Knowledge Base (Posts about palemoon)

Why I stopped using Palemoon

bgstack15 — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 14:14:57 GMT

Summary

I stopped using Palemoon web browser this last year, 2022. It was a decent browser for a while but eventually slid into irrelevancy, and this is ignoring the toxicity of the community. It started out as a more sane Firefox 20 or so, and ended up as an obsolete Firefox 20. (Numbers are generalizations and useful for imparting approximate understanding and humor only.)

And yes, I'm out of technical topics which is why it's time for a chat about old news. Plus, somebody asked and I didn't want to drown the individual so the best place is here.

Main reasons

The primary reason I stopped using Palemoon web browser is because it stopped working on enough websites that I had to always keep a second browser open. It also suffered from instability for quite a few months and it would freeze the whole system for a few seconds at a time. I never submitted a bug because I didn't know how to document or bring it up. Plus, I always compile it myself and upstream always claimed you're on your own for that situation.

Google Voice used to use a dedicated plugin that you could use to place voice calls. When Google Voice switched to WebRTC, palemoon stopped being usable for that, and that is a primary use of that for me. Yes, it's absurd to use a web browser for everything under the sun. But yes, it's still absurd that this one browser doesn't keep up with the rest it wants people to use it as an alternative to.

Secondary reasons

The upstream development community used to be extremely toxic. It's now only slightly toxic, with the removal of the most malicious person I've ever interacted with on the Internet (including multiplayer video game players). I could make do by mostly avoiding the offending developer, but because he held such high status until his malevolent confrontations with the other upstream devs which lead to alleged vandalism of the palemoon servers, I couldn't actually hide his posts on the forum from my view.

This person also called me offensive terms because I stopped maintaining the Fedora-ized build of Palemoon. I had stopped using Fedora GNU/Linux as a daily driver and could no longer validate the built assets, so I didn't want to advertise things that I built but couldn't dogfood. Thinking through that process didn't occur to the most offensive developer, but that's OK. He missed things all the time and the world keeps going around him.

I was banned from the upstream forum for a few days once for calling out his toxicity and supporting some newb that had asked a stereotypically-noobie question. In normal places that wouldn't get you in trouble, but the upstream devs have their own, misanthropic opinions about things, as previously discussed.

Only when the chief developer was personally affected by the toxicity and malevolent behavior of the most offensive developer did he tone down his stupidity and give a mild apology.

Debian Unstable, for which I'm too utterly dependent because I target Devuan Unstable, does not have a solution for the ancient python2 build dependency of the palemoon application. Debian Unstable just removed python2, and folks smarter than me haven't solved this one [in public] yet. I suppose it would be too much to ask to get upstream to use python3. If I wrote this article in a few more month's time without any changes to the situation, this right here would be reason #1.

Minor reasons

I swear that once my Palemoon crashed and it merged the history of a private browsing window with my permanent browsing history. Of course there's the smallest likelihood that it wasn't actually a private browsing window, but that is a very small chance.

The silliness with shuffling the upstream scm links rapidly between 4 releases' worth of time didn't help, but I'm guilty of brief experimentations too. I just try really, really hard to avoid doing it to production.

I'm not even mad about the gtk2-is-primary thing; I think gtk2 is quite fine. Unfortunately, I don't run the world and too many places are starting to drop gtk2.

Extensions

Thankfully, I never cared about noscript. I didn't really care about Adblock Plus or whatever that Palemoon officially recommended, and uBlock Origin [legacy] worked well enough and I didn't tell anyone I used it.

Final thoughts

I use LibreWolf and Firefox now. I need to get back into Waterfox Classic.

Share your browser prefs.js!

bgstack15 — Wed, 13 May 2020 12:47:10 GMT

The advances users of Mozilla-based web browsers tend to have a large set of preferences. Let's start a trend of sharing them! I throw all my settings into one prefs.js that gets distributed through my various means to the system directory. That's why you see pref() here instead of user_pref(). Not all of these options apply to each browser, but the extra ones do not hurt. So these could affect Waterfox, Palemoon, or Firefox web browsers.

// file: /usr/lib/waterfox/browser/defaults/preferences/bgstack15-waterfox-prefs.js
// last modified 2020-04-15
// reference:
//    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig
// Turn off updates. I use my package manager for browser updates.
pref("app.update.auto",                     false);
pref("app.update.autoInstallEnabled",       false);
pref("app.update.enabled",                  false);
pref("extensions.update.autoUpdateDefault", false);
// Disable previews of tabs. I just do not like the feature
pref("browser.allTabs.previews", false);
pref("browser.ctrlTab.previews", false);
pref("browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedOrder", false);
// Old-style backspace action to navigate backwards through browsing history.
pref("browser.backspace_action", 0);
// Do not prompt for download location. Just use ~/Downloads.
pref("browser.download.useDownloadDir", true);
// Show blank page on a new tab.
pref("browser.newtab.choice", 1);
pref("browser.newtabpage.enabled", false);
pref("browser.newtabpage.storageVersion", 1);
// Do not suggest similar searches when typing into the bar. 
pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", false);
// Disable these by choice.
pref("browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled", false);
pref("browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled", false);
// Hide this search plugin.
pref("browser.search.hiddenOneOffs", "DuckDuckGo");
// Do not automatically check for updates to search plugins.
pref("browser.search.update", false);
// Do not show separate widget in navigation bar.
pref("browser.search.widget.inNavBar", false);
// Load all tabs when starting browser. I hate load-on-demand, which is when it loads only when you switch to that tab.
pref("browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand", false);
// Do not check if this is the OS default browser.
pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser",   false);
// Set my home page.
pref("browser.startup.homepage",            "data:text/plain,browser.startup.homepage=https://start.duckduckgo.com/");
pref("browser.startup.page", 3);
// Closing the last tab does not close the browser window.
pref("browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab", false);
// Obviously I did not type this one myself. This controls the layout of the buttons on the navigation bar.
pref("browser.uiCustomization.state", "{\"placements\":{\"PanelUI-contents\":[\"edit-controls\",\"zoom-controls\",\"new-window-button\",\"e10s-button\",\"privatebrowsing-button\",\"save-page-button\",\"print-button\",\"history-panelmenu\",\"fullscreen-button\",\"find-button\",\"preferences-button\",\"add-ons-button\",\"developer-button\",\"sync-button\"],\"addon-bar\":[\"addonbar-closebutton\",\"status-bar\"],\"PersonalToolbar\":[\"personal-bookmarks\"],\"nav-bar\":[\"urlbar-container\",\"bookmarks-menu-button\",\"downloads-button\",\"home-button\",\"jid1-n8wh2cbfc2qauj_jetpack-browser-action\",\"ublock0_raymondhill_net-browser-action\",\"_f73df109-8fb4-453e-8373-f59e61ca4da3_-browser-action\"],\"TabsToolbar\":[\"tabbrowser-tabs\",\"new-tab-button\",\"alltabs-button\"],\"toolbar-menubar\":[\"menubar-items\"]},\"seen\":[\"jid1-n8wh2cbfc2qauj_jetpack-browser-action\",\"ublock0_raymondhill_net-browser-action\",\"_f73df109-8fb4-453e-8373-f59e61ca4da3_-browser-action\",\"developer-button\"],\"dirtyAreaCache\":[\"PersonalToolbar\",\"nav-bar\",\"TabsToolbar\",\"toolbar-menubar\",\"PanelUI-contents\",\"addon-bar\"],\"currentVersion\":6,\"newElementCount\":0}");
// Use dense view.
pref("browser.uidensity", 1);
// Do not hide the http and colon-slash-slash elements of a URL in the url bar.
pref("browser.urlbar.trimURLs", false);
// Disable enlarged-upon-selected url bar.
pref("browser.urlbar.update1", false);
// Allow me to see ssl error messages (and the ability to continue past them).
pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", false);
// Do not use webcam for this feature.
