Is it time to reconsider putting Pale Moon browser in Puppy versions

[Fossil]

I'm posting from Pale Moon 32.5.0 32-bit, Dell OptiPlex 760, 2.50 Mhz, and must say that for my modest requirements never had any problems with it. I'm satisified. What more can be said!

[dimkr]

Firefox has a significantly larger footprint & profile will bloat. Pale Moon's profile is relatively modest.

Take any big browser, fork it, keep it alive but don't maintain it well for a year or two (don't add support for current web standards so websites render partially, some content is broken, some clickable elements do nothing and some codecs are unsupported), and you'll get a much lighter browser compared to the latest version of the browser you originally forked from.

More often than not, this is how the small browsers forked from Firefox or Chromium achieve this claim of lower footprint. I still haven't found a truly full-featured browser (where everything "just works") that's much lighter or faster than Firefox or Chromium.

[bigpup]

So far, all I see negatively posted about Pale Moon is not having DRM support.

[mikewalsh]

So far, all I see negatively posted about Pale Moon is not having DRM support.

@bigpup :-

The lack of DRM support is the only personal grouse I have with Pale Moon. In every other respect, it works 100% for me.

I can't dispute @dimkr 's claims about how "light" browsers are achieved. I don't know enough about it, don't know the coding languages involved, can't read it & don't understand it. I'm like most of us, I don't look at them through a developer's eyes, specifically looking to check out every single one of literally 1000s of individual elements to make sure it's all fully functional, safe AND "secure". Like the vast majority of people, I check it out only so far; does it work for ME? Does it do what I want it to do?

If the answers are "Yes", then it's all jake so far as I'm concerned. TBH, if every single one of billions of computer users worldwide were to be that critical, and "nit-pick" to such an extent, there would be one of two outcomes. Either:-

• Nobody would dare to even plug a 'puter in, much less switch one on, OR
• There would be a rapid increase in the quality of coding and maintenance, because many more folks would make the conscious decision to become "involved"

But that's all speculation on my part, of course. Like I said, lack of DRM is my only grumble. This was a conscious decision Moonchild took several years back, when Pale Moon was first forked from Firefox, and the UXP platform was gathering steam. Otherwise, it's all good. The Goanna rendering engine works well. I like Pale Moon, and always have.

Mike.

[fernan]

I gave up using Palemoon a couple of years ago. Nowadays, I don't even click on the Palemoon Icon or bother trying a new version. I just need a browser to navigate certain web sites, and I had a lot of problems in the past with Palemoon, many web sites I use not opening correctly or nor working as they should, specially banks and government sites with online apps, so I simply gave up and tried other browsers. Vivaldi was my favorite for a while in a slow computer. Now, with a newer hardware, I simply changed to Firefox ESR.

[Feek]

Just my opinion.

Palemoon has always seemed more cumbersome to me than e.g. Firefox (in Bionicpup64, Fossapup64 and sometimes in Fatdog), including playing videos on YT.
So I think what dimkr says explains some things.
Back then I used Palemoon more for lighter things like reading the forum, weather, news etc.

I haven't tried the latest version so I can't rate.

Currently, my 12 year old thinkpad is perfectly happy with FirefoxESR (built in and fully functional) in Vanilladpup64 and in Bookwormpup64.

Of course, I don't want to discourage anyone from Palemoon.

[mikewalsh]

So much depends on the individual use-case.......what the user wants to achieve during a given session.

If I'm just having a general browse through blog-sites and forums, then I know Pale Moon is fine. If I need to access any of my cloud file-hosting sites (Google, MediaFire, or MEGA.nz) - or want to watch NetFlix - I generally fire up a Chromium-based browser.

With packaging/trying-out/experimenting with so many browsers for the community, I've probably got upwards of a dozen or more in a fully-functional, 'ready-to-go' condition at any given moment. It's not at all unusual for me to have perhaps 3 or 4 different browsers all open at the same time.

I accept that my 'use-case' is not representative of the average user.....

(shrug...)

Mike.

[bigpup]

Again, making statements on how Pale Moon worked in the past, especially version 30 thru 31, is not how it works now.

