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

[bigpup]

The latest version is 32.5.1 as of 12-18-2023.

Size alone should be one big reason.
The 64bit deb package is 39MB.

A Firefox 120.0.1.1 64bit deb package is 61Mb

I know in the past Pale Moon browser had issues.

However, if you look at the latest release notes and what has been done, over the last few version releases.

They do seem to be trying, very hard, to improve it, and keep up with what browsers now need to be able to do.

This is the best location to get a Pale Moon package, to use for installing it.
http://www.palemoon.org/contributed-builds.shtml
Notice it offers several builds for GTK2 or 3
Note:
When you navigate to the GTK2 or 3 version page, select Debian->"grab binary packages directly":
https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... e=palemoon
It lists packages built for different versions of Debian.

Same happens if you select Ubuntu->"grab binary packages directly"
Get list of packages for different Ubuntu versions.

Also there are latest 32bit versions being offered.

---

I am using the GTK3 latest 64bit build, as a deb package for Debian 12. (Bookworm Pup64 is based on Debian 12)
Installed it in Bookworm Pup64 10.0.3

I am using it and seeing if, issues in the past, are still there, or have been fixed.

So far, it seems to be working well for me!

[Wiz57]

I've been using Steve Pusser's "Debian" 32 bit builds for 3 years or so on my ScPup32 with LXDE, as well as a kernel swap to
older 4.X kernel...it handles almost everything I "need" to do, a few problem sites I've learned to avoid as much as possible
such as MSN, and anything from google (Youtube videos I view from DuckDuckGo search). If I need something that PM can't
handle (usually related to chrome specific javascript) I fire up my Windows 11 netbook and use the new MS Edge chromium
based.
Wiz

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup / @Wiz57 :-

Penny for your thoughts.....

While I agree about reconsidering Pale Moon's inclusion in Puppy builds as a default, OOTB browser, do bear this in mind:-

With fewer & fewer exceptions - as time goes by - more & more Puppians are running hardware that is less and less like the type of machine that was common when I myself joined nearly a decade ago. Time passes, and increasingly powerful hardware is becoming easily available on the secondhand/refurb market, at very realistic prices too; many of us are running at least 8, if not 16 GB of RAM. Several of us are running 32 GB, and at least one, if not two or three enterprising souls apparently have 64GB of the stuff to play with.

SSDs are now common, and quite a number of us are also running NVMe drives. Core i7s and i9s abound, along with a veritable smorgasbord of various AMD Ryzen models. In short, there's no real need now to keep Puppy as tiny as possible any longer.......though I second the inclusion of Pale Moon, 'cos it's always been a good, lightweight, yet full-featured browser (with the exception of the f**k-ups around v30, that is, though there WERE reasons for that).

There will probably be a need for "small" Puppies for a few years to come, though the days of the machines in need of such small builds ARE now numbered.

Just a thought, like.

Mike.

[geo_c]

My take on browsers in kennel OS's is this:

Portables available here, and appimages that can be found on github like LibreWolf, are simply so versatile and easy to use that having a built in browser like Firefox or Palemoon actually becomes more of a nuisance than a help.

I suppose the rationale is thus: If booting a new pup and there is no browser, how does one obtain the portable?

Well, for us experienced enthusiasts that's not an issue because we're running several OS's and already have the portables on our drives ready to go. But I suppose for someone booting an iso for a first run of some pup OS, that would indeed be a problem.

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.

For instance the inclusion of Firefox in our KLVs is actually creating a lot of bloat in my upper_changes, as doing system-wide updates almost always includes a Firefox update which is always big. And I never even once boot Firefox, as I'm only using portables.

As @bigpup mentioned the latest Palemoon, I updated my Palemoon portable and am posting from it now. It does seem to be working very smoothly compared to older versions. One of my work websites with a lot complicated buttons and popups, a rather unintuitive and quirky site to use, is running smoothly in this newest version. So I'm prone to use Palemoon if it does the job, because it's NOT google and mozilla. However, I would always use a portable if available as opposed to an install in the filesystem save.

[bigpup]

All I can say about overall size of a Puppy version is this.

The last time I had to do a complete fresh install of Windows 10.
I really do not care how big it is, but if they say to have at least 20GB of free space for the install.
That kind of indicates it is huge!

It took me 1.5 hours to get it installed, updated, 3 reboots, and running the computer OK.
Still needed to install programs to do specific tasks, that are normally in Puppy Linux.

We all know you can get a Puppy version installed and running the computer in under 5 or 10 minutes.
And that is taking time to set it up and making a save.
Size does matter.