pref("camera.control.face_detection.enabled", false);
// Null-route these URLs
pref("captivedetect.canonicalURL", "http://127.0.0.1:9999/");
pref("devtools.devedition.promo.url", "https://127.0.0.1:9999/");
pref("dom.push.serverURL", "wss://127.0.0.1:9999/");
pref("security.ssl.errorReporting.url", "http://127.0.0.1:9999/");
pref("services.settings.server", "http://127.0.0.1:9999/");
pref("webextensions.storage.sync.serverURL", "http://127.0.0.1:9999/");
// Metadata that is not very important but it ended up in my copy-paste work.
pref("distribution.stackrpms.bookmarksProcessed", true);
// Disable Mozilla experiments.
pref("experiments.activeExperiment", false);
// This plugin is probably uBlock origin.
pref("extensions.enabledAddons", "%7B972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd%7D:28.3.0");
// Tell the browser that we already showed the user the page for "Select your addons" so it does not bother the user.
pref("extensions.shownSelectionUI", true);
// Already assume these plugins are enabled. This can help suppress the warning, "An admin added these plugins. Please choose to enable them or not."
pref("extensions.webextensions.uuids", "{\"uBlock0@raymondhill.net\":\"7f64930e-0e43-4813-97c3-6fcb8a82e63b\",\"jid1-n8wH2cBfc2QaUj@jetpack\":\"5b1c5018-34cd-4778-902b-08741e3d0002\",\"{f73df109-8fb4-453e-8373-f59e61ca4da3}\":\"b7ece467-f6eb-4254-a815-1029330a9793\"}");
// Select "Highlight all" for the find function.
pref("findbar.highlightAll", true);
// Miscellaneous
pref("gecko.handlerService.migrated", true);
pref("marionette.prefs.recommended", false);
pref("network.cookie.prefsMigrated", true);
pref("privacy.sanitize.migrateFx3Prefs", true);
// Do not warn me when entering about:config
pref("general.warnOnAboutConfig", false);
// Disable geolocation functions
pref("geo.enabled", false);
// Trust my domain for Kerberos authentication
pref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", ".ipa.example.com");
pref("network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris", ".ipa.example.com");
// Disable the captive portal detection logic.
pref("network.captive-portal-service.enabled", false);
// Disable dns prefetching (exactly what it sounds like).
pref("network.dns.disablePrefetch", true);
// Disable whatever these are.
pref("network.predictor.enabled", false);
pref("network.prefetch-next", false);
// Disable requiring HSTS. Use at my own risk!
pref("network.stricttransportsecurity.preloadlist", false);
// Disable Reader mode.
pref("reader.parse-on-load.enabled", false);
// More personal ssl choices. Use at my own risk!
pref("security.cert_pinning.enforcement_level", 0);
// Hide these search plugins. Somehow the Debian package search keeps getting re-enabled so I need to work on this one.
pref("services.sync.declinedEngines", "");
// Startup home page (if I were to choose the option "Load these pages at startup," which I did not)
pref("startup.homepage_override_url",       "");
pref("startup.homepage_override_url", "");
// Hm, there should be more of these, particularly toolkit.telemetry.enabled = false
pref("toolkit.telemetry.reportingpolicy.firstRun", false);
// Trust these domain names for installing extensions: none!
pref("xpinstall.whitelist.add", "");
// Control DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR).
// More about DoH: https://github.com/bambenek/block-doh
// https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-firefox/
// https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configuring-networks-disable-dns-over-https
// https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver
// 0: Off by default, 1: Firefox chooses faster, 2: TRR default w/DNS fallback,
// 3: TRR only mode, 4: Use DNS and shadow TRR for timings, 5: Disabled.
pref("network.trr.mode", 0);
// Disable Pocket and null-route the URLs.
pref("extensions.pocket.enabled", false);
pref("extensions.pocket.api", "http://localhost:9980");
pref("extensions.pocket.site", "http://localhost:9980");

