Pale Moon 'portable' browsers - 32- & 64-bit

[BologneChe]

Hang in there.

Mike may well have a 2.19 copy you can install alongside the build that ships with 5.7.

Yeah. Wait for him to give you the low-down on exactly what to do here.

@ThruHammer

I installed Glibc 2.20 and Palemoon 29 works!

Thanks!

[ThruHammer]

WOW!

Good to see someone take the initiative for a change.

You may have NO IDEA how many peeps come here asking for help and are ABSOLUTELY PETRIFIED to pull the trigger unless one of us is holding their hand.

That you took the ball and ran with it?

MAX Kudos, BologneChe mate!

You done yourself right!

BTW, it was this pet package you installed, correct?

[mikewalsh]

@BologneChe / @ThruHammer :-

To which I'll just add the following.....

For quite a while I've kept a "standby" portable-Palemoon tweaked with a standalone Glibc 2.19 - originally assembled by watchdog for these browsers - and regularly updated to the newest package. I don't keep it in my repos, just upload to a temporary location if, as & when anybody needs it.

I've recently upgraded this to use a newer 'standalone' Glibc 2.28, gleaned from radky's 32-bit DPupBuster. I was going to offer this up if you wanted it.

------------------------------------------------

However; you've actually taken the best route. With the 'tweaked' browser, you only get the benefit for the browser itself. By installing battleshooter's Glibc 2.20 package, that newer version is now available for the whole system to make use of, alongside the older Glibc 2.15.....which is still accessible by those built-in packages that need it.

For some newer packages, you may find a newer 'libstdc++.so.6' is also necessary.

(And I agree with Thru; it IS nice to see somebody take the initiative! Too many folks seem to think Pup's gonna bite them if they do the slightest thing wrong, whereas in actual fact the opposite is true.....because of Pup's extreme ease-of-installation, it's a better distro to experiment & try stuff out with than pretty well any others out there. )

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@ThruHammer :-

Glad you kept your acknowledgement no more than it had to be; Short and Schweet!

Mike, few have given so much of themselves as you my man. *HERO* member in my book!

Thru, it's like this. As a 'carer', some days I'm on the go from dawn till dusk. Other days, I have so much spare time I'd go crackers without summat to do....

I've had more fun with Puppy this last 6 years than for the whole of the previous 3 decades.....and got so much help from this highly-enthusiastic community in the early days, it was only natural to want to contribute back where I could.

I've found I have a knack for package-building. I happen to think that 'portable' packages are a very good fit for Puppy's mode of operation (thanks for the pointers, Fred!), hence the seeming explosion of them this last year or two.

And besides.....I enjoy it! (You guys help keep me out of mischief..... )

Mike.

[amethyst]

A tip running Palemoon in older Puppys (may even be newer Puppys too) - you may have a problem with many youtube videos not streaming. Changing the value of media.libavcodec.allow-obsolete in the browser configuration (access by typing 'about:config' in address bar) to 'true' normally fixes this issue.

[mikewalsh]

Okay-doke, boys'n'girls.

The new version of PaleMoon has very recently been released, so here for your delectation is the 32-bit Puppy 'portable' version of v29.1.1.

No noticeable changes, so far as I can see. Everything is working as it should, so.....another solid & workmanlike release.

You can find it here:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Credits again go to Steve Pusser for this. Cheers, Steve! Posting from it now.....

Enjoy.

Mike.

[keniv]

Hello Mike,
Just downloaded and installed v29.1.1. As usual working in DpupStretch, QuickPup and Racy. Posting from Racy now.

Thanks again,

Ken.

[mikewalsh]

Hello Mike,
Just downloaded and installed v29.1.1. As usual working in DpupStretch, QuickPup and Racy. Posting from Racy now.

Thanks again,

Ken.

You're very welcome, Ken. Enjoy!

Mike.

[xenial]

@mikewalsh
Thanks mike for your portable version,im using it now.
what is the smoothest way to update to the latest version please.?

[mikewalsh]

@mikewalsh
Thanks mike for your portable version,im using it now.
what is the smoothest way to update to the latest version please.?

@xenial :-

.....'kayyy. You've, er lost me a wee bit here, I'm afraid.

Obviously, you know the "official" 32-bit PaleMoon build no longer exists. The "official" 64-bit version really only needs to be downloaded & installed once; after that, it will automatically update 'in-situ'.

