Well, perhaps the Tridactyl devs should move back to XUL and explicitly support Pale Moon & Basilisk. It would be a strong move since Firefox won't support them or their users.
Mozilla also were happy in principle to allow us to intercept key presses on all parts of the browser last time we spoke to them a couple of years ago; we just need someone to write that extension to the WebExtension API - https://github.com/tridactyl/keyboard-api.
Rewriting Tridactyl in XUL is not something I would wish on anyone.
Tridactyl only exists to bring that functionality over into Quantum-branch Firefox.
Edit: To be clear
- Tridactyl for xul already exists its called pentadactyl
- Rewriting Tridactyl in xul is basically creating pentadactyl from scratch. This is a lot of work for no reason.
- There are many legitimate improvements that have come into being between firefox 38 which is what Palemoon basically is and 70 which you would lose.
- It's highly unlikely that a fork of firefox 38 by a few acceptably skilled developers has the chops to keep up with what mozilla can do with millions of dollars.
- Your browser is the most dangerous app in your system running an old version means that anyone with access to the list of patched vulnerabilities for current firefox may well be able to trivially turn these into exploit vectors for old versions.
> - There are many legitimate improvements that have come into being between firefox 38 which is what Palemoon basically is and 70 which you would lose.
> - It's highly unlikely that a fork of firefox 38 by a few acceptably skilled developers has the chops to keep up with what mozilla can do with millions of dollars.
> - Your browser is the most dangerous app in your system running an old version means that anyone with access to the list of patched vulnerabilities for current firefox may well be able to trivially turn these into exploit vectors for old versions.
* https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21626 "Rumor: "Pale Moon is just a rebranded rebuild of an old Firefox version" Rumor: "Pale Moon is an obsolete and insecure version of Firefox" FALSE Pale Moon has been on a divergent path with its own code for a long time already. It was a rebuild in 2009, yes. It was a rebuild with minor changes in the Firefox 4.0 era, yes. But we've come a very, very long way since then with an increasing amount of different code being carried over each time it was re-based on later Firefox code. It's a true fork now, building on a completely independent fork of Mozilla code called the Unified XUL Platform (UXP) and has employed rapid development (as opposed to rapid release) to solidify this independent direction with its own focus and attempt at keeping the browser sane, lean, and offering users choice and stability - not corporate strong-arming or gadgeteering. At the same time, Pale Moon's strong focus on security/privacy and evolving networking standards has added features and kept pace with those developments in other browsers, by e.g. adding TLS 1.3 support the moment it was standardized, by keeping a close eye on encryption and the browser's security by continuing to port or re-implement security fixes that apply to Pale Moon as a browser and the underlying platform. It is neither old nor outdated, it is not a "rebuild" and it does not use obsolete technologies and does not have known security holes or vulnerabilities."
* "Rumor: "Pale Moon is a one-man show and does not have the manpower to keep up with Firefox/the modern web" FALSE Pale Moon is not "just me" and hasn't been for the majority of its life. There are some talented and dedicated people at work in our community to make Pale Moon what it is, and actually has seen support in many ways by many people over the years. Despite e.g. the WikiPedia article for Pale Moon just talking about "Straver this" and "Straver that", the fact that I am the one leading this project and holding the keys and making the overall major decisions about direction doesn't mean that no others are involved. That would be the same as saying that Bill Gates single-handedly wrote the Windows O.S. or that the Mozilla CEO is the only one working on Firefox. To name a few other people currently actively helping with the project's core development: Matt A. Tobin, Travis W. ("trava90"), "JustOff", "Ascrod", "kn-yami". Don't forget our beta testing team, or the people reporting issues while using the unstable channel builds, either. Or the people helping with extensions and extension compatibility or theme porting (thanks FranklinDM and Ryan C.!). Or even the community as a whole providing support to users. Also hats off to all the people doing translations for our language packs. I can go on. One man? I think not. Of course since it's crowdsourced, it's easy to forget the numerous people in the background who play their part, but please don't forget them."
On the other hand, the Pentadactyl discussion is valid.
Specifically what if anything it offers over firefox 38?
The biggest upside, to me, is that what it offers customizability in the UI, that the settings actually feel like they mean something (when I turn something off, it stays turned off) and that addons/tools like Eclipsed Moon and Pale Moon Commander are made to actually protect my privacy. Oh, and there's the other big thing, that it's not taking money from Google or making money for Google. So, y'know, offering a Web Minus Alphabet is a good thing.
Oh. And it still runs in a single process on my 32-bit computer, so it doesn't seize up, cause my HDD to grind, and force a reboot every time it launches. Chrome, Electron-based programs, and e10s-Firefox all do that, and I've had some pretty spectacular crashes that required using a system restore when something I installed also tried to sideload Chrome with it. Thankfully I identified the culprit, went to a restore before the install, sent a nasty email to the people who wrote it, and went on with my life.
If you want to really blow your mind either buy a $50 SSD or stop your antivirus "real time shields" from slowing down all filesystem access.
If you are force rebooting when you start it my best guess is that your intel atom with 2GB of ram is starving and thrashing.
The more them able ui is an artifact of sticking with older tech not specific work by Palemoon devs.
We are left with a front end for select settings in about:config and even less interesting extensions.
Underwhelming.
Come to think of it, I think that's going to be my daily driver again for all those reasons.
Older hardware and "tech", to me, is uniformly better in comparison to the latest and greatest nonsense that "web developers" want to push down the pike. All you want is to take more of my system resources and put them on the Internet. That's not acceptable to me in the slightest. Your "newest technology" is my newest horror and the reason I've most recently questioned the value of computers as a whole. Taking one iota of control away from the user is wrong. Giving the user a structure which can be 100% customized with emergent properties the developers might not have had the forethought to include is what all software with a UI of any kind should be looking to do. Simply put, you are not the NetHack Dev Team. You do not think of everything.
As I said, I don't use most of the features the browser includes. I don't care about them, and I know that I never will. The older I get, the more I see the value in the method Stallman uses of downloading a page, parsing it to clear out all the gunk, and then displaying it locally on a non-connected machine.
There's stuff in there I think is horrendous, like all the stuff for ECMAScript. There's stuff I like, such as the full choice of theme and function, the fact that my settings are mine - not yours, not Mozilla's, not Google's - mine. But I respect that it's got value to some people who want to turn it on. I'm not a person who's going to tell you what bleeding-edge new feature they're missing. I'm a person who can tell you that this program does a reliable and remarkably thorough job of displaying downloaded HTML in the way I desire to see it. It lacks any really good gopher or telnet support, but I cannot ask miracles.
My use-case is not the standard and I recognize that. You asked me a subjective question. I gave you a personal answer. And now you're telling me the only Internet-facing software I see being even marginally decent is 'Underwhelming'? Your seeming lack of understanding when it comes to the nature of real life is underwhelming to me. Try the software for yourself. If, after using it with an honest attempt, you prefer to be led by the nose by Google and its cronies, then by all means i cannot prevent you; nor would I want to. I'll lag back and wait to see the problems before they reach me.
In order to deal with a constrained environment I ran i3wm instead of a complex environment. I adjusted some scripts/configuration that seemed OK on a faster machine but sucked on the underpowered one. I autostarted almost nothing in the background. I kept it to a minimum of tabs.
The problem with running an old version of Firefox as a strategy to deal with an older machine is that older builds are actually slower and the tabs are in effect javascript applications that in fact do have all the defects you ascribe to them regardless of which Firefox they are running on.
Yes in many way the modern web is moronic. We don't even disagree. I just don't think windows + palemoon is a great strategy to deal with it.