General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

Sometimes it feels like we're kinda screwed if we can't get distros to ship us in their repos. Which is honestly how I suspect it is on Linux sometimes. The distros want to ship our package their way, using their system libs, and just have us be completely hands off, or else they won't touch it if we need things done differently.

At this point it might be worth a try to change our attitude a bit in this front. Maybe we should let distros use system libs (and that's our only concession) while allowing the use of the Pale Moon name, but as a condition they should change the default start page and first install page to one that makes it clear to the user that they are using their distro's build and should report any bugs there first. We could require changing the About window and Help menu as well to link to their bugtracker instead of our forum. That way they would be incentivized to fix any issue that comes with system lib usage, and perhaps they might give back by upstreaming their fixes as what FOSS should be. It's a compromise, but one fairer to us than the deal Mozilla did with Debian for the latter to quit using their own Iceweasel branding. Having more eyes and hands on the third-party libraries would be a nice outcome; I'd imagine NSS and ICU benefiting the most from this (currently I don't think it's possible to use the latest upstream version of those two libs, even if we haven't yanked system lib support out of them).

I don't think you're wrong, for what it's worth. I see where you're coming from, I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project. Maybe Pale Moon should not do Linux itself, and someone with a better understanding of the Linux community should build their own browser on top of UXP and ship that, no association with us? That's the only way I can think of to promote UXP on Linux... do something like a Linux equivalent of what dbsoft is doing with White Star and his own forum, maybe Green Penguin or something with Tux in the name? LOL.

It would be another Iceweasel situation IMO, and I don't think mainstream distros would want to repeat that for a browser even smaller in reach than Firefox.