For 32-bit, I now have to wait to see if Steve Pusser puts a build together before downloading it & re-packaging it. You then download it, unpack it, put it where you want it, and fire-it up; profile transfer/sym-linking/whatever being up to the individual. Some like to keep an existing profile, some prefer a new, fresh profile every time.

I don't see how I CAN 'streamline' this much further. Perhaps you can explain what you mean by the above? What were you expecting?

Mike.

[xenial]

@mikewalsh
thanks mike and my apologies for the vagueness of my post.
yea i have never updated pale moon by the manual method and have always relied on the internal updater for updates.

i shall try your method and manually replace my profile etc.

[mikewalsh]

@xenial :-

To make things easier, what I usually do is to copy my existing profile (which for the portables is simply called 'profile') out to a permanent external location. I then delete the copy still inside the 'portable', following by sym-linking the now external profile back to its location within the portable.

It's just a quicker method for restoring it than copying it over every time; if you've got a lot of bookmarks/extensions/history, etc, this can take a while.

-------------------------------

To make things simpler, try this:-

Here's a pair of wee scripts to make things simpler (remove the fake.gz first).

I always find it much simpler to keep the portable PaleMoon and its profile in the same location. Either keep them both in a dedicated directory, or run them from a flash drive.....makes no difference, but the important thing is to keep 'em together, side-by-side, OK?

Download these two scripts - removing the fake '.gz' first! - then place them beside the Portable and its profile. You should end up with something like this:-

You need to make sure that after you've copied your profile out to beside the 'portable', you then delete it from inside the portable.....otherwise this won't work.

--------------------------------------------------

Now, try it out. To start the browser WITH your profile, just click on the 'LinkProfile' script. The profile should be linked-in, and a gktdialog box will appear to confirm this. Now, fire the browser up from the 'LAUNCH' script as usual (you may need to re-link this to your desktop from its new location).

At update time, navigate to this directory again. First, click on the 'UnlinkProfile' script; again, a gtkdialog box appears to confirm what you've done. Then, you can delete the 'old' portable, and after downloading the new version, move it to this location. Then, run the 'LinkProfile' script again, and.....off you go!

Let me know if that works for you, please.

Mike.

[amethyst]

So, is Palemoon 32-bit now the only browser which does not require GTK3...yet?

[mikewalsh]

@amethyst :-

It rather looks like it, Nic.....for NOW (unless you count 'curiosities' like Dillo, Oscar's NetSurf builds, the elderly QTWebs, etc). Pale Moon does at least qualify as "fully-functional", I think...!

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

Hiya, gang.

Now then; BAD news, I'm afraid.

I'm probably going to knock these Pale Moon portables on the head. For some unknown reason, from the newest version, PaleMoon v29.2.0, MoonChild Productions have seen fit to drop support for the Classic Legacy Archive extensions. These will no longer work.

I let the 64-bit version update itself this morning, only to find out after the restart that every single one of my extensions had been disabled! To my way of thinking, this renders the browser all but useless for my purposes.

According to the Pale Moon team, the only extensions that will henceforth be supported must come from their own store.....the contents of which are pathetic, and laughable. Only extensions which are coded directly for the older Goanna-based engine will be allowed into their store, and since everybody and his dog are coding for WebAPI only these days, I don't see this happening.

So; unless anybody wants a pure, bare, "vanilla" browser that doesn't support any extensions at all, I've had it with PaleMoon. It's had a good run, but as far as I'm concerned, it's no longer 'fit for purpose'.

Obviously, you can carry on with the older version as long as you like, but eventually it will become full of holes and be a security risk. I WON'T be building any more of the 32-bit 'specials', either.

Sorry, kids, but browsers are the one thing I refuse to compromise on.

Mike.

[xenial]

hi mike.
Lot of fuss over at the pale moon forum over this and some are being forked by a small amount of people.
Also there is justoff's collection for pale moon over at github.
I updated to v29.2 and my extensions appear to still function ok,ubo,cookie exterminator and advanced night mode which are all by justoff.

Justoff had a spat with a couple of palemoon developers and unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you see it has had to leave and is now available either on reddit or github.

To be honest considering the way the palemoon team treated justoff it was hardly surprising and was expected and one mod in particular was extremely hostile so it was sianara from justoff.
I use pale moon mainly for my flash games which can still be played in palemoon.

From what i can gather justoff is the main maintainer of the legacy extension archive and so with him leaving the pm team threw a tantrum and insist users fork there own extensions.Personally speaking i think pale moon is on life support now and the hostility over there is not helping matters,I don't need to update it really or use extensions as it is for flash content only and it's many thanks to justoff that my extensions still work.

[mikewalsh]

@xenial :-

See, I use stuff like AdGuard, LastPass and the Save to Google Drive extension.....none of which PaleMoon supports. In all honesty, I'm no longer a "typical" Puppy user anymore; with a 9th-gen, quad-core Pentium Gold running at nearly 4 GHz and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, I'm not tucked-up for resources the way I once used to be, nor is it because I have elderly hardware for which support is no longer there.

TBH, I could run anything I wanted to.....but I stick with Puppy because I know what I'm doing with it by now, I love the way I can just dive-in and re-arrange the guts of the thing to suit myself, I'm very, very used to it.....and the friendly community is second to none.

Personally, I don't have issues with Google and the Chromium browsers; after having had an a/c for nearly 20 years, they must have data on me as thick as a stack of bibles by now, but I'm just not fussed. Despite their bad habit of dropping stuff without warning, the infrastructure they provide makes my on-line existence very easy to live with, so.....it just "works" for me.

If it boils down to Chromium-based or 'zilla-based, I can live with that. To me, a browser is a browser; they all do essentially the same thing, which is keeping our community together & functioning.....and since I re-pack so many of 'em, dropping one will make my life a little easier from now on!

There must be something out there that can take its place, but then "true" Puppy boxes are getting rarer & rarer.....not many folks still run really minimalist hardware any more; most of us have moved on to more capable hardware by now, because it's out there & available at realistic prices. Witness my CPUs; the old Compaq's dual-core Athlon64 X2 would have cost almost £1000 when new, 15 years ago; this quad-core Pentium, which will run rings around it.....approx £45.

(*shrug...*)

Mike.

[keniv]

I'm probably going to knock these Pale Moon portables on the head. For some unknown reason, from the newest version, PaleMoon v29.2.0, MoonChild Productions have seen fit to drop support for the Classic Legacy Archive extensions. These will no longer work.

I'm very sorry to here this as I liked Palemoon and use both the 32 and 64 bit portable versions. It is a particular blow in terms of running Racy551 as your 32 bit Palemoon was the only up to date browser that will work on it. I knew it probably had a limited life time but I didn't expect it to go this quickly.

I WON'T be building any more of the 32-bit 'specials', either.

I can still use the portable Iron, however, I use the 32bit version in DpupStretch and Quickpup. Does the above mean that you won't be building the 32bit portable versions of Iron as well as Palemoon?

Regards,

Ken.

[mikewalsh]

Hiya, Ken.

Nah, nowt to fret over, mate. It's only PaleMoon I'm referring to, and only the 32-bit version; I call it a "special" because like certain others, I have to re-package it every single time, along with adding stuff to get it working.

Previously, it would update itself, just like Firefox does. Now, as you know, it won't.....which is why I've had to wait for Steve Pusser to re-compile it, every time.

I'm sorry if this causes you grief, but honestly, the thing holds no attraction for me any longer. Without my extensions, it's kinda pointless now.....

The other 32-bit stuff will still be available, never fear; I use those myself, after all! Nah, the atmosphere over at the Pale Moon forums is becoming poisonous, and the main dev, New Tobin Paradigm (to give him his full 'title') snaps the head off anyone who dares to question the smallest of his decisions. I'm sorry, Ken, but I've had it with them. At this rate, it'll soon be just a 'pet project' for him and a select handful of his mates (if the guy HAS any, that is....)

Mike.

[xenial]

I have been at the recieving end of paradigm or what ever his name is on several occasions and mainly because i did not "address" him correctly.I am sorry but he comes across as a right a***hole and he cannot even be added to the foe list.
Without justoff i think they will dwindle away eventually.I cannot see extension developers of any note taking on pale moon as it is using an outdated extension format and any who are brave enough to do so will be heavily criticised by tobin.
Is it any wonder nobody wants to bother....??.
The 32bit linux builds are now relying heavily on one person(steve pusser) for updates and in time he will throw in the towel on 32bit builds.

I have PM purely because the flash player will run for eternity.
only 3 options for me as i see it.chromium,firefox or vivaldi who thankfully still support 32bit.

[keniv]

Hiya, Ken.

Nah, nowt to fret over, mate. It's only PaleMoon I'm referring to, and only the 32-bit version; I call it a "special" because like certain others, I have to re-package it every single time, along with adding stuff to get it working.

Ah that's good to here.

I'm sorry if this causes you grief, but honestly, the thing holds no attraction for me any longer.

It doesn't cause me much grief and I can understand your reasons for dropping it. Without being able to add extensions (mainly ublock) it probably wouldn't be much use to me either. As you said, V29.1.1 will still be usable for a while with Racy551. I'll use Iron with with DpupStretch and Quickpup. I don't know much of the details other than whats been reported here but it's a pity Palemoon has gone this way and seems to be in such a mess.

Regards,

Ken.

[Null_ID]

I would just like to clarify some things here:

-New Tobin Paradigm isn't the lead dev for Pale Moon. He's involved with the development of the UXP web rendering platform that Pale Moon uses as its engine. The head honcho is Moonchild.

-Pale Moon is a small'ish project by comparison that is frequently understaffed, but still trying to maintain a project that is millions of lines of code in size. They are going up against tech giants like Google, who are so rich and powerful, they now basically own the modern Internet, and use governing bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as their personal rubber stamps to get privacy violating and freedom of choice-violating Google only-web standards passed at their pleasure. This is precisely what Microsoft tried, but failed to do 20 years ago.

-This understandably frustrates the Pale Moon dev team, who at this time are the only ones remaining, who offer a mostly functional web browser, that hasn't sold out to the allure of the lucrative Google bucks, and doesn't phone home to its masters. While Tobin's behavior is disgusting, for all we know Moonchild probably can't afford to lose him.

-The situation with the old XUL-extensions is understandably frustrating. However, Moonchild's point about cutting them off isn't completely without merit. The Pale Moon browser's inner core must evolve with the times and adapt to the requirements of the modern web. Without this, the entire parent product, the browser, will cease to function completely, at which point you wouldn't be able to use ANY extensions on it regardless. It's hardly the Pale Moon project's fault that Google's Web Components-technology is now everywhere, enabled by shortsighted web devs who are too stupid to even consider any other solutions, and simply just go for the latest shiny from the popular guy.

My point is, the case with Tobin notwithstanding (it's true that he's in serious need of some anger management classes), don't be so hard on the guys. They're trying their best against a much mightier opponent, who has all but perverted the modern web into its image in an effort to push out all competition.

[Dingo]

Dear @mikewalsh sorry for disturbing, but using your scripts, it is possible to make portable also 64 bit current version of palemoon? I find very annoying the fact palemoon, when used in non-portable mode, keeps to grow and write tons of data in.cache .config and other directories flooding my pupsave.

[mikewalsh]

@Dingo :-

Easy enough. I'd just move the profile & cache out to /mnt/home, then sym-link 'em back again.

• Create a directory in /mnt/home; call it "PaleMoon". Create two sub-directories, "profile" & "cache".

• Copy /root/.moonchild productions to /mnt/home/PaleMoon/profile, and /root/.cache/moonchild productions to /mnt/home/PaleMoon/cache.

• Delete the originals.....but check the copies are correct first!

• Now, sym-link the moved directories back to their original locations.

Code: Select all

# Create new directories

mkdir /mnt/home/PaleMoon
mkdir /mnt/home/PaleMoon/profile
mkdir /mnt/home/Palemoon/cache

# Now copy directories across. Check copy has worked before the next set of steps...

cp -ar "/root/.moonchild productions" /mnt/home/PaleMoon/profile
cp -ar "/root/.cache/moonchild productions" /mnt/home/PaleMoon/cache

# Delete the originals

rm -rf "/root/moonchild productions"
rm -rf "/root/.cache/moonchild productions"

# Sym-link 'externalized' directories back to their original locations

ln -s "/mnt/home/PaleMoon/profile/.moonchild productions" "/root/.moonchild productions"
ln -s "/mnt/home/PaleMoon/cache/moonchild productions" "/root/.cache/moonchild productions"

That should do what you want. The quotation marks are necessary, because 'moonchild productions' has a space in the middle. Bash doesn't like spaces in file/directory names/$PATHs, because it interprets them as a break between one command and the next.....and the commands will fail if you don't enclose them with quotes.

Let me know if that works, please.

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

Just to show that I'm not entirely insensitive to the needs of those with more modest hardware, here's a pair of new 32-bit PaleMoon builds. Steve Pusser released his 32-bit v29.4.1 .deb the day before yesterday, so here are :-

• A 'standard' portable build, and

• A 'glibc-tweaked' portable build, using the Glibc 2.28 from radky's 32-bit DPup Buster

Hopefully, this will cover those of you running somewhat older Puppies on older equipment. D/l; unzip; put the portable directory where you like, though preferably outside the 'save'. You also have the option to add a Menu entry to fire it up from wherever it's located.

You can find them here:-

https://mega.nz/folder/vWxRmCQa#MRY_sTdVzBJ5-_NMKlTpBg

Hope this is useful for some of you. Enjoy!

Mike.

[keniv]

@mikewalsh
Hi Mike,
Thanks for this. I'll try it and report back. I've installed both your 32 & 64 bit versions of firefox today but not done much setting up or testing. I'm replying on a phone so won't be able to do anything till I'm back on the PC.

Regards,

Ken.

[keniv]

@mikewalsh
Hi Mike,
I've downloaded and installed v29.4.1. As it uses your new standard portable form I got caught out a little. I had made a menu item for the previous versions. The route to LAUNCH was

Code: Select all

/initrd/mnt/dev_save/Portables/PaleMoon-portable/LAUNCH

as older version was in PaleMoon-portable but new version is in PaleMoon-portable32 so I had to add 32 to the above. I suppose I could have deleted the menu entry I had and used your menu entry maker to make a new one. I did have an issue with the download. Close to the completion of the download I got a popup window with "Mega.nz is trying to install files to this device and two boxes with "Allow" and "Don't Allow". I have not seen this before. I did not press either but the download did not complete. This is where I may have done a stupid thing as I decided to press "Allow". At this point the download completed. I checked the md5 check sum for PaleMoon-portable32.tar.gz and it is correct. I downloaded it with iron v89.0.4550.0. In iron in Settings>Privacy and Security>Security I have "standard protection" ticked. This includes "Detects and warns you about dangerous events when they happen". Would this be enough to through up the above mentioned popup box or have I done something stupid? For the moment I'm not using this new version of Palemoon.

Regards,

Ken

[mikewalsh]

@keniv :-

Umm....okay. I've not heard of that particular occurrence before, but Mega have recently been altering all sorts of things. I've had to update the desktop sync client twice in less than a week! I can't honestly comment on that one, because I haven't heard of it before, but I know they've been trialling a 'download & install' thing for executable files. Doubtless catering to the modern generation who haven't got a moment to live.....

The way the portable works, of course, it's not exactly "installed", as such, but their system has no doubt detected the executable within.

I doubt there's anything nefarious going on with it. Let me know what happens, okay?

--------------------------

As for the Menu entry installer, all it does is to sym-link the "LAUNCH" script into /usr/bin & renames it, then the other stuff simply points to that. It's pretty foolproof.

Mike.

[keniv]

@keniv :-

Umm....okay. I've not heard of that particular occurrence before, but Mega have recently been altering all sorts of things. I've had to update the desktop sync client twice in less than a week! I can't honestly comment on that one, because I haven't heard of it before, but I know they've been trialling a 'download & install' thing for executable files. Doubtless actering to the modern generation who haven't got a moment to live.....

The way the portable works, of course, it's not exactly "installed", as such, but their system has no doubt detected the executable within.

Hi Mike,
Thanks for that information. I also did wonder if it was to do with cookies etc, however, two things make me doubt this. One is when the cookie choise popup box appears I choose only "essential cookies" which I think is supposed to equate to the minimum required for the site to work. Also these were installed before this popup appeared. I also have all my browsers to clear cookies, other site data etc when I close the browser.

I doubt there's anything nefarious going on with it. Let me know what happens, okay?

This makes me fell a little better. I've only tried it in Dpup Stretch and have not noticed anything that seems wrong with it but I'm not sure I would as I suppose things could be happening in the background. I'll take care when using the browser and Dpup Stretch. If I notice anything I will report it.
On the plus side thats two up to date 32bit portable browsers in a week. I'm posting from your 32bit Firefox ESR version now. It might allow the use of my 32bit machine (in my shed) and my favourite 32bit pups for a little longer.

Regards,

Ken.

[BologneChe]

@mikewalsh

Thanks for the recent versions in 32 bit. It is very appreciated and the work is impeccable as always!