Knowledge Base

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.