Version 30 thru 31 were buggy, by getting bad code put into it, by a disgruntled member of the team. Who was removed from working on it.

The bad code got put in version 30 and it took releasing version 32 to get it corrected, for the most part.

We all know it was a piece of crap, with version 30 thru 31.

So judge it now at version 32.5.2

---

Google Chrome controls the Internet.

As we have all found. Some web sites just will not properly function, unless the browser is Chrome or Chrome based.

The service that is providing my Internet.
Their web site will only function correctly, if I access it with Google Chrome or Chromium browser.
They even tell you this on the main web page!

But, I do not like the idea of having Google spy on what I do!

[bigpup]

OK, here you go.

Microsoft Edge browser for Linux.

It is only 157 MB deb package download.

Running it on Bookworm pup64 10.0.3

Has to be run with --no-sandbox added to exec command.
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[jamesbond]

There's a reason why companies that build browsers (Opera, Brave, Edge ...) decide not to build their own browser and mostly wrap Chromium with different UI.

But then if we follow this to its logical conclusion, we end up with mono-culture which has been proven to be bad for security, isn't it?

[mikewalsh]

Google Chrome controls the Internet.

As we have all found. Some web sites just will not properly function, unless the browser is Chrome or Chrome based.

The service that is providing my Internet.
Their web site will only function correctly, if I access it with Google Chrome or Chromium browser.
They even tell you this on the main web page!

But, I do not like the idea of having Google spy on what I do!

Shades of the late 90s, methinks.......when MyCrudSoft's Internet Exploder dominated the web. Many webmasters coded their sites to specifically optimise them for IE6/6.5/7, just to guarantee everything would work with M$'s dreadful DirectX crap (one of the biggest security "holes" ever invented, from what I recall).

We've gone full circle, I believe..!

Mike.

[dimkr]

mono-culture which has been proven to be bad for security, isn't it?

I guess it depends. As long as we have groups like Project Zero auditing the codebase, I guess it's fine to have one browser or one base for most browsers. What matters is professional penetration testing and auditing, a group of browsers by different vendors and very little shared code can be bad for security if researchers can't look at each browser thorough or some development teams don't have the resources or willingness to take the security of their browser seriously.

The amount of Firefox code in Pale Moon is probably decreasing over time because Firefox keeps evolving independently, so I assume that fewer and fewer Firefox security updates can be applied to Pale Moon, if these fixes are indeed backported continuously. And I assume that Pale Moon (especially the parts not derives from Firefox) receives less (if any) attention from security firms and independent researchers.

[bigpup]

If you look at the Pale Moon release notes.
https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

About all of them have security updates.

Now, how up to date they are, I do not know.
But the latest updated version release notes indicate, they seem to be.

Note that general statement at the top of the release notes

---

Yes, I want a Google Chrome based browser, so I know for sure, Google is spying on what I do on the Internet!

We are Google.
We control the vertical and horizontal, input and output, what you can see and what you can not see!
We know what you did and where you did it.
Resistance is futile!

[amethyst]

Yes, I want a Google Chrome based browser, so I know for sure, Google is spying on what I do on the Internet!

Google will be spying on you when you visit any google related site never mind what browser you are using.

[dimkr]

Yes, I want a Google Chrome based browser, so I know for sure, Google is spying on what I do on the Internet!

Google will be spying on you when you visit any google related site never mind what browser you are using.

There are so many ways to track you that are baked into a browser and required by various web standards any "serious" browser must implement to be useful. Is Chrome much worse than other options? IMO no, especially when you change some configuration defaults or block certain domains with /etc/hosts. And while Chromium is open source, I think that any software project you can't rewrite yourself in reasonable time (and need a large or well-funded team) is not truly "open source", because you can't read all the code, understand it and audit it for privacy or security issues until you feel confident that you can fully trust it. It's open source only for commercial reasons, like easy integration of "free" work done by contributors, or "free" security auditing by security firms that write whitepapers to show off their talent.

