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Comment by app4soft | Hacker News Reader

Waterfox (with Web Extensions) or Pale Moon (with XUL/UXP extensions)

If security is something you’re looking for, “Firefox plus some ancient, unmaintained legacy code and patches jammed in by random third parties” is not substantially more appealing than just Firefox by itself.

Your description does not apply to the two examples given. It's obvious you don't even know what they are even if you knew what they were 5 years ago. Look again.

Pale Moon and the like aren't just ancient Firefox code. And without all the 'features' Firefox keeps adding in that are irrelevant to a browser that renders html and executes JS they're just as secure.

Fake news.

1. https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

2. https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

3. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270

4. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399

I ran into Pale Moon years ago when Let's Encrypt was started and that experience gives an adequate flavour of their approach to security.

The up shot is Pale Moon's maintainers decided they don't trust Let's Encrypt for spurious reasons. But if you use Pale Moon you've probably never noticed this because Let's Encrypt is cross-signed, and so even though Pale Moon claims not to trust them, the cross-signature makes everything still work because they didn't intervene.

So that's a bad decision, combined with total incompetence to produce the appearance where everything looks fine.

That's exactly the sort of thing in a browser that should make people run away screaming.

In the years that followed Pale Moon wanted to keep StartSSL (the outfit which straight up lied to us about issuing clearly bogus certificates for money, Pale Moon's maintainers apparently feel that this shows "integrity") and described Mozilla's distrust decision as a "foot gun". How did that work out? Oh right, it turns out that everybody else doesn't trust liars either and so Pale Moon eventually went along with this because as others explained in practice they're mostly just applying patches blind to core Firefox subsystems like NSS.

If I'm to avoid Firefox, I'd like to avoid its forks as well - they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past. I'm thinking smaller than Firefox.

> they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past.

Please, prove it.

From looking at the commit history of Pale Moon, it is maintained by essentially three people. Their maintenance strategy is to freeze at an old version of Firefox, and randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date on JS or DOM features. Given the sheer size of the codebase, its inherent complexity (a JIT compiler is going to be very ripe for potential security vulnerabilities), and the utter lack of any sign of trying to mitigate these problems (e.g., fuzzing, or even merely attempting to identify security fixes in Firefox that may warrant backporting), if you are worried about any security issues in Firefox, moving to such a fork should only worry you more.

I not see any proofs here. Only your personal opinion.

Read https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/commits/master for yourself.

>utter lack of any sign of trying to mitigate these problems (e.g., fuzzing, or even merely attempting to identify security fixes in Firefox that may warrant backporting),

And here's where you show you're making it up and haven't even looked at a Pale Moon release notes, http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

I don't read release notes, I read the commits and the patches themselves. Actually, I did check after posting, and they appear to do the bare minimum--port the posted CVEs, which won't even account for all the security bugs. There are definitely several commits I've seen them do where they specifically revert changes that rewrite functionality to be safer, but don't actually fix any specific known security flaw.

If I really wanted to scare you, I'd tell you about such security-friendly-sounding commits as "we don't want the newest release of the [crypto] library, let's freeze at an older version" or "re-enable support for RC4 in TLS." But that would be unfair, because you'd actually have to read the commit to judge for yourself if I'm quoting them in good context.

It's hard for me to make sense of what you're saying.

1. You don't seem to think the Pale Moon has value, nor that it should be used.

2. You say you don't read their release notes--which makes sense if you don't think it's worthy.

However:

3. You say you do spend time reading their patches--which doesn't make sense if you don't think it's worthy.

4. Their release notes frequently mention "defense-in-depth" patches which are their own work, not, as you put it, to "randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date"--which conflicts with your claims about their work.

So you say you read their patches, yet you don't appear to read all of them. And you say you don't read their release notes, yet you speak as if you have comprehensive knowledge of their work.

Then you say something that's supposed to be scary, but then you say that it might not actually be scary, and you won't tell us whether it actually is.

So, regardless of whether Pale Moon is valuable or useful or secure to any degree, isn't your comment a textbook example of FUD? What's your purpose here?

> Actually, I did check after posting, and they appear to do the bare minimum--port the posted CVEs, which won't even account for all the security bugs

If you actually read the release notes, you wouldn't say this.

Would you please leave personal swipes out of your HN comments, or edit them out if they make it in? They break the site guidelines, you've done it more than once in this thread, and I'm sure you can make your substantive points without them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date on JS or DOM features

It's not "random", inform yourself: https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

Firefox has been turned into a Chrome copycat with built-in blocklists and Tor Browser Bundle features.

1. https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

2. https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:project:iceweasel...

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