A lot of the Puppy specific programs, that are basically scripts, are small, use very little RAM, startup quickly, and run fast.
There small size matters.

Every time I update a web browser, it gets bigger in size, takes longer to start, and uses up more RAM.
But operating it, stays the same for what I see, and use it for.
Sloppy coding adds to the size, but does not really provide anything useful.

Puppy needs to not go down that rabbit hole.

So size does matter.

The last time I worked on developing a program for Puppy Linux.
In development, the code does get a little sloppy.
but the last thing we did was tweak it, to eliminate unneeded code and make what was needed, as small and simple as possible.
When complete.Total operation of the program was faster, better, and less buggy.
Size mattered.

[ozsouth]

When assembling Fossa-Less, I found Palemoon to be the smallest effective browser, as size was very important there. In combo with a small ffmpeg install, Palemoon was also a basic mediaplayer. Generally, I prefer Firefox as it plays all my content including streaming sites that PM won't.

[amethyst]

Unfortunately Palemoon is inadequate for all streaming services (and last time I used it had problems with quite a few sites too) so in my view not fit to be included as a default browser. Also - rather include the chosen browser as an added drive or extra sfs in the iso distribution and not in the base sfs.

[Clarity]

The topic of size continues to be a topic of discussion on the forum. 4 decades ago, it was "proven" that the notion of size has absolutely NO bearing on either functionality or user expectations. The machines, even in those days of mainframes, minis, micros where providing response times that was capable of keeping up the fastest of both users and developers.

The biggest impacts in daily use in not the kind of size that continues to surface on this forum, but rather RAM. As over the decades, users have more and more active, on-screen apps in front of them as they go about system's use and efforts. We ran all kinds of measurements from performance analysis of workloads to capacity analysis of systems during a users growth over time.

Sloppy coding 'should' be unacceptable, but facing it as I do, we have kinds of developers who see the world in various ways as they code for what they envision the need to be. That word 'sloppy' is similar to the word 'bloat' as it really depends on the creator of what one feels is best for the requirements. And YES, some individuals have better coding skills than other people; that's a given just as some people have better talents in playing a sport in comparison of others on the same team.

I am not raising objections to what many feel as important, but overall, especially in today's environment using 64bit PCs over the past 2 decades demonstrate that the MOST important items to pay attention to is one's RAM needs for desired use versus some arbitrary concern a single particular app/coding effort.

Lastly 5 decades ago I learned that HARDWARE wins over software; EVERY TIME! It a little longer story, but as a young extremely efficient coder, I thought I could code an older machine to beat the newest of Hardware. So working with the hardware engineers they taught me something that was the foundation of my understanding of the marriage of hardware and software. (And to my dismay, using hardware monitors demonstrated my lacking of both understanding and 'why' hardware. Back then we used oscilloscopes to intercept and measure.)

Many, including myself, from time to time remain stuck in the past...until some awareness of hardware instructions changes and its impact on performance-capacity become obvious in either access to new PCs or reading manufacturer's papers of changes in new PC motherboard and chipsets.

Case example is Intel's newest announcement of their chips for laptops and desktops. AMAZING!!!
Another is AMD's announcement couple months ago. Equally amazing with differing focus.

Our world has changed and our job is to recognize it and to understand our need to adapt to the brave new world.

You dont have to like change, but unfortunately its not going to stop. Our only choices are will we change along with ...

If you dont need to, my advice: Dont Change!

But, if you want to appreciate the newest of the apps, systems, and useful change, ....your choice. Dont "hate-on" it when developers do things they find appropriate as they may be 'ahead of YOUR time'.

[Clarity]

BTW: There is a major paradigm shift afoot making this discussion moot.

Hint: Its in the 'coded' language used by ALL of the developers: namely nvidia, Intel, AMD and others. Further the performances test with RAM, ram channels, and processors is supporting the shift in line with the internet changes to the cloud.

Enjoy the ride into the future.

Only wish I live long enough to see this latest run.

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup :-

In terms of small app size equals fast and/or responsive operation, then yes; absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

In terms of the hardware that runs said software, well.....a lot's happened in the last 20 years. Don't forget; back in the early 2000s, Intel's focus was on outright speed, and making a CPU run as fast as they possibly could. They confidently predicted 10 GHz+ clock speeds would be a reality within a couple of years, and a lot of folks were really looking forward to this coming to pass.

---

We all know what happened. They hit the barrier at a little under 4 GHz; much beyond that, and massive overheating ensued, along with almost continuous electromigration.....leading to the well-known "Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome", for those attempting to overclock "Northwood" P4s:-

From Wikipedia:-

"Overclocking early stepping Northwood cores yielded a startling phenomenon. While core voltage approaching 1.7 V and above would often allow substantial additional gains in overclocking headroom, the processor would slowly (over several months or even weeks) become more unstable over time with a degradation in maximum stable clock speed before dying and becoming totally unusable. This became known as Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome (SNDS), which was caused by electromigration."

Prescott overcame the electromigration issue, but ran even hotter.............so hot you could fry an egg on it. And still it ran no faster.
The final Cedar Mill started to fix things, then 'Core' came along. And the rest is history.

Intel tried to overextend themselves beyond the limits imposed by the technology of the day, and fell flat on their faces. It was something the entire industry learned from; the fab processes of the day weren't that sophisticated.......dies were of the order of hundreds of millions of transistors. Today, 5.5-6 GHz is a reality, process size is approaching that of an individual atom, and transistor counts are now measured in the hundreds of BILLIONS.

---

My point is this; hardware and software do go "hand-in-hand". You can have all the sophisticated hardware you like, but without software to run on it it's just so much junk. And without the hardware to turn it into reality, sophisticated software is as much use as a chocolate teapot.

So; running lightweight, responsive software with a small footprint on modern, high-tech hardware gives a user experience many would envy, and has to be the best of both worlds. Even on elderly hardware, Puppy does STILL "move the goalposts" to a measurable extent.

Mike.

[bigpup]

In making statements about what Pale Moon can do and cannot do.

It is no help if you are not talking about using the latest version of Pale Moon.

What made me start this topic, is the fact that Pale Moon has been updated a lot, since the time it was decided to drop it as the default browser, to have in Puppy.

Negative comments need to be about the latest version of Pale Moon!

The inside job of hacking of the code, by a disgruntled evil member of the development team, around the time of version 30.
Really did make a mess of Pale Moon and how it operated.

But much effort has been made to clean up the code and keep improving it.

So how is the latest version now working????

[Jasper]

I like the idea of developers that provide a "light" browser just to get you online upon the first installation and then give you the option to download more fully featured browser that suits your own personal needs.

Personally, I stuck with PM64, yes occasionally I have issues with SSL certs on certain websites. However, on a day to day basis it works fine. No issues with handling streaming media.

I have to admit, I stuck with it as it was the default browser FP95. I guessed the original developers knew what they were doing by including this within the OS.

I also use BleachBit to clear up the cache which works well.

[ozsouth]

Although this is definitely worthy of being the packaged browser, from which folk can get online, do a lot & get another browser if desired, as I said before, it (v32.5.1) doesn't play my subscription sites. I can log in, but won't play. Firefox ESR does. Palemoon is good, but Firefox works better for me.

[mikewalsh]

@ozsouth :-

That's understandable. Your streaming sites - like most of 'em! - require DRM decoding. Which means Widevine (for better or worse). And Moonchild has made it very clear that Pale Moon will never, EVER support Widevine. He's got no intention of going down THAT route. See my own thread on their forums where I asked about this 4 years ago:-

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 175002#top

.....and from the Pale Moon "roadmap":-

Media support

Media support is a regularly-discussed topic for Pale Moon users, since part of the user base would prefer a browser to also be a full-featured and fully dedicated & specialized media player.

It will never be our goal to equal or surpass dedicated media software, since Pale Moon is and remains above all a web browser. Full-HD streaming will be possible with the right hardware, but may not be as smooth or as feature-rich as what you may find in home cinema software.

Also, as stated above, we do not intend to have DRM in any UXP-based application, and the browser will as such remain properly DRM-free.

Essentially, this puts even 64-bit PM in the same category as any 32-bit Puppy browser. None of those can play back DRM-encoded content. They could up till mid-2020.....but that was the cut-off point for 32-bit Widevine support. And Google HAD clearly stated, at least four years earlier - in 2016 - that 2020 would be when 32-bit Widevine was deprecated. On this point, at least, they kept to their own timetable, and honoured their word.

I like Pale Moon as a general browser. It plays YouTube without issues. If I want to watch NetFlix - which needs DRM, of course! - I have Slimjet set to run NetFlix by itself in a dedicated window, on a second work-space.

Works for me, but with 32 GB RAM, I frequently have 3 or 4 'portable' browsers all running simultaneously. It's not really practical for those with limited resources.....like, say, just 2 GB RAM. Although, as I stated above, there really aren't too many of these kind of machines still functional any longer. And those that are have definitely got a limited 'shelf-life' by now.

Time keeps a-moving, regardless of whatever else is happening. You can't stop it, can you?

(shrug...)

Mike.

[amethyst]

I'll take functionality every time over size. Why would I want to use any other browser than Chromium based or Firefox if I can do everything on the net with the latter browsers? Fact is you can't stream all videos with Palemoon just to name one shortcoming of Palemoon. On my old desktop with only 2GB ram I do hours of HD streaming with Brave (which is Chromium based) ever day without issues. Have to say I'm very impressed with Fossa96CE too, rock solid. I also run Bionic32 on this machine with an older Chromium version 90 which is also excellent but obviously can't do DRM streaming with the 32-bit restriction. I can run the latest Chromium based and Firefox on this machine without any issues but the Chromium based browsers are less taxing for this old machine.

[dimkr]

Small size doesn't guarantee better performance.

A browser without Wayland support will run under Wayland through Xwayland. It will work, but everything will be slower. A browser that doesn't support Wayland is not a future-proof option and it will feel much slower in the near future even if it seems fine now.

A browser without support for VA-API will be able to decode YouTube videos, but it will use the CPU and the GPU. On an old computer with a slow CPU, this can slow down the browser and even the entire OS, and increase power consumption.

The Firefox package contains various .zip files (extensions) and if you recompress them with a higher compression level, Firefox is much smaller but also much slower to start. I believe Pale Moon inherited this from Firefox.

(I have more examples)

[Tenoch]

It is not only video streaming, recently, I installed Jammy 32 which includes some*light browser (do not remember the exact name), I could not load web.telegram, many companies perhaps do not offer 32 bit desktop versions of their software, but do offer web versions. I had to immediately download Firefox, on a slow internet connection. I too would rather have a bigger ISO with a full fledged browser from the initial boot than to have the bad experience of having websites not working properly, first impressions matter.

My two cents.

[amethyst]

It is not only video streaming, recently, I installed Jammy 32 which includes some*light browser (do not remember the exact name), I could not load web.telegram, many companies perhaps do not offer 32 bit desktop versions of their software, but do offer web versions. I had to immediately download Firefox, on a slow internet connection. I too would rather have a bigger ISO with a full fledged browser from the initial boot than to have the bad experience of having websites not working properly, first impressions matter.

My two cents.

The Light Browser you are referring to is a very old light version of Firefox actually (I think Version 49 abouts). It's totally inadequate for modern day internet. Not sure why this is included in some modern build ISO's but probably just so you can access the net and download a new browser.

[bigpup]

I hope everyone reporting negative results using Pale Moon are reporting on the latest version of it!

Not seeing anyone saying using Pale Moon version..................................

[bigpup]

Using Pale Moon v32.5.1 64bit

If you have low spec CPU and graphics hardware.

For viewing YouTube videos.

Install the MTube add-on

I just did it on a low spec Raspberry Pi 4oo computer that no longer would run YouTube very well if at all.

MTube made it run YouTube videos like normal and very fast to load and run.

[houndstooth]

Why not none? Given ubiquitous monthly security updates, that seems the way to go. Teach every beginner .sfs if not installs.

61MB is still small for a current full-featured browser .sfs, but none is better.

Peebee will include Light as an adrv. Dillo is there for reading documents.

If a browser is a must, I would vote Pale Moon.

[dimkr]

Even if latest Pale Moon doesn't suffer from issues it had in the past and a problematic developer is gone from the project, I wouldn't trust a browser built by a small team (no matter if they built it from the ground up or forked from some old version of a "big" browser). 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. Even a large team of professional developers can't keep up with the rate of change in web standards and handle all the security issues caused by the increasing complexity.

[rockedge]

and mostly wrap Chromium with different UI

Sounds like conformity to me.....toe the line kind of vibrations if you catch my drift. I like living on the wild side and trying out something other than the same 4 flavors at the ice cream shop....savvy?

[pp4mnklinux]

@dimkr

Even if latest Pale Moon doesn't suffer from issues it had in the past and a problematic developer is gone from the project, I wouldn't trust a browser built by a small team (no matter if they built it from the ground up or forked from some old version of a "big" browser). 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. Even a large team of professional developers can't keep up with the rate of change in web standards and handle all the security issues caused by the increasing complexity.

ABSOLUTELY "!!!

Incluso si el último Pale Moon no sufre los problemas que tuvo en el pasado y un desarrollador problemático se ha ido del proyecto, no confiaría en un navegador creado por un equipo pequeño (sin importar si lo construyeron desde cero o bifurcado de alguna versión antigua de un navegador "grande").