Fix Palemoon browser mouse scroll wheel goes through history when using Fluxbox

bgstack15 — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 13:04:06 GMT

The solution

In my ~/.fluxbox/startup:

xinput set-button-map "$( xinput | awk -F'[=]' '/ouse/{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}' | head -n1 )" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 &

The story

I installed Devuan ceres on a desktop workstation as part of my research into lightweight window managers. I installed my self-rolled dpkg of Palemoon (source on gitlab) because I have been actively reducing my use of upstream Firefox. When I scrolled up with the mouse wheel, the browser jumped back and forth in history. If the current tab in the browser has no previous pages, then the scrolling operates just fine. Apparently I'm a unicorn. Nobody has had this exact problem in this environment before (Windows users of Firefox changing the about:config don't count). Relevant xkcds include a tiny bit of xkcd#979 and a healthy dose of xkcd#1495. I investigated many different methods to try to solve my problem. I tried changing the about:config settings in the browser (specifically mousewheel.default.action and similar) which did not solve my problem. My next attempt involved file ~/.fluxbox/keys to assign commands to mouse button actions to reduce the effect they have in the window, which failed to suppress the undesirable actions. I investigated using xbindkeys to control what is sent to the X server when it receives certain inputs. I even tried complicated guile logic, which actually seems quite nifty, but it just didn't accomplish what I wanted in this case. I found an interesting example (secondary reference 3) where some toggling logic was shared, and I spent a lot of time trying to tinker with that. I finally found what I was looking for on the Arch Wiki (primary reference 1), go figure. Those Arch folks know how to help a guy no matter the distro! You can use xinput to change what signals are sent to X from the device by remapping the buttons. You can suppress a button with 0. The wiki helpfully explains how to find which device to modify. And then the series of numbers after that are the button mappings. So the first button, is mapped to the first number, and so on. If a button is mapped to 0, it is effectively ignored.

xinput set-button-map "$( xinput | awk -F'[=]' '/ouse/{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}' | head -n1 )" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 &

In my example, I mask buttons 8 and 9. Using xev and xbindkeys -mk I learned that my mouse (a generic HP mouse since I've never cared about fancy peripherals) sends button 4 on scrolling up, and then button 8 and button 9 when stopping the scrolling up action. It was the button 8 (and 9) that were causing weird issues with the browser. When I mask the input with xinput as seen here, the scrolling operates completely normally and as expected.

The probable causes

I have been using this mouse with Xfce on Fedora for years, and the scrolling has never been a problem. I suspect my choice of installing all the packages myself on a Devuan netinst contributed to the problem. I had an issue with fonts on xscreensaver which was probably due to my minimal install. Perhaps Fluxbox does not perform some perfunctory task that desktop environments (DEs) do with sanitizing input. I don't care, because Fluxbox has been quite satisfactory. And as a side node, I haven't found a debian-family "minimal" disc that can be used independently of a network, like the CentOS minimal disc image, only a netinst.

References

Primary

Mouse buttons - ArchWiki [wiki.archlinux.org]

Secondary

XBindKeys [nongnu.org]
xbindkeysrc.scm [nongnu.org]
[SOLVED] [xbindkeys] Advanced mouse binds? [linuxquestions.org]
fluxbox-keys(5) Manual Page [fluxbox.org]

Commands/programs

xev - uesful to display info about keys are being pressed xbindkeys -mk - same xinput - manipulate mouse button mapping

Files

~/.fluxbox/keys ~/.xbindkeysrc ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm

Compile Pale Moon 28 on Fedora 27

bgstack15 — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 01:23:16 GMT

Introduction

Pale Moon 28 was released on August 16, 2018. I package it myself on Fedora because I don't see it in the fedora repositories, and plus I like the experience of assembling packages myself. For a basic compile (not in an rpm), you can follow these instructions.

