# palemoon!



## teo (Jul 29, 2019)

Palemoon on FreeBSD 12 is no longer available in ports or binary packages.


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## tingo (Jul 29, 2019)

True. Things change all the time. Please pay attention to the changing world around you!


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## SirDice (Jul 29, 2019)

teo said:


> Palemoon on FreeBSD 12 is no longer available in ports


Palemoon is no longer available in ports (the version of the OS is irrelevant, all versions use the same ports tree).

PR 237107


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## wolffnx (Jul 29, 2019)

teo said:


> Palemoon on FreeBSD 12 is no longer available in ports or binary packages.







I'ts a shame...in the official page says:


```
*BSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems.
```

is one of the good gtk2 browsers still there...

link: oficial page of palemoon


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## scottro (Jul 30, 2019)

That's very general and I suspect there is another side of the story. Might be licensing, I don't know. Not that either side is wrong, both believe their method is better, but the end result is that it's another piece of software that works in Linux and won't work (at present) in FreeBSD. Regardless of your feelings of loyalty or dislike towards either of them, bottom line is, if you like palemoon then you'll have to use it in Linux, though of course a VM is a solution.


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## hukadan (Jul 30, 2019)

I think it all started here : https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86

-- Edit --
Here is the corresponding thread for FreeBSD : https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2018-February/112455.html


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## abishai (Jul 30, 2019)

Seamonkey removed as well


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## LakeCowabunga (Jul 31, 2019)

I don't have all the information and/or facts, but my current understanding is that Palemoon developers were packaging it in such a way, as to include *BSD "branding" of some sort.  And the Palemoon developers feel that this is standard practice for free software.  Umm.  No.  No it's not.  Unless "branding" here means something completely different.

Edit:  Try to pull that with Microsoft or Apple, and see just how quickly you are in a world of hurt!


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## forquare (Jul 31, 2019)

LakeCowabunga said:


> I don't have all the information and/or facts, but my current understanding is that Palemoon developers were packaging it in such a way, as to include *BSD "branding" of some sort.



I believe it is almost the other way around.  Palemoon appears to include a number of common libraries (security/nss, databases/sqlite, and print/harfbuzz to name a few) as part of its source tree, it patches and maintains these libraries as part of its source tree and outside of their respective upstreams.

From what I can see, the BSDs have chosen to build Palemoon using libraries from their upstreams (they contain the latest security fixes, and have already been ported to *BSD).  
But by modifying the build behaviour to use "system libraries" rather than the Palemoon in-tree modified copies, the BSDs are violating the branding conditions so cannot distribute it as Palemoon.

It appears that this could possibly have been avoided by using the non-branded version called _New Moon_, but I don't know if the Porters knew about this option, and if we had _New Moon_ in our Ports tree how many requests from new users would we get asking for Palemoon?


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## hukadan (Jul 31, 2019)

forquare said:


> but I don't know if the Porters knew about this option


At least, the porter was aware that there was a problem and asked for guidance on the Pale Moon forums. If we look at the date of the different exchanges, it seems that the answer was the rather aggressive issue open on GitHub that I gave on my previous post.


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## LakeCowabunga (Jul 31, 2019)

forquare said:


> I believe it is almost the other way around.



Ahh, I stand corrected. Thanks. (I didn’t know the players by name, and got confused just who was who.) 

Edit: After reading further into the links above, understanding who the players were, and (I think) what the issues were, my OPINION is that people went a little overboard on BOTH sides. A maintainer/porter going against a license and having an attitude, and a developer holding an entire type of OSs responsible for the actions of one individual. Childish on BOTH parts.


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## badbrain (Jul 31, 2019)

If what you said were right Palemoon still default to gtk2 you could try running the Linux build of Palemoon using the Linux compat layer. I don't know if it works or not, though. But do you really need that browser that much? I found normal Firefox is good enough for me


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jul 31, 2019)

forquare said:


> It appears that this could possibly have been avoided by using the non-branded version called _New Moon_, but I don't know if the Porters knew about this option, and if we had _New Moon_ in our Ports tree how many requests from new users would we get asking for Palemoon?



NewMoon was what I built from ports and had installed on all my machines. It was listed in ports as PaleMoon but showed NewMoon in the titlebar of the browser.


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## mark_j (Aug 1, 2019)

It's a pity waterfox is a dead port, too, as it was an alternative like palemoon. 








						Building Waterfox Classic on FreeBSD · grahamperrin/Waterfox Wiki
					

Fork of the official Waterfox repo. Contribute to grahamperrin/Waterfox development by creating an account on GitHub.




					github.com


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## Wozzeck.Live (Aug 3, 2019)

Palemoon was interesting at a time regular Firefox was very slow (Gecko engine so before Firefox 57).
Since Firefox Quantum engine implementation THIS IS NO MORE A PROBLEM, please try to forget Palemoon

Most of old extensions (scripsafe, noscript, ublock....) have been ported to the new extension model

For light browser alternative on FreeBSD the best is www/falkon, formerly known as "Qupzilla" which is now deprecated
Falkon is a Webengine (the official reworked Chromium Blink engine for QT, and so perfectly stable) based browser, more stable and lighter than Chromium.

