Pale Moon 29.2.0 does not support legacy Firefox extensions anymore that are not ported

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 28, 2021
Pale Moon
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82

When Mozilla switched from its legacy add-on system to WebExtensions, Firefox forks such as Pale Moon saw an increase in users who wanted to keep using extensions that Mozilla's new system did not support anymore. Not all extensions did work, but many did, and users could continue using these extensions.

The release of Pale Moon 29.2.0 changes the browser's extension compatibility in a major way, as it removes support for legacy Firefox extensions that are not adjusted to work with the Pale Moon browser. About 230 extensions are currently available for Pale Moon on the official Pale Moon Add-ons website, including popular extensions such as Decentraleyes, uBlock Origin (Legacy), or FoxyProxy.

According to a forum post by Moonchild, Pale Moon project owner, support for Firefox extensions was always considered temporary by the development team. Classic Firefox extensions may not install at all in Pale Moon or may introduce compatibility issues, and that is one of the main reasons for blocking classic Firefox extensions in Pale Moon 29.2.0.

pale moon 29.2.0 addon compatibility

Extensions that are not compatible may be ported to make them compatible with the Pale Moon browser, but who is going to do it? For the Pale Moon project team, the answer is clear. It is the community that needs to step up to ensure that extensions that they use remain compatible with the browser. Realistically, most browser users don't know how to create browser extensions or modify them to make them work. The Pale Moon team cannot port the majority of browser extensions to the browser either, which leaves a small group of community members with the skills and time to port some of the extensions to the browser.

A thread is available on the official Pale Moon forum to post critical Firefox-only extensions.

Pale Moon users may stay on version 29.1.1 of the browser as a temporary measure to keep on using extensions that would otherwise be disabled in Pale Moon 29.2.0 or later. A good option to test compatibility is to use a portable copy of Pale Moon 29.2.0 and test extension compatibility in that version to see which of the installed extensions remain compatibility and which do not. Downgrading to an earlier version of Pale Moon after installation of the 29.2.0 upgrade is not advised as it may introduce profile compatibility issues.

Pale Moon 29.2.0 was released on April 27. 2021.

Now You: do you use Pale Moon? Are you impacted by the compatibility change?

Summary
Pale Moon 29.2.0 does not support legacy Firefox extensions anymore that are not ported
Article Name
Pale Moon 29.2.0 does not support legacy Firefox extensions anymore that are not ported
Description
Classic Firefox extensions are no longer compatible with the Pale Moon web browser starting with Pale Moon 29.2.0, released on April 27, 2021.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Sawako said on September 4, 2021 at 5:02 pm
    Reply

    In a further effort to alienate users, the palemoon developers just forced the takedown of the palemoon forked Mypal browser for Windows XP. Regardless of the details, it appears to be a sad hissy-fit of how-dare-you-do-with-our-open-source-code-the-same-thing-we-did-with-Mozilla’s-open-source-code-to-support-Windows-XP-users-that-we-abandoned!

    Last time I checked palemoon had a 0.01% market share and falling. Seems like they are trying to hasten the decline.

    1. Jody Thornton said on September 25, 2021 at 3:50 pm
      Reply

      I was wondering if there was going to be any news on this. I remember taking A LOT of flack for rightly calling out the two MoonMatt fools. Now, their own idiocy has been shown.

      Matt Tobin, or Matty as he likes to be called :p, dared to compare what was going with XP-forks to the events of September 11th, 2001. Are you for real Matty?

  2. The Solution said on June 23, 2021 at 3:57 pm
    Reply

    Nombreux sont ceux, comme moi, à trouver totalement stupide l’abandon du support des extensions Legacy avec les versions 29.2+ de Palemoon. Le developpeur commet exactement la même erreur que Mozilla à l’époque de Firefox 57+. C’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison que j’utilise Palemoon : pour garder mes anciennes extensions ! Sans cette fontion, le logiciel n’a plus raison d’être.

    La solution pour retrouver toutes vos extensions :

    – Télécharger MyPal (version modifiée de Palemoon supportant les extensions Legacy et l’OS Windows XP) ici : https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal/releases

    A noter que l’installateur inclus une version portable (c’est l’utilisateur qui choisi).

    – Télécharger le pack de langue souhaité (le soft est en anglais par défaut et les packs de langues de Palemoon ne sont pas compatibles). Se présente sous la forme d’une extension, ici : https://mypal-browser.org/release/langpack/ (prendre la branche 29.0.1 pour la version 29.2.1).

    Une fois installée, changer la langue avec l’habituelle extension de Palemoon “Palemoon Locale Switcher”. Pour rappel, elle est ici : https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/locale-switcher/

    – Récupérer l’intégralité de vos paramètres et extensions en quelques clics. Il suffit de copier votre profil de Palemoon situé dans le dossier “…\Palemoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\” (ici pour la version portable, sinon ce dossier se trouve au niveau du profil utilisateur de Windows) et de le coller à la place de celui de MyPal “…\MyPal\Profile\” (ici pour la version portable également).

    ——————————————————————-
    Traduction automatique en anglais / Automatic english translation :

    Many people like me, to find totally stupid abandoning the support of the Legacy addons with paleemoon 29.2+ versions. Developer acts exactly the same mistake as Mozilla at the time of Firefox 57+. It is for this reason that I use Palemoon: to keep my old extensions! Without this failure, the software is no longer correct.

    The solution to find all your addons:

    – Download MyPal (modified version of paleemoon supporting the Legacy addons and the Windows XP OS) here: https://github.com/feodor2/mypal/releases

    Note that the installer includes a portable version (it is the chosen user).

    – Download the desired language pack (the soft is in default English and Palemoon language packs are not compatible). This is in the form of an extension, here: https://mypal-browser.org/release/langpack/ (Take the branch 29.0.1 for version 29.2.1).

    Once installed, change the tongue with the usual Palemoon extension “Local Palemoon Switcher”. As a reminder, it is here: https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/locale-switcher/

    – Retrieve all your settings and extensions in a few clicks. Just copy your Palemoon profile located in the folder “…\Palemoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\” (here for portable version, otherwise this folder is at the Windows user profile) and paste it instead of MyPal folder “…\MyPal\profile\” (here for the portable version also).

  3. StefG said on May 12, 2021 at 11:12 pm
    Reply

    Just was negativly surprised that the tiddlyfox extension for firefox is disabled. Was using this extension every day.
    And also the palemoon forum asked for the most critical FF extensions, but the thread was closed because the users did not follow the rules.

  4. Callhoun54 said on May 6, 2021 at 5:28 pm
    Reply

    So the browser is way behind in supporting recent and upcoming web standards and the makers are not skilled enough to implement this kind of functions – for which some prominent examples are:

    1) Google WebComponents
    2) window.event
    3) upate for the V8 regexp parser

    Which makes the browser unable to display more and more websites and now old add-on support is removed too which was basically the only reason to use the browser in recent years?

    Excuse me but what for a reasoning is now still around to use Pale Moon? Exactly zero! I would say you make the browser up-to-date with adopting a recent Firefox engine to add at least some redeeming value back to it or if you can’t or don’t want – it’s honestly now a very good moment to evaluate the time which is spent in developing this browser.

    1. Peterc said on May 6, 2021 at 9:51 pm
      Reply

      @Callhoun54:

      “[R]ecent and upcoming web standards … [like] Google WebComponents ….”

      Do you not find anything remotely troubling about the owner of the dominant browser — and the dominant ad service and the dominant search engine and the dominant video platform and the dominant email service and the dominant map service — imposing “web standards”?

      “[T]he makers are not skilled enough ….”

      That’s like saying the army of San Marino “is not skilled enough” to fend off an invasion by the army of Italy. GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) are driving the evolution of “web standards,” with Google in the lead role, and together they employ *tens of thousands of coders*. Pale Moon’s development team is *tiny* by comparison. They could be the most highly skilled coders in the world and still have trouble keeping up.

      “[N]ow old add-on support is removed too ….”

      Many (most?) critical or important legacy-Firefox extensions — e.g., uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager, DownThemAll!, NoSquint, and Reader — have already been ported, forked, or replaced. Many others still work after a simple compatibility hack and are good candidates for formal forking. (I use one hacked extension that was last updated 12 years ago and it still works perfectly.) But Pale Moon evolves over time, like legacy Firefox before it, and sometimes it breaks extensions, like legacy Firefox before it. Most legacy-Firefox extension developers threw in the towel and abandoned development when Mozilla pulled the plug on XUL. For those extensions to continue working “indefinitely” in Pale Moon, they *have* to be forked and maintained. Ending support for extensions targeted exclusively to discontinued Mozilla apps was an increasingly necessary move.

      “[O]ld add-on support … was basically the only reason to use the browser in recent years.”

      To my knowledge, Pale Moon (like *legacy* Firefox) doesn’t “spy on you” *at all* out of the box. The only other “major” browsers I can think of that might be able to match that claim are Tor Browser and Brave. Additionally, Pale Moon’s UI (like *legacy* Firefox’s) is much more customizable than other browsers’. But even if “old” extension support is the *primary* reason for using Pale Moon, many of those old extensions have native Pale Moon equivalents and many more can be forked — and they can still be *far more powerful* than extensions for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers are permitted to be.

      Look: I don’t know whether Pale Moon will survive GAFAM’s self-serving de facto takeover of Web “standards” in the long term. For now I can still use it to do 99% of my browsing more productively than in any other browser. If I run into a “problem site,” I can open it in Brave with a single click of a toolbar button (thanks to a native Pale Moon extension). I end up having to do that two or three times in a full day of browsing. Pale Moon *still* provides me the things I loved so much about legacy Firefox in its pre-Australis days: privacy, full customizability, and *powerful extensions*. Apparently, a lot of other people loved those things, too, since legacy Firefox was the dominant browser until Google (still pretending to not be evil) came along and suckered everyone in with its promise of speed and simplicity. Convince enough websites and services to code for features *you* design, and you may eventually be able to make that promise come true. Meanwhile, never mind about all the tracking, profiling, and data-mining going on in background, because the modern Web is a Brave New World.

      1. OldFoxBetterBox said on September 11, 2021 at 3:07 am
        Reply

        @Peterc

        ‘To my knowledge, Pale Moon (like *legacy* Firefox) doesn’t “spy on you” *at all* out of the box’

        You could bundle a release of Firefox78ESR (which is still current) to do that by changing one file. Takes me all of 10 minutes to completely switch all that stuff off manually and disable updates.

        ‘Pale Moon *still* provides me the things I loved so much about legacy Firefox in its pre-Australis days’

        Australis was just a customisable UI, which is far more user friendly to customisation than older versions (it was just the default UI that sucked), and still had xul support up to FF45esr which is 4 years old vs the Palemoon base which is 7 years old. 38-45 was far superior to 22-24 once the UI customisation extensions were available. To this day there are over 100 users of Firefox 38-45 for every Palemoon user.
        I hated Australis when it first came out too, but once the extensions community adjusted it was great. Moonchild made a critical mistake sticking to the 22-24 codebase, and expecting devs to go back a change their now legacy extensions to suit his code instead of fixing it himself.

        Also Brave is spyware personified selling user data to ad companies just like google, facebook etc., and uses your computer as a cryptominer to generate revenue for their company. This is all public knowledge.

  5. llorc said on May 4, 2021 at 10:46 am
    Reply

    @ Peterc

    Thanks again Peterc !

    llorc

    1. Peterc said on May 4, 2021 at 8:45 pm
      Reply

      @llorc: My pleasure!

  6. llorc said on May 3, 2021 at 6:00 pm
    Reply

    @ Peterc

    Thanks a lot for your full description !
    Now i see a bit clearer!

    llorc

  7. John said on May 1, 2021 at 12:53 am
    Reply

    I think they are doing the right thing cutting support for legacy Firefox extensions.

    From what I understand, some elements of Pale Moon’s UI that match ones Firefox once had were dropped by Firefox in 2013 or so (8 years ago) with their “Australis” update, which later, in Firefox, was itself replaced by something else, and is soon going to get yet another overall.

    Pale Moon’s relative UI stability is one of the things that attracts many of it’s users to it, which is cool.

    Similarly, some of the common elements underneath the UI that were once shared by Firefox and Pale Moon aren’t quite that old, they are also based on XUL, which is something Firefox purged several years ago.

    To keep absolute compatibility with the Firefox extensions of yesteryear, Pale Moon would have to essentially freeze their browser in time.

    PM often gets hit hard as outdated and insecure, but they do make improvements under the hood, and I would imagine that the UI, while it looks very similar, is actually not totally identical, and may be rendered using different methods than the Firefox version it most resembles at this point.

    Even a browser trying to stay the same actually does have to change in ways users may not notice just to keep web compatibility, be reasonably secure, work with modern operating systems and hardware, and so on and so forth.

    When you keep changing that kind of stuff and do so independently and not the same way the project you forked from is doing it, it naturally renders extensions that worked 8 years ago on a browser it forked from as less and less reliable and more apt to screw up installations of the browser or give users a sense that maybe an extension is securing something that it isn’t because there is this unseen compatibility issue under the hood.

    So, there comes a point at which you need developers to be making extensions, or editing existing extensions, specifically for Pale Moon. The only way to avoid that is by refusing to update the security or performance of some aspects of the browser that hook into the extensions, which would be problematical.

    Most of those extensions themselves also haven’t been updated in 8 years (Well, many of them have been, but for Firefox’s WebExtension API, which Pale Moon doesn’t support, so the versions Pale Moon users are using have no updates that work on Pale Moon). So, it seems very possible that some of those extensions themselves are a security risks.

    It’s perfectly legitimate for users to say “Well, Pale Moon no longer supports some of my favorite extensions, but [some other browser’s name here] does, so I’m switching to that.”. However, it kind of had to be done. Pale Moon gets hammered, fairly or unfairly, as being insecure or outdated, and here they are making it more secure and up to date, without radical UI changes or anything like that. They just feel at this point that they’ve changed enough and that enough time has passed that it’s not reasonable be pointing users to unupdated eight year old Firefox extensions. All they need is for the old developers to pick them back up, or new developers to fork them, and do a very small amount of work to target Pale Moon and keep them updated.