If you don't want tracking, get off the web and use something like https://geminiprotocol.net/

[houndstooth]

Take any big browser, fork it, keep it alive but don't maintain it well for a year or two (don't add support for current web standards so websites render partially, some content is broken, some clickable elements do nothing and some codecs are unsupported), and you'll get a much lighter browser compared to the latest version of the browser you originally forked from.

More often than not, this is how the small browsers forked from Firefox or Chromium achieve this claim of lower footprint. I still haven't found a truly full-featured browser (where everything "just works") that's much lighter or faster than Firefox or Chromium.

Take both Pale Moon & Firefox, similar era on the same machine. Do your thing. Compare profile sizes. The difference dwarfs this discussion about .sfs size discrepancy! 20MB is a sneeze!

Then declare it's more important for an OS sold on efficiency & modest system requirements putting browser profiles in ram by default to worry about piggy bloated website compatibility over piggy bloated browsers.

Is it theoretically possible to live on Firefox alone unlike Pale Moon? I would say yes. But do most of us use just one browser? It does not seem like it.

My concern about Pale Moon is sufficient technical support for its maintainer, having a bunch of users leaning on a browser that potentially goes belly up. And we know, Firefox's technology needs to fight Chromium vigilantly.

That said, the argument for no browser & letting users decide blows all our noise out of the water & obviates the need for this discussion.

I think there is a middle ground between gutted Fossapup without its adrv (where Pale Moon uniquely still runs easily!) & the bane of trying to remove Pale Moon or Firefox in a remaster. I tried a Fossa remaster once that failed & my heart isn't in making it a priority.

The only reason you would not care about system resources is if you have a high-powered machine for waste, but what sets Puppy apart? What is its creator's philosophy?

[dimkr]

what sets Puppy apart? What is its creator's philosophy?

In my Puppy releases, I include Firefox but with various tweaks to reduce its resource consumption: various anti-privacy features and extra features (things like Pocket) are turned off by default, the process/tabs ratio is lower and memory allocation settings are tuned for reduced waste of RAM at the cost of slightly higher CPU consumption. The result is a full-featured browser, but memory consumption is lower and it works much better on computers with <2 GB of RAM. It's still heavier than Pale Moon, but very few sites are broken and you get essential features like GPU-accelerated video decoding (can make a huge difference in responsiveness and battery life).

(And large browser cache is good for you - more cached data means less data to re-download and less CPU% spent on encryption and decryption of data travelling through the network, so I wouldn't rush to compare profile size in search for some objective indicator of performance; in general, I think that if you're limited in CPU, RAM and disk space, the 'cheapest' resource you have is disk space because it's easy to expand or upgrade - in old computers with a CPU bottleneck, I don't mind sacrificing disk space for lower CPU usage)

[gyrog]

What particular software package should be included in a Puppy ISO?
This was one of the burning questions when I come to Puppy Linux so many years ago.
You can never get this "right".

The ultimate choice for which browser is included in any ISO is up to the Puppy creator.
I simply ask that it be provided in an adrv, so I can simply deactivate it and use the portable browser I already have installed.

The question here is one of approach, provide a "light" browser to get folk started,
or a "full-featured" browser that will do pretty much everything, at the get-go.

what sets Puppy apart? What is its creator's philosophy?

As I recall, one of the stated aims was to be something you just had to boot and use.
All the "ordinary" requirements were provided for, and they simply worked "out of the box".

Also given @bigpup's, earlier analysis of new users attitudes,
I would suggest that a "full-featured" browser would be desirable.
Even if this means a bigger ISO.

[houndstooth]

more cached data means less data to re-download and less CPU% spent on encryption and decryption of data travelling through the network

It's funny you mention, I was writing about PROFILES not even including cache. Both together there is no comparison, Pigfest 2023. Overall instead of selling myths, when a machine is not resourceful enough for a task, we simply use another.

Yet you have a point some users may not consider: each device will have its bottlenecks & if less cache means more CPU & your CPU is already pushing limits, you might want more cache.

In Pale Moon I notice a slightly lower speed to Firefox but find it less significant than website compatibility. Is it slowness due to little cache making it incompatible? I could not say for certain, but I would guess not.

Pale Moon has cache management perhaps working more modestly? Only using this forum my Pale Moon cache is at 2.8 MB. I just limited it to 10.

