General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

I 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.

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. I just don't know what that would be. A "killer app" based on XUL that people would download Pale Moon to use? Or maybe engine improvements that don't come from Mozilla but are rooted in independent development.

I came to this project because I was a bit excited about the idea of developing an alternative browser engine... not because I specifically cared about XUL extensions or even NPAPI (though I admittedly enjoy Flash player). 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. 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?

You 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.

Oh, he liked the idea? That is good to hear. I am glad it's no longer listed as the first option. Anyway, I do know how to package .rpm myself, and could do that in our current build environment fairly easily. .deb is actually the one that would be a little more challenging since I don't know my way around Debian-based distros. I used Linux-Mandrake back in the day, and played around with Mandriva and Mageia a few times after that, and also have worked with a lot of RHEL or Fedora-based systems at this point because that became "the corporate standard." So by an odd coincidence, most of my Linux experience is on RPM-based distros, and 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. Of course, I also ran Gentoo and followed the LFS handbook one time.

Another thing I do think about a lot, is whether we are developer-friendly. One thing I've learned is that a lot of times, the platform that's easiest to develop for succeeds because it draws the most contributors, and all those contributions build up an ecosystem that starts improving itself and holding itself together quickly. That is one lesson I learned from being a Microsoft fan and hanging around those people. The N64 doing worse than the PS1 because of developer tooling and storage issues despite being more powerful on paper also hammered that home. That is, the key to success is creating a platform that appeals to developers as much directly appealing to users. If developers like working with your stuff, they will build on it, and the stuff they build will attract users even if the foundation isn't the best, even if it's as buggy and transitional as Windows 9x was.

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 or new UXP applications, 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.