stable. As already noted, the desire for privacy and customization has long been trained out of the general public, an entire generation has grown up using nothing but Chrome.

Splintering due to animosity from people who forked off from us to go "full retro", which was never one of our goals.

It really looks like the browser engine monoculture may be here to stay. Microsoft couldn't beat Chrome, Firefox is losing despite being funded by Google and them using kid gloves to avoid killing that project, so... I hate to say it, maybe Chromium is just too entrenched in the ecosystem now for people to ever have a choice of browser again. Maybe everyone who ever wanted something different has already lost and we're all just too stubborn to give up anyway.

Pale Moon has ended up retro by default , for the simple reason that, now that there are adults who have been using nothing but Google, Microsoft or Apple ‘apps’ since early childhood and cannot imagine anything else, preferring something else ipso facto places us in an IT cultural milieu which is almost fifteen years removed from popularity.

The only at all plausible way I could see the situation changing now would be geopolitical: Brussels, Moscow or Peking take enough interest in the matter to recognise that letting US-based Google stipulate web standards on a whim is unwise, and instead promulgate an official, normative alternative standard for the respective jurisdiction. Whether the cure is worse than the disease is another matter, but it would surely be more stable, for bureaucracy is slower than Silicon Valley. I am reminded now that Korea ruled for a while that all online commerce must use a specific ActiveX plug-in for security.