Hay una razón por la que las empresas que crean navegadores (Opera, Brave, Edge...) deciden no crear su propio navegador y en su mayoría envuelven Chromium con una interfaz de usuario diferente. Incluso un gran equipo de desarrolladores profesionales no puede mantenerse al día con el ritmo de cambio en los estándares web y manejar todos los problemas de seguridad causados ​​por la creciente complejidad.

[dimkr]

Sounds like conformity to me.....

Personally, I wouldn't use an ancient browser or a browser developed by amateurs who don't take security and maintenance seriously, only because it's the niche, cool choice. From a security or privacy point of view, a well-maintained and well-funded but popular browser gives you a stable stream of security updates and your browser fingerprint is less unique (because you use the same browser, same resolution, etc' as many others). Nobody is patching a browser without a security team that searches for vulnerabilities and reports them, while all Chromium-based browser benefit from large amounts of shared code (a fix in Chromium goes into all of them). From a maintenance point of view, using GTK+ 2 (dead for many years) or not supporting Wayland/PipeWire/... means death of the project not too far in the future, and many projects (not only browsers) are already dying because of this.

[mikeslr]

Palemoon remains useful for light-browsing, particularly for accessing this Forum. Running multiple Puppys, I use a portable version that each accesses.

I've mentioned this before. But its worth repeating now that the ISOs for all Puppys are no longer maintained at Ibiblio.org. I think it was jrb who had the best idea: rather than including any web-browser within the ISO there was a menu entry which --after an internet connection was created-- would download and install one of several web-browsers: user's choice. The location of the web-browsers to be downloaded would be with the same Webhost as that on which the ISO was located.

fredx181 approach is an reasonable alternative: a web-browser --and only a web-browser-- is contained within the Puppy's ISO as the adrv.sfs. If a user doesn't want that browser it's a simple matter to not deploy the adrv, or if deployed automatically by the installer delete it before the 1st boot-up.

My suggested variation to fredx181's approach was --rather than include a web-browser within an adrv.sfs-- to provide a link on the Puppy's OP to an SFS. A web-browser before you have an internet connection has no value; and once there is an internet connection downloading is easy. Even with Puppys such as Bookworm --which have difficulty using SFSes-- the User could download the SFS and rename it as an adrv.sfs or other.sfs.

[Chelsea80]

I tend to agree with mikesir -

I think it was jrb who had the best idea: rather than including any web-browser within the ISO there was a menu entry which --after an internet connection was created-- would download and install one of several web-browsers: user's choice. The location of the web-browsers to be downloaded would be with the same Webhost as that on which the ISO was located.

In my OS (see signature) I can:

Applications > Internet > Get Web Browser
.

Browser choice.jpg (18.29 KiB) Viewed 1730 times

.
Other browsers could be added if possible -

Then, after the internet connection is made, the browser choice menu pops up automatically -

This would seem to, perhaps, make most happy, especially those new to Puppy -

Except those who have a particular choice not being available in that menu -

Best regards

Chelsea80

[bigpup]

The people that started Pale Moon were coders that were working on Firefox and did not like the way Firefox was being developed.

So they left Firefox and started their own browser, Pale Moon.

So these people do know what they are doing.

---

Everything talked about, having or not having a browser, having a small low featured browser just to be able to get on the Internet,
having a menu entry to select and download a browser, has been tried before.

What I saw reported by new users to Puppy:

They all wanted a good, well featured, complete browser, already there to use.

They did not like, only having a minimum featured, small browser to use, to get a better one.
They did not like, having to go to a menu entry and have to decide, download, and install a browser. (an issue if they have not already made a save to put it in)
They sure did not like not having any browser, already installed.

Any package you make of a browser, that can be downloaded and installed, from a menu selection list.
Those packages are going to have to be constantly updated, by someone.
If not, that list is outdated software, in not to short a time.

Sure, the browser provided in the Puppy ISO, is most likely, not the latest version.
But not an issue, as long as you provide it setup to auto update or tell you, there is a newer version, ready to update it, if you click update.
Firefox, provided in Bookworm Pup64, does this. (it is set to auto update) but it would be better to set it to tell you, there is an update, and let you decide to update.
Browser internal update process does the work.

[d-pupp]

Something else to consider is that many new to Puppy Linux are Windows converts trying out new hats.
They know nothing about Linux let alone installing a new browser in Linux. It's not the same as Windows find the exe file and click.
If they don't have a good first impression they will just move on.

[houndstooth]

So these people do know what they are doing.

That's my impression too.

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

Firefox is faster on intensive websites & more compatible (eg, 32 is the 1st version to support Mastodon).

Pale Moon does not have Firefox's apulse audio problem which can be a significant hassle.

Pale Moon also has the unique "Originating server" images setting which I tend to use.