Install dependencies

Install the whole set of packages listed on the Pale Moon site (reference 2) or CentOS7

sudo dnf -y install gtk2-devel dbus-glib-devel autoconf213 yasm mesa-libGL-devel alsa-lib-devel libXt-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel sqlite-devel bzip2-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel
sudo dnf -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'

Install the dependencies I found.

sudo dnf -y install GConf2-devel notification-daemon

Use autoconf 2.13

Pale Moon depends on autoconf 2.13. Thankfully, it's in the Fedora repos, but changing the main autoconf link to point to this specific version will save a bunch of headache later. Be aware that this step exactly as shown will change your system's default autoconf. I'm sure this is a crude way to do it, but aren't build systems throwaway systems nowadays?

autoconfver="$( autoconf --version 2>/dev/null | awk 'NR==1 {print $NF*100;} END {print "0";}' | head -n1 )"
test ${autoconfver} -ne 213 &&amp test ${autoconfver} -gt 0 && sudo mv /usr/bin/autoconf /usr/bin/autoconf-${autoconver} 2>/dev/null ; sudo ln -sf autoconf-2.13 /usr/bin/autoconf

Fetch source

Pale Moon likes to compile in ~/pmsrc. Don't change it. It just makes it easier.

mkdir ~/pmsrc ~/pmbuild
cd ~/pmsrc
git clone https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP .

Prepare to compile

Use the recommended .mozconfig from the Pale Moon site (reference 2)

tf=~/pmsrc/.mozconfig
touch "${tf}"
cat <<'EOFMOZCONFIG' > "${tf}"
mk_add_options AUTOCLOBBER=1
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=/home/$USER/pmbuild/
ac_add_options --enable-application=palemoon

ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2"

# Please see https://www.palemoon.org/redist.shtml for restrictions when using the official branding.
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding
export MOZILLA_OFFICIAL=1

ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-jemalloc
ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --with-pthreads

ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-eme
ac_add_options --disable-parental-controls
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility
ac_add_options --disable-webrtc
ac_add_options --disable-gamepad
ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi
ac_add_options --disable-updater

ac_add_options --x-libraries=/usr/lib
EOFMOZCONFIG

Compile

These instructions include saving the output to a log file, but that's not necessary.

mkdir ~/log
cd ~/pmsrc
{ time ./mach build && time ./mach package ; } | tee -a ~/log/pmsrc.$( date "+%F-%H%M%S" ).log
echo done

References

Weblinks

Add user agent overrides in Pale Moon

bgstack15 — Mon, 14 May 2018 12:43:23 GMT

Pale Moon is a wonderful web browser. I use it as a daily driver. Some websites think it is outdated and will actually send a page saying, "Your browser is outdated. Please update to a modern browser to use this site." I disagree with their assessment. Additionally, Pale Moon has the ability to change the user agent when talking to domains. You can just make a new entry in the about:config page. general.useragent.override.deviantart.net | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:3.4) Goanna/20170101 PaleMoon/27.6.1
---|---
general.useragent.override.netflix.com | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.9
Just make a new entry with name: general.useragent.override. domain.com. And just experiment with the user agent string to send until you get it right for the site in question.

Compiling Pale Moon web browser on Fedora 27

bgstack15 — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 13:31:27 GMT

Story

I like the traditional model of Firefox. This is easily represented in the current project Pale Moon. The upstream project does not currently provide instructions for compiling on Fedora 27. All the options they have documented are on their developer site: https://developer.palemoon.org/Developer_Guide:Build_Instructions/Pale_Moon/Linux. You might think it is no big deal to download and compile an application. But when the application is still targeted for gcc4.9, it's a little tricky to compile on the current Fedora which uses gcc7. After consulting the Internet, I have assembled my instructions for compiling Palemoon on Fedora.

Compile palemoon on Fedora 27

# Install the whole set of packages listed on (primary ref 1) for CentOS7
sudo dnf -y install gtk2-devel dbus-glib-devel autoconf213 yasm mesa-libGL-devel alsa-lib-devel libXt-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel sqlite-devel bzip2-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel
sudo dnf -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'

# Install additional dependencies I found
sudo dnf -y install nspr-devel

# Use autoconf 2.13
autoconfver="$( autoconf --version 2>/dev/null | awk 'NR==1 {print $NF*100;} END {print "0";}' | head -n1 )"
test ${autoconfver} -ne 213 && test ${autoconfver} -gt 0 && sudo mv /usr/bin/autoconf /usr/bin/autoconf-${autoconver} 2>/dev/null ; sudo ln -sf autoconf-2.13 /usr/bin/autoconf

# Use the copr davidva/gcc49
sudo dnf -y copr enable davidva/gcc49
# fix the $releasever variable in the repo
sudo sed -i -r -e 's/-\$releasever-/-23-/;' /etc/yum.repos.d/_copr_davidva-gcc49.repo
sudo dnf -y install gcc49
# fix a minor library problem (primary ref 2)
pushd /opt/gcc-4.9.3/lib64/gcc/x86_64-fedoraunited-linux-gnu/4.9.3
sudo cp -p ../lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 .
sudo ln -s libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so
popd

# Fetch palemoon source
mkdir ~/pmsrc ~/pmbuild
cd ~/pmsrc
git clone https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon.git .

# Prepare to compile
# use .mozconfig from (primary ref 1)
tf=~/pmsrc/.mozconfig
touch "${tf}"
cat <<'EOFMOZCONFIG' > "${tf}"
# Please see https://www.palemoon.org/redist.shtml for restrictions when using the official branding.
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding
export MOZILLA_OFFICIAL=1

mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=/home/$USER/pmbuild/

ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2 -msse2 -mfpmath=sse"
ac_add_options --with-pthreads

ac_add_options --disable-installer
ac_add_options --disable-updater

ac_add_options --enable-release
ac_add_options --enable-devtools
ac_add_options --enable-jemalloc
ac_add_options --enable-shared-js

ac_add_options --enable-strip

ac_add_options --x-libraries=/usr/lib
EOFMOZCONFIG

# Compile:
mkdir ~/log
cd ~/pmsrc
source /usr/bin/gcc49
{ time ./mach build ; } | tee -a ~/log/pmsrc.$( date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S" ).log
echo done

Future steps

Post these instructions on the fedora and palemoon fora. Ask Pale Moon devs if these can be adapted and shared on Reference 1.

References

Weblinks

primary

http://developer.palemoon.org/Developer_Guide:Build_Instructions/Pale_Moon/Linux
ensure lib files are in right dir: https://serverfault.com/questions/266138/cannot-find-lgcc-s-from-gcc-3-4-on-unbuntu-11-04/266141#266141

auxiliary

A great example and future reference http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/srpms/SRPMS.pclos/palemoon-27.0.3-1pclos2017.src.rpm
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/network/palemoon

Palemoon 64-bit for Linux and Flash Player Plugin

bgstack15 — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 14:16:14 GMT

Install Palemoon using the pminstaller.sh from http://linux.palemoon.org/download/installer/
Visit the main page at https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ or use this direct link: https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/download/?installer=FP_27.0_for_Linux_64-bit_(.rpm)_-_NPAPI&stype=7768&standalone=1 and install it.

Load the libraries in the directory Pale Moon looks in:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

References

My links

Palemoon 64-bit for Linux and Google Talk Plugin

bgstack15 — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 13:55:54 GMT

Install Palemoon using the pminstaller.sh from http://linux.palemoon.org/download/installer/
Visit gmail and initiate a call, which will cause it to prompt you to download the google talk plugin. Install it.
Load the libraries in the directory Pale Moon looks in:
```
pushd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins 1>/dev/null 2>&1
```
sudo ln -s ../../../../opt/google/talkplugin/libnpo1d.so sudo ln -s ../../../../opt/google/talkplugin/libnpgoogletalk.so popd 1>/dev/null 2>&1

You don't even need to close and re-open the browser!

You will still get the warning "Hangouts phone calls will temporarily stop working in Firefox." When making an outgoing call, you can dismiss the warning. However, I was unable dismiss the warning when receiving a call, which means I was not able to receive calls. I don't know how to fix that part. Also, on occasion, it simply wouldn't make an outgoing call. Just cancel and try again, and then it will work.

