[GoLUG] If firefox really cared about security

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2025 23:21:56 -0700
Kyle Terrien <kyle at terren.us> wrote:

> With regards to the extension fiasco, Pale Moon has proved “security
> versus XUL overlays” is a false dichotomy.  Pale Moon regularly fixes
> old crufty code, most of which they inherited from Firefox.  Take a
> look at how many DiD (Defense in Depth) entries there are in the
> Release Notes.
> 
> https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

Ah yes, Palemoon. Be careful what you wish for :-).

About 10 years ago I blew Palemoon right off my computer after they
made a bunch of lawsuit threats, right out of the box, to an OpenBSD guy
who wanted to package it for OpenBSD using the "Palemoon" name. Hey, I
respect trademarks as much as the next guy, but some clown without
position in Palemoon started talking lawsuits, and then the main guy
went further. Whatever trademarks they may have had, a USPTO search
showed they had no registered trademarks in the USPTO. I think they
were talking about some "common law" trademark or something.

So Kyle, thanks to your enthusiasm I gave Palemoon another try. First
of all, it ships with hardware acceleration turned off, so that it
slows your whole computer to an almost stall. The trick is to
tools=>preferences=>advanced=>general and check both the "use hardware
acceleration when available" box and the "Force hardware acceleration"
box. After doing this, Palemoon behaves in a reasonably efficient
manner.

Palemoon and Youtube just don't get along. When you're watching a movie
on Youtube and try to click the little rectangle on the lower right to
fullscreen the movie, some nonsense menu covers the lower right, and
inconveniently prevents you from clicking the "skip" button on ads.
Heyyyy, thaaat's greaaaat!

Now of course, all browsers suck, so there's room to forgive Palemoon.
And at least it doesn't give me the video artifacts that the
Void-packaged Qutebrowser does. But Palemoon has its limits. Oh, and
open one instance of Palemoon with one tab on one simple website and
you get over 10 Palemoon based processes.

All that being said, I'll be keeping Palemoon around, and probably use
it for Claws-Mail email URLs instead of artifacted Qutebrowser (which
would otherwise be a pretty darn good browser).

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques