General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

Definitely get the reference here... I think part of the problem is our identity is very tied to XUL and NPAPI. Those things are associated with, basically, old versions of Firefox. Hence our branding problem. I remember when I was trying to search for Pale Moon a while back, the top autocomplete results I got were "pale moon use old firefox extension" and "pale moon use flash player" or something similar, which really does highlight the problem. People seeking out Pale Moon are the ones who want to use an old extension or plugin Firefox can't run anymore. Effectively making us open-source legacy support for Firefox users that Mozilla didn't want to provide, whether we want to be or not. And that is still in many ways our primary selling point. I sometimes wonder if we need... something else.

You already have something else - the only modern browser with single process security. Everyone used to be extremely concerned about speed. Now that black-hat hackers with AI tools are exploiting everything in site with increasing speed, there's going to be a growing cry for a more secure browser, even if it isn't as fast.

Sometimes I wonder if the "way out" is to focus on doing something no one has done before, rather than on the things we can still do that Firefox can't anymore.

It definitely is the way out. 97% of people don't care about Firefox or they have outright dislike for Firefox and/or Mozilla, as you know. And that disinterest/dislike is accelerating.

The stuff about UXP that seems exciting to me is when we move forward with things like newer compilers, porting to other operating systems, newer libraries, newer toolkits, options opening up to use different memory allocators, etc. But all that is under the hood... what can we really do that is visible to users and not just nice to look at under the hood?

Well, if you aren't tied to keeping alive a past that is largely disliked at this point, then the world is your oyster. You could be as creative as you wanted to be. Obviously one thing that is going to drive adoption over the next several years is going to be providing security from the impending AI-enabled internet apocalypse.

the only real exposure I've had to .deb is installing Ubuntu for a friend about a decade ago because I heard it was easy to use, and maybe running Mint in a VM one time to troubleshoot a user's problem

Trust me, you've got tons of people in this community with the exact experience that would probably be more than happy to lend a helping hand or guide you in the mystical, arcane, cultic ways of deb packaging.

From this perspective, our real problem may well be that it's not easy to develop for Pale Moon. It's not always easy to dig in and start contributing code, not easy to write XUL extensions, there's very little documentation and not much to hold your hand. That just isn't stuff we've taken the time to prioritize because we're too busy maintaining what we have rather than doing work that doesn't have an immediate tangible benefit and which isn't guaranteed to pay off. I don't know if that angle is worth considering, but it is one my mind keeps going back to naturally.

I don't know, seems to me I've seen people dropping in more frequently to share contributions and extensions in recent months than I've ever seen. I'm sure that the AI coding assistants are a huge help. I've been thinking of trying to code a couple of extensions myself, since I already have an expensive AI subscription I could tap into. And I know literally zero about coding for XUL, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I could do it with the help of a competent AI coding assistant.