General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

Hey everyone, this is all great stuff. I'd like to gather some common sentiments that have been expressed in this thread related to Pale Moon's PR:

• Pale Moon should be (and is) primarily pitched as an independent browser, because it is an independent browser; we should (and do) distance ourselves from the image of being a 'Firefox fork', though we don't want to deny technically being one as that would be lying. Although this has been our approach for a while, we are still viewed by the FOSS world as a fork of legacy Firefox that is 'stuck in the past'.
• This one I think is particularly important; the image of Pale Moon as being 'old' or 'retro' is due to the perception of what a 'modern' browser should be like.
• Pale Moon's development is focused on the backend, which is good given its nature. But we should change something that is a visible benefit to users; this way, we can attract attention from OSS users. (I may have an idea for this, but that's a separate topic)

Off-topic: Of course, any such feature should be high-quality and meaningful, and only contribute to Pale Moon's nature, and not impede the current user experience, etc. etc.

• Pale Moon should try and make things easier for developers down the road, if resources can be spared; this could help foster growth of the Pale Moon/UXP ecosystem, and attract more contributors.
• Pale Moon could be more up-front about its relative disadvantages to new users (namely, that of functionality/compatibility with modern websites) to lower expectations and mitigate disappointment.
• Pale Moon being ported to other operating systems, particularly to Linux/BSD, may be in our interest (because it's inherently in our interest to make Pale Moon more available to users), but there are things to work out. Packaging for OpenBSD may be (or is) a lost cause.
• We should further highlight, maybe even upsell, Pale Moon's advantages in regards to privacy/security/independence, when talking about Pale Moon. (If we want to apply this beyond just in other forums out there, we could have testimonials or something somewhere in the Pale Moon website -- just an idea to throw out there.)
• Better demonstrate the power of XUL extensions, to better demonstrate the extensibility of Pale Moon.

To elaborate on the second bullet; this could be a big part of the problem.

Someone opens up Pale Moon for the first time, they see an ancient UI; they go to a website (will probably be YouTube or something), things are slow or load weird or maybe even don't work. They then conclude that it is an old, 'legacy' browser.

So even if someone goes past all the drama that's happened with Pale Moon, and isn't bothered by the unjust depiction of Pale Moon being insecure, and is curious and wants to try it out, then if they do not care about their browser having telemetry or not (which applies to most users, even in the world of FOSS), if they do not care about extensions outside of maybe an adblocker or something (again, most users, even in FOSS -- except maybe they like uBlock Origin, which isn't available in PM in its modern form), the above happens, and said conclusion is virtually inevitable.

What do you guys think?