Using disk space as an expendable resource I only accept with solid state technology. I do not have a machine that boots off SD, but that would be acceptable. MMC would work.

This discussion seems to be about balance.

[houndstooth]

What particular software package should be included in a Puppy ISO?

I think Phil's adrv implementation in Fossa is great, but you have to be more advanced than I to make use of it.

A developer can start with a barebones system, build his pupsave, & make that his adrv for a lean system.

A browser is standout for its commonality, size, & temporality, the reason it should be separate from HexChat & Hexalate (I would probably put games in Quickpet).

It seems what pushes the system size is not stalwart utilities & accessories but the esoteric foundational packages, though it is curious that we can use older, smaller distros with the same functionality. It's just that one little problem pushing you to boot something newer.

[mikewalsh]

As I recall, one of the stated aims was to be something you just had to boot and use.
All the "ordinary" requirements were provided for, and they simply worked "out of the box".

Also given @bigpup 's earlier analysis of new users attitudes,
I would suggest that a "full-featured" browser would be desirable.
Even if this means a bigger ISO.

I would suggest it's not so much a case of "new user attitudes". More to the point, I don't see too many folks coming direct to Puppy from Windows; usually, new Puppy users have these days already tried out at least a few "mainstream" distros - lightweight OR otherwise - before they find their way to us.

Mainstream distros, to a man, always include a full-featured "brand-name" browser - usually either Chrome/Chromium OR Firefox - so these new users have already come to expect that. Yet I do agree here with @gyrog ; the way the 'portable' browsers have evolved since Fred & I started tinkering with the concept some 4, nearly 5 years ago now, I honestly think they're an extremely good fit for the whole Puppy 'ethos'. Including the OOTB browser as an adrv, thereby making it easily removable (if required), DOES make sense. Or at least it does to me.

Modularity and ease of interchangeability counts for a lot.......I don't care WHAT platform you're invested in!

Mike.

[ozsouth]

@SteveSmith - Welcome! Like you, I favour the completeness of Firefox.

[ozsouth]

@houndstooth

. . . I think there is a middle ground between gutted Fossapup without its adrv (where Pale Moon uniquely still runs easily!) & the bane of trying to remove Pale Moon or Firefox in a remaster. I tried a Fossa remaster once that failed & my heart isn't in making it a priority. . .

Perhaps this is your 'middle ground': viewtopic.php?p=94956#p94956

[houndstooth]

Perhaps this is your 'middle ground': viewtopic.php?p=94956#p94956

Ah, so I am not the only one. Good size reduction. What I would want first are the current Chromium browser dependencies. Firefox is almost always easier to get running, and Pale Moon doesn't need anything.

How did you distinguish between ydrv & main Puppy installs?

How easy would it be to automate alphabet .sfs creation based upon dialog check boxes in a user-friendly way? Unfortunately as it stands we can't just auto-install every app by the ppm in bare Fossa or I probably would have done it.

[ozsouth]

@houndstooth - The fossa puppy sfs already contains base files & security files, so I placed updates of those in fossa's puppy .sfs.
The ydrv has traditionally been for personal settings, so I placed my additions & some of the libraries that were originally in the fossa adrv, so that my added apps would run. The range of .pets available came from various sources.
Adding 'alphabet' .drv files requires careful editing of DISTRO.specs file & a few other files within initrd.gz. It is not simple.
I did that in my s15pup64-ovrly pup, adding b,c,d,e drvs.

[mikewalsh]

Adding 'alphabet' .drv files requires careful editing of DISTRO.specs file & a few other files within initrd.gz. It is not simple.
I did that in my s15pup64-ovrly pup, adding b,c,d,e drvs.

@houndstooth :-

Unfortunately, I have to concur with Oz on this one. I know folks who have done this, and at a personal, individual, one-off level, it can be done (with a lot of patience).

However, to automate such a thing & present it via an intuitive, easy-to-use GUI with checkboxes, etc? Such requires an extensive & in-depth knowledge of precisely how Puppy works, along with high-quality scripting skills. The people who might have been prepared to take on such a challenge would have been folks like perhaps mavrothal or Technosaurus, but they've fallen by the wayside since the forum change in 2020. Both were becoming rare visitors long before that; they were around in the early days of the old Forum, and that's like 20 years ago. Very few maintain interest in, and membership of ANY community for that length of time.