References

Weblinks

https://askubuntu.com/questions/906315/install-java-plugin-in-pale-moon- browser/906341#906341

Original research

rpmrebuild google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm

Using Google Talk Plugin in Palemoon Portable in Wine on Linux

bgstack15 — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 13:19:52 GMT

Overview

My main browser is Palemoon Portable which I run in Wine on GNU/Linux. I also use Gmail, Google Talk (the pre-Hangouts tool), and Google Voice. In order to make and receive phone calls from my main web gmail page, I used this process.

Install Adobe Flash Player for Firefox on Windows. I used the offline installer from the download link at Weblink 2.
1. Used my Linux native Firefox to navigate to the normal Adobe flash player download page.
2. Selected "Need Flash Player for different computer?"
3. Selected Windows 7/Vista/XP and FP 25 for Firefox - NPAPI.
4. From a terminal, I ran the following command and installed Flash like normal.wine ~/Downloads/install_flash_player.exe
Install Google Talk plugin.
1. Unfortunately the gmail link for "Download voice chat plugin" failed to complete. When I ran wine ~/Downloads/GoogleVoiceAndVideoSetup.exe from a terminal, I observed that the process failed because of some network issue related to wine:fixme:secur32:schannel_get_cipher_algid unknown algorithm 23 fixme:secur32:schannel_get_mac_algid unknown algorithm 200 I bet it has something to do with the way my GNU/Linux computers always have some long MAC address in my dhcp list instead of a normal 12-character value. I don't know how to fix that, nor was I able to trick the installer to continue.
2. So I had to install the Google Talk plugin manually.
3. I used a Windows computer that already had a working environment of Google Talk for Palemoon Portable. I copied these files:C:\Users\bgstack15\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\plugins\npgoogletalk.dll C:\Users\bgstack15\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\plugins\npo1d.dllTo location /usr/share/PMP257/Lib/Mozilla/Plugins Where /usr/share/PMP257 is my D:\PortableApps location.
4. I also copied this entire directory:C:\Users\bgstack15\AppData\Local\Google\Google Talk Plugin\ As the directory /usr/share/PMP257/Lib/Mozilla/Plugins/Google Talk Plugin/
5. I set up the wine registry with a key and values from a registry file as seen below.tf=/usr/share/PMP257/Lib/Mozilla/Plugins/googletalk.reg touch "${tf}"; chmod 0644 "${tf}" cat << EOF > "${tf}" REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk Plugin] "CrashReporterKeyPath"=dword:00000000 "D3DXRedistKeyPath"=dword:00000000 "DriverBlacklistKeyPath"=dword:00000000 "install_dir"="z:\\usr\\share\\PMP257\\Lib\\Mozilla\\Plugins\\Google Talk Plugin\\" "neven_lm_installed"=dword:00000001 "neven_sft_installed"=dword:00000001 "nven_mft_installed"=dword:00000001 EOF regedit "${tf}" If the registry file does not import properly, try sticking a blank line after REGEDIT4. Wordpress and the html tag do not play nicely together with blank lines in code.

Conclusion

This entire process was made possible by the fantastic users of the Portableapps.com community: portablealpha, taosk8r, acamp, and robertcollier4. It was that one page (weblink 1), and my working but disused Windows installation that made this whole process possible.

