Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Mozilla's behavior is increasingly worrying. As mostly everyone here I presume I'm eager for the Ladybird project [1] to release their browser and have very I hope about it. In the meantime I'm stuck with a day-by-day degrading Firefox, the degrading speed being mitigated by Debian stable packaging speed in my case, which is at least something.

Has anyone here seriously tried Pale Moon which is referenced in the linked blog post? How does it do for everyday browsing and ad/tracker blocking?

[1] https://ladybird.org/

View on HN

I had a look at pale moon out of curiosity. Here's what a new install looks like: https://imgur.com/a/f5FqOsO

I am running a mac and find the interface to look crude and "cross platform", if that makes sense. Performance is very jerky, and font rendering isn't great - although that's perhaps subjective. Icons seem low resolution everywhere and in general it has the vibe of an outdated QT program. I was able to install a legacy version of ublock origin but it doesn't seem possible to use 1password, which is a dealbreaker for me.

I like the idea but I wouldn't be able to use pale moon day to day.

The UI reminds me a lot of old versions of Firefox for Mac

That's because they've kept the UI from before Australis was rolled out in Firefox 29. The Australis UI revamp back then was very controversial; it's funny to see how the complaints of Firefox "becoming more like Chrome" goes way back...

Under-the-hood is an engine that is pretty modern though (at least for a vast majority of the websites I regularly use, and plenty are "Web 2.0"). It's not as updated in terms of web compatibility as Mozilla's Gecko, and I'm not going to hold my breath for that, even though I love this browser very much and have contributed code to the Pale Moon / UXP project. Trying to "catch up" in the WHATWG's "Living Standard" is just going to be an endless uphill battle because of Chrome doing implementations first before doing consultations with real stakeholders like website authors in writing the spec to see if the features they want to push to the rest of the web are really necessary and beneficial. It's amazing we're still able to make advancements on this front like getting Google's WebComponents supported or dynamic module imports.

Honestly this is almost how Firefox feels to me compared to Chrome/Brave.

This is ridiculous. What exactly does Chrome do that Firefox doesn't?

chrome does ublock do not work?

I have a lot of problems with Chrome, especially recently but I really don’t like the firefox UX. I can’t remember exactly now but I gave it another try about a year ago and there were so many annoying inconsistencies. Profile UX is basically not even there. Do they still do their own custom janky scrolling? Devtools is clunky and slow. There were definitely more problems too.

I’m very happy with Brave with all its silly ads/crypto/news things turned off.

I don't think they really have a chance if I'm honest.

I would rather like Apple to take the lead on this one. They have a ridiculous amount of money and control over a not insignificant portion of the market. They could use this for good if they tried simply from having enough momentum to kill anything bad dead by not implementing it.

It's not an ideal situation of course. Having the planet's core infrastructure completely open for contribution would be better.

(if only the EU used their fines to do that...)

Well, if Apple really wanted to do more, they would have implemented new APIs sooner and be in sync with Chrome and Firefox regarding features they support. (Currently Safari is often 1 year late in supporting lastest features.) I would not count on them.

I take it you disagree with the thesis of the article, which is that new features are a thing we need less of, as they’re being used to preclude the possibility of competition with the dominant browsers.

> They could use this for good if they tried simply from having enough momentum to kill anything bad dead by not implementing it.

Funnily enough though a lot of web developers really hate Apple for this (going as far as claiming "Safari is the new IE" which is just ridiculous). But as a former Pale Moon developer I think Apple is the "lesser evil" than Mozilla exactly because they're "slow" in implementing the latest "Living Standard". Oh and just like us they've rolled out a JPEG XL support enabled by default in their stable release before Mozilla and Google did ;)

I think websites will adopt WEI/attestation or forced login (probably with Google), blocking out any non-Chrome-family browser, faster than Firefox degrades.

Care to share reasons why would you think this?

To deal with bots that are increasingly good at evading bot detection and to track user data, made possible because we let an ad and tracking company control the technology for over ninety percent of browsers.

I've used pale moon for years, but slowly faded back to firefox caused by the increasing websites that doesn't work with it. In this moment I've started a update and will try it again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com