    1. OldFoxBetterBox said on September 11, 2021 at 2:12 am
      Reply

      Note how it’s always “A very small amount of work” when somebody else has to do it, but when they have to do it it’s “Such a big task”? Ah, human nature…

  8. llorc said on April 30, 2021 at 9:01 am
    Reply

    @ NICO

    where do i use :


    {8de7fcbb-c55c-4fbe-bfc5-fc555c87dbc4}
    28.0.0
    29.*

    ?

    llorc

    1. Peterc said on May 3, 2021 at 1:23 am
      Reply

      @llorc:

      Nico provided a link to the full block of code in a reply to his own post, above. (The link is: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lkvsppp3tkde7n3/Palemoon-xpi-codesnippet.txt)

      In short, you unzip the extension, insert the block of code into its install.rdf file, rezip the extension, and install it.

      Some key points:

      • {8de7fcbb-c55c-4fbe-bfc5-fc555c87dbc4} is Pale Moon’s GUID (globally unique identifier) that identifies Pale Moon as a (theoretically) supported application (or one of them).

      • 28.0.0 is the minimum version of Pale Moon you can attempt to install the extension in.

      • 29.* (meaning all point releases of Pale Moon 29) is the maximum version of Pale Moon you can attempt to install the extension in.

      In full detail (with minor adjustments as necessary for non-Windows OSes):

      • Identify the extension’s ID by loading about:support in Pale Moon and looking for it in the list of Extensions. Copy the relevant ID.

      • Still in about:support, scroll back up, look for the “Profile Folder” entry, and click on the “Open Folder” button next to it.

      • You should now be in your current profile folder in File Explorer. Double-click on the “extensions” subfolder to open that.

      • Now find the *.xpi file that has the extension’s ID as its base filename. (Filter or search the “extensions” subfolder for the ID you copied.)

      • Copy and paste the *.xpi file somewhere else, to be safe.

      • Unzip the copied *.xpi file into its own subfolder.

      • Open the unzipped install.rdf file in a text editor.

      • In the opened install.rdf file, find the “em:targetApplication” code block(s) ‒ the block(s) that are similar to the code block in Nico’s link.

      • Paste in Nico’s code block, on its own lines, either immediately before or after existing “em:targetApplication” blocks.

      • Optionally, find the “em:name” section and type in something like ” (RDF hack)” (without the quotes) after the extension’s friendly name. For example, if the extension’s name is “QuickDrag” you might change it to “QuickDrag (RDF hack)”. This makes it easy to identify hacked extensions in about:addons.

      • Save the edited install.rdf file and close it in your text editor.

      • Rezip the contents of the unzipped subfolder in ZIP format and change the resulting *.zip file’s extension to *.xpi.

      • Open the new *.xpi file in Pale Moon and install the hacked extension.

      That’s how I did it; I hope I didn’t overlook any steps. Even for complete non-coders like me, the structure and contents of install.rdf files are pretty straightforward and easy to understand. The process is more tedious than difficult.

      Caveats:

      • “Jetpack/SDK” extensions won’t work in current Pale Moon without being rewritten. If a legacy-Firefox extension worked in the immediately previous Pale Moon release (29.1.2?), I’m pretty sure it’s not a Jetpack/SDK extension.

      • If you want to share/distribute/publish your hacked extension, you have to respect the original extension’s copyright and licensing language. (Technically, you have to respect it just to make your own personal hacked copy.) Most of the time, permission is given to freely modify the extension, provided the original license is included. Sometimes, you’ll find the relevant information in a separate (unzipped) “LICENSE” file; sometimes, the license is included as a header in a file whose name isn’t immediately obvious to non-coders. In the latter case, doing a content search of all of the extension’s unzipped files for keywords like “license”, “licence”, “permission”, “copyright”, and “©” can be helpful. I found permissive licensing language for all of the extensions I hacked, except for one, which apparently contained no copyright or licensing language at all. (As it happens, that extension has been glitchy for a while and I don’t know how to fix it, so it’s kind of a moot point!)

      1. Peterc said on May 4, 2021 at 12:24 am
        Reply

        @llorc:

        One more tip, in case you *do* have any Jetpack extensions lurking (and I’m guessing disabled) in your profile:

        When you unzip the extension’s *.xpi file, if it contains a file named “package.json” or “harness-options.json”, it’s a Jetpack extension, so don’t bother with it, as it will require more than a simple compatibility hack to work.

        (This is explained in the “Open Casting Call” thread on Pale Moon’s forum: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=26542&sid=4f8a161c6395937ef971adea46928c02)

      2. Peterc said on May 5, 2021 at 10:12 pm
        Reply

        @llorc:

        One final tip, about licensing:

        If you can’t find any licensing language in the extension itself, the license should be specified on the extension’s main page in the Classic Add-ons Archive.

        To peruse the Classic Add-ons Archive, install the Classic Add-ons Archive extension from Github (the *.xpi in the “Latest release” on this page: https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive/releases), enter caa: in Pale Moon’s address bar, and use the page’s search box to find your extension. The extension’s license should be stated somewhere on the right side of the page. (NB: Like a number of other Pale Moon extensions, the Classic Add-ons Archive extension is externally hosted but is linked to from one of Pale Moon’s extension-category pages, in this case: https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/other/)

        In Classic Add-ons Archive you can also download legacy-Firefox extensions you *don’t* currently have (for possible hacking/forking), or different versions of them, by right-clicking their “Install Now” or “Download” buttons and choosing “Save Link As…” That’s actually the Archive’s primary purpose.

        You can also search for licensing information and the extensions themselves in Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, but … I hope you’re a *lot* better at using the Wayback Machine than I am. ;-)

  9. jobbautista9 said on April 29, 2021 at 9:18 am
    Reply

    It’s really amusing that people are complaining to the browser developers, who just simply can’t support all unmaintained extensions forever, rather than the developer/maintainer of the extensions whose support was dropped. Stop shooting the messenger, guys.

  10. Billy said on April 29, 2021 at 2:50 am
    Reply

    Did people forget that these extensions are not maintained anymore? We’re talking about a platform that Firefox itself left behind to better pretend to be chrome. Moonchild is not trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s trying to keep UXP going. UXP was a good platform, but Mozilla was never happy with something that just worked, and when they went back on their policies to change, Pale Moon stayed the same. That’s a good thing. You all knew this time was coming, Moonchild even wrote it in an article on his forum a while ago. Why so surprised?

  11. Anonymous said on April 29, 2021 at 2:26 am
    Reply

    FYI:
    moon-tester-tool is automatically disabled if you install it.
    If you re-enable it, it is disabled again.

    1. Nico said on April 29, 2021 at 10:26 am
      Reply

      Go to Options —> Security and check “Allow all addons” at the top.

  12. Ron said on April 29, 2021 at 12:49 am
    Reply

    All you complaining about this must have short term memories. Ask any developer of these legacy extensions how many times they had to modify them because a new version of Firefox “broke” them. The bottom line is that no one can expect frozen extensions to continue to work on an actively developed browser. They NEED to be forked and maintained. It’s not rocket science folks.

