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  "publishedAt": "2026-05-24T01:52:01.000Z",
  "site": "http://forum.palemoon.org",
  "textContent": "> I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project.\n\nI'm just saying, the PR problem for Pale Moon is not to do with these little yapping adversaries from the past, it's the fact that people mentally associate Pale Moon with Firefox. People do not want Firefox, as you pointed out they are down to 3% market share and dropping like a rock. And I can't think of a single Firefox-based browser that is currently gaining any market share, or that has more than a tiny piece of the market measured in tenths of a percent or hundredths of a percent. On the other hand, people get excited about independently developed alternative browsers. Lady Bird gets tons of positive press, even though every time I try it, it renders pages pretty badly. But it's different, and new, and not associated with Firefox or chromium, and so people romanticize about what it might become. If Pale Moon could be promoted as it's own, independent thing, with strong security advantages over existing browsers (both of which are completely true), without any association with Firefox, you could have a surge of popularity.\n\nI was thinking about this earlier. You remember in the Fellowship of the Ring movie, in Moria, when Gandalf was breaking the bridge, and the Balrog was falling into the abyss? You did not want to be standing near the edge of the abyss like Gandalf was, because the Balrog was certain to grab you by the ankles with his fiery whip and drag you down with him. The analogy is that Firefox is the Balrog, plummeting without any hope of stopping down to the bottom of the abyss, and it has wrapped its fiery whip around the ankles of the various Firefox-associated browsers. Pale Moon is standing too near to the edge of the abyss and is being dragged down by association. The lesson? Step back from the abyss. In fact, run, as fast as you can, away from the abyss.\n\n\n> That does leave every other Linux distro that doesn't do things the Fedora/RHEL way or the Debian way out in the cold, but it seems to be industry standard practice.\n\nYou could still keep the tarball, nothing wrong with it and it will be a huge help to people not on the most mainstream of distros. But I would eventually move it off to the side and make a primary Linux installation page like other browsers have with at least the .deb install commands, if not also the .rpm install commands. You could link the tarballs at the bottom of the page \"For other distros\", something like that. Moonchild just changed the Downloads page to be a bit more friendly to the GTK3 tarball, so no reason to make a big change immediately, but long-term, if you want a lot more Linux users, yes that would help a lot. And not being associated in any way with Firefox.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-24T01:52:01.000Z"
}