[GoLUG] If firefox really cared about security

[Kyle Terrien]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 03:20:46AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> 
> 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.

I know which developer you are referring to, and I remember that
conflict with OpenBSD.  Even though that developer was very sharp and
exceedingly competent on the technical issues, he did have strong
opinions, and he did have his limits.  I’m not trying to justify what
happened; I cannot.  However, I will say that he was very smart and a
very valuable resource within Pale Moon; I only wish he knew when he
needed some well-deserved time off to relax.

> 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.

That’s interesting about YouTube.  Back in 2019 when I used Pale Moon
as a daily driver, YouTube worked fine, but Google probably broke it
by supporting some new web standards implemented in Chrome.

That’s strange hardware acceleration is disabled by default.  It’s
2025.

One of the reasons I switched away from Pale Moon was because the web
applications I was using kept growing more and more bloated such that
they ran significantly faster in Firefox and Chromium.  I eventually
settled on Brave Browser because of its built-in ad blocking which
actually works very well and its multi-profile system, which I use for
security by compartmentalization.

I am glad that Pale Moon is still around though.  It is one of the few
fully independent browsers out there that can actually make decent
attempts at running full web applications.  The developers want it to
be able to run modern web applications too.

> 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).

Yes, I usually end up installing it for niche uses or “classic web”
usage.  I wonder if the future of the web will involve a small browser
that supports the “geek web” and a big Chromium smart terminal that
supports modern web bloat.

-- 
[*] Kyle Terrien
    Terrenus => from the Earth, to the Cloud
    https://terren.us/

Dilexisti justitiam, et odisti iniquitatem.  -- Psalmus 44:8