  13. John C. said on April 28, 2021 at 11:33 pm
    Reply

    Does anybody know how to completely turn off updates in Pale Moon version 29.1.0? I managed to revert back to it and don’t want to be continually getting update notices to go to version 29.2.0. TIA.

    1. Peterc said on April 30, 2021 at 2:48 am
      Reply

      @John C.: I would take jobbautista9’s route for the browser proper. (GUIs are easier and less amenable to accidents, like double-clicking on the wrong line. They also make it easier to remember what to undo later on.)

      For extensions, I don’t know what to say. If the minimum and maximum compatible Pale Moon version in all of your future extension updates are correctly specified by the maintainer (which I’m guessing they are most of the time), you shouldn’t run into any trouble. If they aren’t, you might have to manually reinstall an older version of an extension at some point. Anyway, if you decide to disable automatic extension-updating across the board, you can do that in a GUI, too, by going to about:addons and clicking on the “Tools for all add-ons” dropdown button (the gear/sprocket button). If you want to set updating policy on an extension-by-extension basis, you’d have to go through each extension listed on about:addons and click its “More” link.

    2. Peterc said on April 29, 2021 at 10:09 am
      Reply

      @John C.: I’m not 100% positive, but I think making sure the following entries in about:config are set to false might do the trick:

      app.update.auto [leave at false]
      app.update.enabled [change from true to false]
      extensions.update.enabled [change from true to false]

      If you ever wanted to resume updating the browser and its extensions from within Pale Moon, you’d have to remember to change the last two back to true.

      1. Gerard said on April 29, 2021 at 6:52 pm
        Reply

        @Peterc.
        That’s correct.

    3. jobbautista9 said on April 29, 2021 at 9:13 am
      Reply

      Preferences => Advanced => Update

      There you should see the option to either check for updates (but not install them automatically), or never check for updates.

      Btw, if you’re not going to migrate to 29.2.0 for now, you should upgrade to 29.1.1 at least for the security updates. You can find a binary for it in their archives at http://www.palemoon.org/archived.shtml

  14. Peterc said on April 28, 2021 at 10:56 pm
    Reply

    @Nico:

    Thanks! Your post saved me the hassle of having to look up Pale Moon’s GUID. I hacked all of my “orphaned” extensions. Bookmark All, QuickDrag, Scroll to Top/Bottom, and Uppity seem to work perfectly. (Either I was mistaken when I thought Bookmark All had stopped working or I should have hacked it long ago. I also tweaked the language in Bookmark All’s US-English locale overlay while I was at it.) Searchbar Autosizer is not working entirely well and seems to need some substantive recoding, which is unfortunately beyond my abilities.

    The license language I saw — I didn’t think to check for all the extensions — seemed pretty permissive, but I know nothing about the ins and outs of open-source licensing. I remember that one had an explicit MIT license, another one or two had very similar language without identifying a license explicitly, and another mentioned that its graphics fell under a Creative Commons license. If I were an actual extension forker/developer/maintainer, I’d obviously have to review all of the licensing information systematically.

    It’s my (limited) understanding from this thread — https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=26717 — that simple RDF hacks are not going to work indefinitely, even if the rest of the code still happens to. Ultimately, legacy-Firefox extensions will have to be forked and maintained.

    SUMMARY: Pretty happy, for now!

    1. beemeup5 said on April 29, 2021 at 2:57 pm
      Reply

      They’re eventually going to transition from using the ancient and esoteric RDF format (which is the Netscape spec and not the W3C spec) to JSON which is far more universal. This is the right direction for future development.

      Fortunately, the RDF file is basically just a header with metadata in its current usage so reformatting that little bit of information over to a JSON format should be pretty straightforward. The extension’s actual core is essentially javascript, so if it still works in Pale Moon 29, changing the header format in and of itself shouldn’t break functionality.for the foreseeable future.

      1. Peterc said on April 30, 2021 at 1:51 am
        Reply

        @beemeup5: Thanks! From what you write, converting from RDF to JSON *might* even be within reach of ignorant hacks like me. (Well … if a primer for dummies can be had.) Could come in handy for extensions that still work but haven’t been formally forked by the time RDF is no longer supported.

        It sure would be nice if more former XUL-extension developers had continued developing for Pale Moon after Mozilla pulled the plug. (I mean, if the lion’s share of the work is already done, why not?) I’m *really* grateful that onemen (Tab Mix Plus) and gorhill et al. (uBlock Origin) didn’t throw in the towel. Kudos, too, to forkers and new developers. It’s impressive that three-odd years after the WebExtensions Apocalypse, I’ve been able to replace almost *all* of my Firefox extensions with “native” Pale Moon ones.

  15. Leland said on April 28, 2021 at 9:05 pm
    Reply

    Try Roy Tam’s version of PaleMoon and Basilisk as seen at http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/search/label/browser and also referenced at https://msfn.org/board/topic/177125-my-browser-builds-part-1/page/184/ He has continued to make both browsers compatible with XP though it runs fine on any version of Windows. He also has other browsers he has also added like IceApe and others. He is always open to suggestions or help. He is much more open than the real PaleMoon development team in my opinion.

  16. Johnny said on April 28, 2021 at 7:31 pm
    Reply

    I just tested Palemoon 29.1.1 and it’s surprisingly good, I’ll keep it for a while :)

  17. Peterc said on April 28, 2021 at 6:11 pm
    Reply

    KEY REMINDERS: Especially if (like me) you don’t diligently keep up with Pale Moon’s forum, ALWAYS read the release notes *carefully* before upgrading Pale Moon, and ALWAYS back up your profile *before* upgrading in case you want to subsequently downgrade. Once loaded in a new Pale Moon release, profiles are not guaranteed to be back-compatible.

    MAIN NARRATIVE: I’ve been a Pale Moon user for quite a while, and since the “WebExtensions Apocalypse” have gone from using 100% legacy-Firefox extensions to only around 10% over time: I eventually found Pale Moon forks or substitutes for almost everything I used. When I learned that support for legacy-Firefox extensions was ending — which I did yesterday; I’m not much of a forum lurker — I revisited the Pale Moon Addons site and discovered new forks for DownThemAll (GetEmAll) and QuoteURLText (URL Quoter), and a substitute for Scroll to Top/Bottom (Scroll to Top). Still missing are forks/substitutes for QuickDrag (or any drag-and-dropper), Uppity, and Searchbar Autosizer. I also kind of miss Bookmark All, which hasn’t worked in Pale Moon for a couple/few years but which my gut tells me is probably pretty straightforward and easy to adapt.

    NOTE: The “Open Casting Call” thread on Pale Moon’s forum linked to in the article, for “critical” orphaned legacy-Firefox extensions, has been LOCKED because too many people were posting duplicates and unforkable Jetpack extensions. The thread nonetheless remains useful, as a few replies point out available forks/substitutes for some extensions. (WARNING: Don your thick skin before wading in. See my final note, below.)

    ALSO: “Realistically, most browser users don’t know how to create browser extensions or modify them to make them work.” THIS. That’s coming from a new-tricks-averse lazy old dog with no background in coding whatsoever. On a couple of occasions when extension authors were slow in updating their extensions to make them compatible with new Pale Moon releases, I’ve unzipped the extension and topped up its maximum PM-version compatibility or changed a few lines of code — *carefully following instructions found in Pale Moon’s forum posts*. I flounder around hacking other people’s AutoHotkey scripts. I edit recorded LibreOffice macros by informed guess and trial-and-error. That’s the extent of my abilities. I’m not going to be forking any extensions anytime soon.

    FINALLY: When dealing with people in tech (or in law or politics), it’s best to develop a thick skin when it comes to lack of social graces. Based on how Pale Moon has *actually run* over time, its developers strike me as being *pretty good coders* (like Linus Torvalds) and (like Linus Torvalds) they can be prickly and impatient. I worry about its effect on the long-term viability of the project, but I try to not let it get to me personally. (And for what it’s worth, I’m *considerably* more worried about Alphabet/Google’s “polite” de facto takeover of Web standards than I am about sometimes impolite independent-project developers.)

    1. OldFoxBetterBox said on September 11, 2021 at 2:02 am
      Reply

      When ‘impolite’ moves into ‘will not even consider constructive criticism or superior solutions’ the project is dead.

      See ReactOS, still in buggy alpha 11 years after the expected beta release date because the whole project is based on a flawed paradigm

  18. Max said on April 28, 2021 at 4:53 pm
    Reply

    I’ve just upgraded to the latest version. I had to swap out quite a few of my extensions for forked equivalents, but now have 74 installed – almost everything I had before, and no gaps that I’m going to miss.

    So far – everything seems to be running OK.

  19. Birmingham said on April 28, 2021 at 4:34 pm
    Reply

    >> Now You: do you use Pale Moon? Are you impacted by the compatibility change?

    Thanks for the fair article and essential release informations here.

    Well, as these changes have been announced for a long time now, I’ve been prepared and replaced most of my old Firefox add-ons with those to find on addons.palemoon.org.
    There are 3 left, important enough for me, where I couldn’t find a good replacement there. So I installed Pale Moon 29.2.0 as portable version first, like the article advises, to see if I can get those 3 extensions to run again, by forking them. Depends on the complete licensing madness for dead add-ons, if I will also publish them ever.

    Anyway, it’s NOT like > Klaas Vaak said on April 28, 2021 at 10:24 am. I didn’t switch to Pale Moon because Mozilla killed their add-ons and banned them from access, but because I need an unbloated, lightweight, fast and privacy focused browser, not one which introduces new gimmicks every few months.
    It’s rather funny that “rapid” and even “chaotic” changes are now held against Pale Moon. I mean, just look at the ghacks article history about Firefox changes, and not at last your own complains about Pale Moon being an “old and outdated browser”, lol.

    So what … the portable 29.2.0 version runs good and fast for me with around 15 good, working and maintained add-ons compatible with Pale Moon. And there will be more, I guess.

  20. Nico said on April 28, 2021 at 3:40 pm
    Reply

    Modifying the .xpi (zip) file still works for compatible extensions. In install.rdf you have to add this:


    {8de7fcbb-c55c-4fbe-bfc5-fc555c87dbc4}
    28.0.0
    29.*

    1. Nico said on April 28, 2021 at 4:32 pm
      Reply

      [Edit]
      The formatting of my code snippet got completely lost here…

      I’ve uploaded it to:
      https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lkvsppp3tkde7n3/Palemoon-xpi-codesnippet.txt

  21. Lootyhoof said on April 28, 2021 at 2:53 pm
    Reply

    This is a decision that has been years in the making. At the time of Pale Moon 25’s release, which was the first to support Pale Moon-specific add-ons, there were of course very few add-ons which actually supported Pale Moon. Over time, as that number has grown, Pale Moon itself has diverged further from what it was initially forked from. As such, while many Firefox add-ons could be installed in Pale Moon, for many people it took an amount of time and effort to find specific versions that could work, or might work with some issues. However, as these extensions were not maintained by anyone, nobody was able to fix them and they therefore only targeted a specific version of Firefox released in the past, which does not take into account changes in Pale Moon.

    I’m sure this will be disappointing to some people, but we must move forward and to do that, we need to ensure that add-ons are able to actually support us. This does mean some add-ons which were otherwise working have been left to the wayside, but ultimately only a small change is required to make those work (in theory) and, should you wish to help others and grow the community, you could either submit them to our Add-ons Site or host them externally (we are not a “walled garden” and you certainly can do this). There would be an implication of fixing any issues that may arise in the future when doing this, however, as a community project the Pale Moon Forums are always there for any development questions (in addition to the usual community discussion).

    People are free to choose their own path. The same is true of Pale Moon.

    1. OldFoxBetterBox said on September 11, 2021 at 1:55 am
      Reply

      @Lootyhoof

      That’s the exact same logic used by Mozilla to switch to webextensions, the reason Palemoon was created in the first place. Just another example of the hypocrisy of the whole project.

      If there is only a ‘small change’ required to get them working, the palemoon team should be able to knock out the top 1500 extensions in a couple of days, which would cover 99.9% of users. You could probably run a script to do most of it, if Moonchild’s actual skill as a programmer is as good as he makes out (Spoiler alert: It’s not)

  22. Honorius said on April 28, 2021 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    > Pale Moon 29.2.0 does not support legacy Firefox extensions anymore that are not ported
    Zed’s dead baby. Zed’s dead.

    1. Peterc said on April 28, 2021 at 6:18 pm
      Reply

      @Honorius: Dead? “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” ;-)

  23. jobbautista9 said on April 28, 2021 at 11:25 am
    Reply

    Hey @Martin Brinkmann:

    > Downgrading to an earlier version of Pale Moon after installation of the 29.2.0 upgrade is not advised as it may introduce profile compatibility issues.

    You can still downgrade to 29.1.1, but you need to have a backup of your profile from 29.1.1 beforehand. Otherwise, yes, it’s not a good idea to corrupt your profile.

  24. Anonymous said on April 28, 2021 at 11:13 am
    Reply

    “Firefox forks such as Pale Moon saw an increase in users who wanted to keep using extensions that Mozilla’s new system did not support anymore. ”

    Exactly the reason I installed Pale Moon (albeit as a secondary browser).

    Maybe there is a technical NEED for the change, but the way the article is written indicates it is a decision by the development team based on choice and if so I don’t understand why.

    Without access to these legacy extensions I’ll uninstall Pale Moon, as it pales (get it hey) into comparison with other browsers.

  25. Gerard said on April 28, 2021 at 10:43 am
    Reply

    Perhaps the Pale Moon team is too small to develop and support enough extensions. There is still no NoScript for Pale Moon, but an older (legacy) version always worked, at least until the new version of this browser. That may now become a dealbreaker for many users. And when will the to be expected end of uBlock Origin for Pale Moon be a fact? Pale Moon users may now have to return to Firefox, look for an alternative such as Waterfox or flee to the dangerous world of Google’s Chrome or its derivatives.

    1. JustMy2c said on April 29, 2021 at 5:56 am
      Reply

      uMatrix and/or uBlock Origin for PaleMoon, and also Firefox, is a better choice, I used to use NoScript in the past but it’s somewhat resource heavy and the user interface isn’t that good in comparison.