Technosaurus has, to the best of my knowledge, showed his face once since then.......but that was many months ago. We may not see him again.

@dimkr might perhaps be "up for it", but he has his hands full with not only his work on Woof-CE but his full-time employment too. I doubt he's got the hours OR the inclination to spare.

In all honesty, a project of this nature will only ever be undertaken if the individual involved has

• The enthusiasm, and
• Can see real, lasting value in such a thing

Invariably, folks who blithely request such items have very little real understanding of just HOW much work is involved. Something like this would require a major investment of time AND effort.......and we're none of us getting any younger. I have scripting experience, but I'm not particularly skilled, nor do I have the faintest interest in such a project.

Mike.

[geo_c]

@houndstooth :-

Unfortunately, I have to concur with Oz on this one. I know folks who have done this, and at a personal, individual, one-off level, it can be done (with a lot of patience).

My take on browsers in kennel OS's is this:
My thought for awhile has been that a portable, or multiple portables could be included in a pup download, simply residing in a folder along side the system squashed files. After all, some have been offering the additional ydrv or adrv approach. How much easier it would be I think to simply include a portable folder, compressed or uncompressed, available to run OOTB. The OS could provide a link on the desktop to run the launch script. People could use it, or discard it, install a browser from a package manager if that's their preference.

I won't ask anyone to develop the approach I suggested earlier, but it still seems like an option begging to be tried.

I'm soon to do a little customization of KLV-airedale and KLV-spectr using the most recent versions @rockedge provided.

When I do I'll resquash the filesystem and see if it's possible to add two portable browsers and a script to run them or delete them, hoping that it's possible to keep an iso to a downloadable size.

The only problems I'm really forseeing other than iso size, might be linking startup icons to a yet undetermined install location, but I might be able to provide a script with prompts asking what drive and directory the portable LAUNCH script is located. This problem might also be averted simply by ensuring that a /home/ location is linked within the system itself, and that the portable location is accessible under that location.

Any advice is welcome before I give that a whirl.

[wiak]

You can script the installation of any browser giving a choice of the most popular such as Chrome, Chromium, Firefox along with well-known portables or special Puppy-team developed portables - isn't that the sort of thing "Quickpup" gui/script was about. Certainly easy to do.

Then when new user presses browser icon on desktop or via StartMenu - Internet the browser install utility pops up - checkbox which one(s) you want properly installed (including suitable desktop file) and wait a few minutes and nothing more to think about. There is really no need to include a 'default' browser that may well be out-of-date by the time the iso is produced and not the preferred browser of many anyway, and if you update/upgrade the new system you do indeed suddenly get save folder bloat as geo_c mentions.

[mikewalsh]

@wiak :-

TBH, if any of the current portable browsers were to be included as an adrv, the "out-of-date" issue is obviated. Most - with few exceptions - have either an official, built-in updater, or else a scripted updater by either myself or Fred. Which do work....

I still think Palemoon is a sensible, 'get-you-started' default......it's just its "deployment" that perhaps needs looking-at.

Mike.

[geo_c]

@wiak :-

TBH, if any of the current portable browsers were to be included as an adrv, the "out-of-date" issue is obviated. Most - with few exceptions - have either an official, built-in updater, or else a scripted updater by either myself or Fred. Which do work....

I still think Palemoon is a sensible, 'get-you-started' default......it's just its "deployment" that perhaps needs looking-at.

Mike.

My idea is "Why include as an adrv, when it could just reside in the install as a folder?"

I should probably start a new topic, but I see a lot ideas converging on the forum currently, and in my optimistic mode I could see a unified approach on the horizon.

Consider these posts in conjuction with the idea of using portables strategically and I could see pups and KLs offering some extreme install and development flexibility:

viewtopic.php?t=10181
viewtopic.php?p=106798#p106798
viewtopic.php?p=97175#p97175
viewtopic.php?t=9446