Backstory

I realize I make life hard for myself, for using a web interface in a portable version of a small fork of a web browser in an emulator. The story behind why I use this portable browser, in wine, on Linux, is this. When I first started getting on the Internet, I was a teenager and did not own my own computer. I had a flash drive, and I used it to store my personal files. I discovered PortableApps which let me use probably Firefox 2 or 3 from my flash drive. Even as I grew and got my own computers, I still kept my main web browser as a portable one so it would be relatively free from OS hooks so it was easy to transplant from system to system, as I migrated my main workstation. I built up a new installation every couple of years, hopping from Firefox 17 at one point to 27 to 33 to 38. After that, I switched to Palemoon 25 Portable and that is what I'm still on as of this post. Now, 2016 was the Year of Linux on the Desktop for me, as I wanted to avoid the Windows 10 debacle. I had installed Korora 22 Cinnamon on a spare laptop in November of 2015 and from there made it my main system. In February of 2016 I copied over my Palemoon Portable install and it ran in Wine just fine! The only problem it had was it didn't work with Google Voice. This week I was trying to solve a VLC dlna problem where it was not finding my Plex server. I got frustrated with that (a bug that's still unresolved https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libupnp/+bug/1571199) and transitioned into looking into the Google talk problem on Palemoon Portable.

References

Weblinks

Entire portableapps thread explaining how to get a PortableApp to use Google Talk. http://portableapps.com/node/24945

Portablealpha on September 15, 2010 - 9:18pm

Adding Google Voice plugin

Just wanted to let people know how I got the Google Voice plugin to work so that I could use the "Call Phone" feature from within gmail. This is not elegant but it's the only way I could figure it out because the target computer is behind some nasty firewalls (and the Google Voice installer isn't allowed to call home to download its files). 1. Install the Google Voice plugin on your home computer. 2. Locate the Google Voice and Video Accelerator plugins in FF using about:plugins. 3. Copy those to your Firefox Portable plugins directory on the flash drive. 4. Locate the "Google Talk Plugin" folder on your hard drive and copy it to the flash drive (doesn't matter where). When you want to use Google Voice through Firefox Portable, run the exe in the Google Talk Plugin first, then start FFP and go to gmail. Note that once you exit gmail, it will stop the exe, so you'll have to run it again manually if needed. Anyone have any suggestions to automate this?

Taosk8r on June 11, 2011 - 1:42am

Oh good

I found this thread again.. I cant seem to find where ff 4.0 puts these.. the info I get is: npgoogletalk.dll application/googletalk npgtpo3dautoplugin.dll application/vnd.gtpo3d.auto Is this even still relevant?

Acamp on October 21, 2011 - 3:13am

Fantastic!

Works like a charm! You have to search your computer for those two files (real pain in the ass on newer windows machines because they try not to display any scary system files). Once windows can't find it, click advanced, check include non-indexed, hidden and system files. You also need to search for the folder "Google Talk Plugin" and copy that to the flash drive. It contains the executable that needs to be launched before Firefox is opened

Robertcollier4 on September 28, 2012 - 7:33am

Works without needing to load the EXE manually

Create the following directory structure if not already existing: FirefoxPortable\Data\Plugins\ ChromePortable\App\Chrome-bin\Plugins Palemoon- Portable\Lib\Mozilla\Plugins Place the following files/folders in Plugins directory: npgoogletalk.dll npgtpo3dautoplugin.dll "Google Talk Plugin" (complete folder) "Google Talk Plugin Extras" (complete folder) The files are located at: DocsandSettings\Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk Plugin\ DocsandSettings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\plugins\ Then it will work and the EXE will automatically load from Gmail.

Robertcollier4 on September 30, 2012 - 2:02pm

Specify path in registry to load EXE automatically

Hi - there is one update. If you want the EXE to run automatically, you must add the following registry key with the proper path to googletalkplugin.exe so that it knows where to find it and load it automatically. It will work without adding the registry path - but if the registry path is not there as shown below then you must run the googletalkplugin.exe manually before loading the browser. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk Plugin] "install_dir"="D:\\FirefoxPortable\\Data\\Plugins\\Google Talk Plugin\\" "neven_sft_installed"=dword:00000001 "neven_mft_installed"=dword:00000001 "neven_lm_installed"=dword:00000001 "D3DXRedistKeyPath"=dword:00000000 "CrashReporterKeyPath"=dword:00000000 "DriverBlacklistKeyPath"=dword:00000000

https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/download/?installer=FP_25_for_Firefox_-_NPAPI&stype=5513&standalone=1
Normal adobe flash player download page https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/