    2. Peterc said on April 28, 2021 at 4:08 pm
      Reply

      @Gerard:

      EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you want to use a “scriptblocker” in Pale Moon, use eMatrix instead of NoScript.

      FULL NARRATIVE: NoScript has been *strongly discouraged* in Pale Moon for … a couple of years? The developers say it is known to cause problems and that they will no longer offer support to users who run it. I had well over a decade of “training” invested in NoScript (a custom blacklist and a custom whitelist) and I’m an old dog who no longer gets excited about learning new tricks, so I dragged my feet for almost a year after learning it had been deprecated. Sure enough, I began running into weird issues that I couldn’t connect to anything else. I finally bit the bullet and rebuilt my profile from scratch (important in this case), replaced NoScript with eMatrix (an actively developed fork of the now-discontinued uMatrix), and learned how to *use* eMatrix (which turned out to be a *little* easier than the lazy old dog thought it would be). The weird issues went away, so although I still don’t understand *how* NoScript messes up Pale Moon, my own experience suggests that it *does* (or at least *can*).

      FUNCTIONAL BONUS/LEARNING DRAWBACK: eMatrix is more sophisticated and granular (site- and element-specific) than NoScript. When you blacklist or whitelist a “secondary” domain in NoScript, it’s blacklisted or whitelisted on all sites (globally). In eMatrix, you have a choice between global and site-specific blacklisting/whitelisting, and you can blacklist/whitelist specific classes of element.

    3. jobbautista9 said on April 28, 2021 at 11:16 am
      Reply

      eMatrix (https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/ematrix/) is a better alternative to NoScript.

      Also, I’m not sure where you heard the “expected end of uBlock Origin for Pale Moon”. It’s the maintainers of that add-on that will decide when to stop targetting Pale Moon, not the other way around.

    4. Iron Heart said on April 28, 2021 at 11:12 am
      Reply

      @Gerard

      > or flee to the dangerous world of Google’s Chrome or its derivatives.

      Chrome can’t have any derivatives – it’s closed source. Chromium, on which Chrome is based, has derivatives. If you call browsers like Bromite, Ungoogled Chromium, or Vivaldi – the only browsers that are actually listening to their users, might I add – “dangerous”, then you can’t be helped.

  26. Klaas Vaak said on April 28, 2021 at 10:24 am
    Reply

    Remarkable, Moonchild has this habit of developing an app as an alternative to another, and when he gets users over, after a while he sticks a virtual dagger in their back and drop what was the original attraction of the product.

    He did the same with that email app he developed as an alternative to Thunderbird. I fell into that trap 1 year after I had gone over from Thunderbird. I learned my lesson and did not fall in his much touted Pale Moon wannabe browser. Naturally, Moonchild had a reason for dropping his email app (I forget the name), an lame excuse rather: it was taking up too much of his time and he preferred to remain focused on Pale Moon. Yeah, sure. Figuring that out beforehand was not possible, right?

    So, now that Moonchild does a moonchild again, what is next? Basilisk? I am surprised people still trust this dicey character and his “there 1 day, gone the next day” apps.

    1. FossaMail said on May 3, 2021 at 1:56 pm
      Reply

      @Klaas Vaak:

      It was FossaMail.

      FossaMail user area (No official support will be provided here —)
      https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=58

    2. Iron Heart said on April 30, 2021 at 2:57 pm
      Reply

      Pale Moon is insecure. It lacks sandboxing

      1. jobbautista9 said on May 1, 2021 at 3:36 pm
        Reply
      2. jobbautista9 said on May 1, 2021 at 3:40 pm
        Reply

        Multi-process is also insecure by design, despite what Google and Mozilla is telling you otherwise: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17442

        You secure yourself against malicious webpages that can crash a process, in exchange for opening up the attack surface via IPC. Doesn’t seem like a good trade-off to me.

      3. MaNaMaNaDoDoBeDoBe said on May 1, 2021 at 4:42 pm
        Reply

        It doesn’t affect Iron Heart because he only hundred and hundreds of profiles, one per domain. So a crash doesn’t bring down his entire stack

    3. Peterc said on April 28, 2021 at 7:59 pm
      Reply

      @Klaas Vaak:

      That’s a bit unfair. With email clients (and calendaring apps and contact-management apps) *in particular*, it’s important for the *user* to assess the future viability of the app and identify an exit strategy in case it goes under. Moonchild Productions is a *very small outfit*, and the future of even Thunderbird was open to question for a while. Pale Moon is *clearly* Moonchild Productions’ primary project. It’s been facing increasing challenges since being orphaned by its legacy-Firefox upstream base, and GAFAM’s ongoing de facto takeover of Web standards (with Alphabet/Google in the lead) hasn’t made it any easier for Pale Moon to keep up. I think it’s *admirable* that I can *still* use Pale Moon for 99% of my browsing and be happier with it than with the alternatives. It still delivers most of the “classic Firefox” privacy, customizability, and extensibility that I loved so much (albeit with a greatly reduced pool of extension developers). That said, I remain cautious about becoming reliant on side projects, and I maintain a fallback strategy for Pale Moon itself (for now, Brave or, with recurring privacy-enhancing tweaks, Firefox).

      There’s only so much you can legitimately expect from a small operation. Raymond Hill (by all accounts a very decent guy) shelved uMatrix to focus on uBlock Origin. Mozilla is a thousand times bigger than Moonchild Productions, and they “stabbed” thousands of extension developers and millions (tens of millions?) of users “in the back” when they ended support for legacy extensions. Red Hat is also a thousand times bigger, and they “stabbed” … well, *lots* … of CentOS users “in the back” when they stopped releasing it. Microsoft is tens of thousands of times bigger than Moonchild Productions, and *they* “stabbed” millions (tens of millions?) of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users “in the back” when they refused to support those OSes on post-Skylake chipsets three and six years before end of life, respectively. It’s important to have some perspective before speaking of betrayal.

      @Iron Heart:

      According to a post in the Pale Moon forum’s “Open Casting Call” thread, Singing Stallman is Jetpack-based and (therefore, I gather) not directly forkable. Regarding forum toxicity, see one of my other comments in this thread: it’s best to develop a thick skin when dealing with people in tech.

    4. Iron Heart said on April 28, 2021 at 11:23 am
      Reply

      @Klaas Vaak

      You absolutely nailed it. The leadership of this project is nothing short of chaotic and they drive users away with the toxicity of their forums. That being said, next to Brave, I am actually keeping a Pale Moon installation around here, because of the Singing Stallman extension. This is so hilarious, one really needs to check it out! It can still be fetched from JustOff’s Classic Add-ons Archive (XPI file available here):

      https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive/releases

      It adds a button representing Stallman’s head to Pale Moon, and when you press it, the original Free Software Song by R. Stallman plays. LOL.

      I suppose it no longer works with PM 29.2.0… But it still works with Waterfox Classic (one has to disable multiprocess / e10s in the settings) + Classic Add-ons Archive.

      1. Anonymous said on April 28, 2021 at 6:47 pm
        Reply

        The toxicity of their forums ? I have never understood those repeating that systematically to the point that I suspect that it’s just part of the usual anti-Pale Moon hate campaign for other reasons from competitors. I disagree with them on many things but from what I have read there, compared to the pathologically lying and terminally corrupt Google-like automatons that populate Firefox forums for example, the Palemoon forums are a breath of fresh air in honesty and reason. But of course everything is relative.

      2. OldFoxBetterBox said on September 11, 2021 at 1:38 am
        Reply

        @Anonymous

        Anyone who has experienced it (like I have) knows, so you must be one of Moonchild’s orbiters, or Moonchild himself. Even constructive criticism that disagrees with his edicts is met with the kind of passive-aggressive dismissive abuse such as your post display

        Great example of his attitude was when he ran a contest for forum users to pick the name and logo for his new Australis browser. He didn’t like the answer they chose, so just used his favourite: That’s why it is called Basilisk

        Also he promised Palemoon would always support Firefox extensions, now like a child caught breaking a promise says “I never said that”. FYI he also said he would never make an Australis based browser a year or two before he came out with Basilisk.

        I like the idea of Palemoon (and I have recoded firefox source) but no-one wants to work with that guy. He tried hooking up with Alex (Waterfox), and he was like ‘no thanks’, just like the rest of us.

      3. John said on May 1, 2021 at 12:32 am
        Reply

        I actually am going to make a comment at the bottom of the comment section defending Pale Moon dropping support for Firefox extensions that aren’t specifically ported to Pale Moon after I post this, so I am not just saying what I am about to say out of a knee-jerk negative feeling about the browser, I’m trying to be objective (If you combine the two posts and average them out).

        However, I do think there are issues with the public relations skills of both Tobin (Who’s issues are pretty obvious to anyone who has spent much time in an online community he’s been part of.) and MoonChild.

        What I’m about to say about MoonChild (the project’s lead developer and copyright holder of the intellectual property assets of Pale Moon [name, logo, that sort of thing]) is something I don’t feel violates GHack’s rules against personal attacks because it is simply relaying a public stance he holds that he has repeatedly stated in his public capacity as the face (Figuratively speaking) of the Pale Moon project on Pale Moon’s official forums and has never (At least to my knowledge) retracted. He seems to think it’s an alright stance to take publicly, so it should be alright to discuss.

        Since others have started to cover Tobin, I’ll just mention that MoonChild pretty vigorously asserted that anyone who wasn’t donating money to the project while using the browser was a “freeloader”.

        It was talked out with him and he was given a bunch of opportunities to back off that stance gracefully or explain it away, and he declined to do so. It was brought up to him that maybe he shouldn’t include people who reported bugs, spread the word about the browser to other users, generated revenue through their search deals, and/or contributed code to the project in his “freeloader” category. He reaffirmed his stance anyway (With the possible exception of code contributors, he may have backed off counting them, but he definitely counted all the others as “freeloaders”).

        Someone asked him, okay, fine, if you feel like the browser really needs more donations that badly, could he provide some basic financial information for the project like official expenditures, income to the project by general source (donations, seach deals, etc.- not asking for donors’ names or anything), and the salary he pays himself and/or others- just a small portion of the type of things that would be in any publicly traded company’s annual report, nothing too person to be in the sort of report that’s mandatory for larger companies that are structured a bit differently.

        He declined to disclose any financial information for privacy reasons, but it was pointed to him that he was basically in a sense saying that someone who was dirt poor had a moral obligation to finance MoonChild’s salary if said person used the Pale Moon web browser, without knowing what that salary was that the CEO was getting and whether it was higher or lower than the salary of the person he was asking to donate on pain of otherwise being considered a “freeloader”, whether it seemed reasonable for a person of his skill set to get for doing what he was doing, and so on and so forth.

        I would say that it wouldn’t have mattered if that type of information is disclosed or not if he had just said “Give if you want. The project depends on user support to continue, and donations allow me to work on it full time instead of as a hobby. I understand that not everyone can give money, though, and I’m glad you choose to use my web browser anyway.”. That would have been fine. Doesn’t really matter in that scenario what he makes off of it, how much money comes in to the project in general, or how much of the revenue goes back into paying project-related expenses. People where that’s as far as it goes are being offered a chance to help the people who provide software they enjoy, which is cool. People who don’t want to help out, want to help out in other non-financial ways, or who can’t afford it aren’t guilt tripped or insulted in that scenario. It’d just be an opportunity to give if you want- or not if you don’t (or can’t). That’s how most projects that offer the ability to donate approach it, and that’s alright in my book.

        However, once he started insulting people who used a freely offered open-source web browser as freeloaders if they didn’t donate monetarily, even if they helped the browser in other ways, then I think it’s fair to ask for more information. Frankly, I don’t think calling your users free loaders is appropriate anyway. They’re not pirates. It’s offered from his official site as a free download. However it would be *less* offensive (albeit still a little bit) if he opened up the project’s finances and/or perhaps exempted more groups people from his broad categorization like people who make less than he does, people beneath the poverty line, or whatever.

        That also made Pale Moon the only browser I know of that has gone on record and said, essentially, “If you don’t give us money, you’re a freeloader”. No other browser projects I know do that, including small ones that rely on donations in full or in part.

        These guys at Pale Moon understandably really rub some people the wrong way, and I think it does limit their user base. Even some people for whom the browser may be perfect (or as good as other options) could be put off from trying it, or be put off from continuing to use it, if they feel like every time they open the thing it’s going to remind them of these really nasty thing one or more of the developers said about them or about other people.

        When it comes to a browser, it’s features, security, user interface, customizability, extension support, and various other things matter, but I think what matters most, especially to a non-technical crowd, is how using the browser makes them feel. If the branding is off to the point where people really have significant issues with public comments from the top brass in their capacity as the top brass that make them feel less positive towards the browser, that probably does cost them users. Some people can ignore that stuff, but others can’t.

      4. Iron Heart said on April 29, 2021 at 6:54 am
        Reply

        @Anonymous

        There is a reason why people keep saying this, and this reason starts with “T” and end with “obin”. I mean, even outside of their forums…

        https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86

        And inside…

        https://forum.palemoon.org/search.php?author_id=1861&sr=posts

        This project already has its bane.

  27. epictetus said on April 28, 2021 at 9:40 am
    Reply

    For everyone how needs legacy exetensions full support, i suggest “Waterfox Classic” with ” JustOff ca-archive” extension, an archive of legacy exensions that mozilla has removed from his repository.
    “Waterfox Classic” has also a good compatibility with most of the latest WebExtensions.

    1. Anonymous said on April 28, 2021 at 5:41 pm
      Reply

      That’s what I use. Unfortunately the developer has more or less abandoned Classic for now, doing principally security updates (and not with the greatest care and commitment either), while focusing instead on a main version that follows more closely Firefox and essentially does not work with classic extensions.

      He promised that Classic would remain maintained but he’s clearly doing it reluctantly and site compatibility may become a real problem in the future. Github is already broken unless a specific add-on called Polly is installed and configured. Github leading the charge in killing ethical browser forks may come as a surprise considering its social role in libre software development but that’s what happens when Microsoft, one of the worst enemies of this movement which it considers as a cancer, owns the place.

      There is no real ambition in Waterfox to counter Mozilla’s damage, only to exist as a niche browser next to them as long as it makes them enough money.

      However Waterfox remains unquestionably a superior alternative to Firefox, because it is more user respecting by default, even if it imports a lot of the original Firefox problems. For example there is no more telemetry, no more ads, no more Pocket, and the developers won’t use a backdoor to install more malicious components (Cliqz, Mr Robot, …) or alter user preferences in their back. What is striking is that while it cannot be denied that the developer has a dirty background compared to libre software standards, coming from the search engine business and still being paid by Microsoft, and still displaying on the Waterfox homepage links to articles where he explains that personalized ads are better than normal ads in his opinion, in effect he succeeds in actually cleaning Firefox from its most offending parts, reminding us that Mozilla is yet another kind of beast.

      And for those who worry that an ethical browser may come at the cost of usability problems like a Microsoft site being broken, Waterfox current removes that last problem, leaving no reason to use Firefox. Mozilla must be pressured by the users to be less evil and the fear of users leaving for more ethical forks when they do something bad is the only lever we have currently to defend ourselves against them and their world.

      1. Jody Thornton said on May 28, 2021 at 11:59 am
        Reply

        Yes Alex has closed a bunch of GitHub ticket abruptly for Waterfox, and has even conceded that Waterfox Classic may be getting outpaced by the modern web.

        https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/nmsbr8/classic_problems_with_outlookcom/

        Ouch! I’d say that has a limited future.

      2. Anon said on May 1, 2021 at 1:30 am
        Reply

        >> Github leading the charge in killing ethical browser forks

        Now I really want to know what you’ve been snorting, because clearly it’s powerful stuff!

      3. fatwolverine said on May 2, 2021 at 11:48 am
        Reply

        > Now I really want to know what you’ve been snorting

        Probably the same mind-bending substance and cool-aid as the others. It must be drugs, aimirite? How else do shills and trolls induce such alternative realities, hostility and incessant spamming. Maybe they’re paid in pyramid fiat batshit coins? Which they use to buy more snorting wares … such a vicious cycle

      4. TelV said on April 29, 2021 at 10:44 am
        Reply

        @ Anonymous,

        As of the 2021.3 release Polly has been removed due to confusion on how to use it apparently: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-2021.03-release/

        The initial warning that the Github site won’t work with older browsers appears, but the site works properly in spite of Polly’s removal. Example:
        https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/master/share/lua/playlist

  28. John C. said on April 28, 2021 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    Yes, I absolutely am impacted by this development. At this point, I’m looking at Waterfox as a replacement for Pale Moon.

    1. Brave Heart said on April 29, 2021 at 3:12 pm
      Reply

      > Note for all those looking into Waterfox Classic

      Don’t bother. It’s outdated old code. If you really want a browser made by an advertising company, use Chrome or Brave

      1. Iron Heart said on April 29, 2021 at 3:53 pm
        Reply

        @”Brave Heart” * [Editor: removed]

        I am missing the proof that Waterfox is spying on users, I am missing the proof that Pale Moon is any less “outdated” (web standard support). Please provide said proof.

      2. Brave Heart said on April 30, 2021 at 2:00 pm
        Reply

        @ “Iron Heart * [Editor: removed]”

        Who said Waterfox was spying? Please provide proof

      3. Brave Heart said on May 1, 2021 at 6:40 am
        Reply

        @ “Iron Heart”

        “Says it all” says the resident “the sky is falling” alarmist, who constantly shrieks and rants about Firefox being business savvy and selling default search engine deals by the region to the highest bidders

        You sure are hypocritical

      4. Iron Heart said on April 30, 2021 at 5:57 pm
        Reply

        @”Brave Heart”

        “Advertising company” implies monetization of user data. Provide proof for that or shut up.

        Firefox is almost entirely Google-funded and I never hear its fanboys talk much about that. Says it all.

      5. jobbautista9 said on May 2, 2021 at 9:04 am
        Reply

        @Iron Heart

        System1’s website (https://system1.com/) literally says that they “connect customers with advertisers”, so they are an advertising company, just like Google and Brave. Advertising by itself has nothing to do with “monetization of user data”.

        And of course you fall back to the false dichotomy that everyone who criticizes your views is a Mozilla fanboy. I’m not. I’m more of a Pale Moon lunatic really. ;)

      6. Brave Heart said on May 7, 2021 at 12:24 am
        Reply

        > “Advertising company” implies monetization of user data. Provide proof for that or shut up

        Like Brave? Brave makes money by utilizing user data, it’s fully documented that user data is used to create advertising profiles. Brave is an advertising company.

        Where did anyone say Waterfox was monetizing user data? Please provide proof

      7. Iron Heart said on June 15, 2021 at 6:44 pm
        Reply

        > Like Brave? Brave makes money by utilizing user data

        Proof? Brave’s ad matching happens entirely on your PC, no data is being sent to servers owned by Brave Software or any third party. You would know that if you had read about it:

        https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/

        Must come as a disappointment to you….

    2. BiCurious said on April 29, 2021 at 8:44 am
      Reply

      Palemoon is not secure. Why would you want to use an outdated insecure browser?

      1. vanp said on April 30, 2021 at 6:23 am
        Reply

        BiCurious:

        If I can do just about everything I want to do on the internet with a browser, how is it outdated? And a browser not kowtowing to the Chrome-ordained standard of the day doesn’t mean it’s outdated.

        Since Nov. 2015, I haven’t had any problems with Pale Moon. So, how is it insecure? And I don’t want any nonsense about that ‘archive’ situation a couple years ago, thanks. As far as I know, nobody was harmed. If you made software (maybe you do; I don’t know), would it be perfect?

      2. computer said no said on April 29, 2021 at 3:08 pm
        Reply

        @bicurious
        Can you outline what the security issues are please so the pale moon team can know.?.

        when you claim it is insecure which insecurities do you mean as i have used pale moon for years and never had a security incident.

    3. Hunter said on April 28, 2021 at 11:24 am
      Reply

      You can use Moon Tester Tool to bring your extensions back to life – https://github.com/JustOff/moon-tester-tool

      1. JustMe said on April 28, 2021 at 3:15 pm
        Reply

        Excellent, thank you for the tip :)

    4. jobbautista9 said on April 28, 2021 at 11:19 am
      Reply

      @John C.

      Do you mind sharing what critical extensions have been disabled after you upgraded to 29.2.0? There might already be alternatives for those extensions, or someone willing to fork them for UXP.

      Also, you might also want to consider migrating to Basilisk instead, which still supports Firefox-only extensions. It will inevitably stop supporting those extensions in the future, but I don’t see any reason they would do it this year.

    5. Iron Heart said on April 28, 2021 at 11:14 am
      Reply

      Note for all those looking into Waterfox Classic:

      Depending on the age of the extension you intend to use, you might have to turn off multiprocess / e10s in the Waterfox settings, under about:preferences#general. I would first try to run with e10s enabled (as this increases performance), this is just meant as a hint in case an extension doesn’t work.

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