Falkon and Mozilla Firefox are according to me the two current references for FreeBSD
There is also Otter-Browser, which is more experimental. The main interest is that you can switch between Webengine (based on Blink, forked from WebKit) and Webkit (the regular Apple's Webkit)

Waterfox IS TOTALLY USELESS on FreeBSD.
Waterfox uses the very last Mozilla Gecko engine.... and so was also affected by its incredible slowness.

On the contrary Palemoon team long time ago locked on a quite older version of Gecko not affected with theses speed issues.
They renamed this engine "Goanna"

Mozilla foundation doesn't support anymore any Gecko engine.... so these forked engines may have PLENTY of security holes.

Waterfox is just packaged by one simple guy... do you seriously think that "one" man could now efficiently maintain such a big thing as Gecko engine ????????
Waterfox was long time ago nothing other than the very first 64 bit implementation of Firefox on Windows at a time Mozilla was still focusing on 32 Bit only for Windows, but did support a regular 64 bit *nix version. So basically.... Waterfox has nothing to do with *nix
Palemoon is a bigger project so with (a little) more people in the team, but team can't compare with the Mozilla foundation. We can still wonder if they are really enough to efficiently maintain the old Gecko fork facing security issues.


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## badbrain (Aug 3, 2019)

I still use Waterfox on Windows because I just like the old user interface. It could be because I'm more familiar with it. On exotic platform I still hope pre-Rust Firefox forks to be going on. On NetBSD, when using pkgin to search for Firefox binary packages it only shows Firefox52 and Firefox60-i18n (notice: not Firefox60 but only the i18n). There is a port of modern Firefox on pkgsrc-wip but if I'm right, binary package for Firefox60 is not available due to Rust (notice the final Rust-free Firefox58 still available). Rust requires the very latest version of GCC or Clang to built, and all of the LTO thing that I don't understand. LLVM full support on NetBSD still not complete as FreeBSD, even though the NetBSD folks hired a couple of Gentoo Linux guys to work on it.

Chromium has Iridium which is Chromium but Google-free. I hope Waterfox will move to be the Iridium of Firefox. I don't like the way Mozilla is moving Firefox to. I just want a simple browser, just a browser. I afraid someday Firefox will be just like Google Chrome.


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## mark_j (Aug 3, 2019)

Wozzeck.Live said:


> Waterfox IS TOTALLY USELESS on FreeBSD.
> Waterfox uses the very last Mozilla Gecko engine.... and so was also affected by its incredible slowness


Waterfox is not useless on FreeBSD if it was a supported port. It isn't so it's moot.
Waterfox is based on Firefox ESR so I cannot see any real difference between Waterfox and Firefox ESR.
Overall it's a sad state of affairs when the rubbish they dish up as Firefox is their hallmark product. It's slower than Chrome in every way. Its focus seems to be on mirroring the latest GUI of Windows 10 (eek!) and failing to deliver on speed or usability.
I fled Mozilla ages ago, but still occasionally fire up Firefox <insert latest version here> to see just how bad it keeps getting; I'm never surprised.

Sure Chrome is basically dealing with the devil but Firefox is hell.


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## badbrain (Aug 3, 2019)

No. I've to disagree. At least with my own experience, I found Firefox loading page slower than Chromium a bit but with heavy Javascript used site like Facebook only Firefox could load the site completely and scrolll smoothly. Chromium always keeps the page as loading and scrolling is very lagged.


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## mark_j (Aug 3, 2019)

Fair enough. I've never used facebook.
Though Chrome, not Chromium, is supposed to have the best javascript engine according to those in the know.


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## teo (Aug 7, 2019)

mark_j said:


> Overall it's a sad state of affairs when the rubbish they dish up as Firefox is their hallmark product. It's slower than Chrome in every way. Its focus seems to be on mirroring the latest GUI of Windows 10 (eek!) and failing to deliver on speed or usability.
> I fled Mozilla ages ago, but still occasionally fire up Firefox <insert latest version here> to see just how bad it keeps getting; I'm never surprised.
> 
> Sure Chrome is basically dealing with the devil but Firefox is hell.



Palemoon was a faster and lighter browser in my opinion, it is a sad reality that there is not a light and powerful browser suitable for FreeBSD vanilla and has to support the system three or four times more than its original weight with browsers such as firefox or chrome googlu.


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## badbrain (Aug 7, 2019)

teo said:


> Palemoon was a faster and lighter browser in my opinion


IMO Palemoon is much slower and not lightweight at all. You could try with some pages with heavy ads and see. Sometime it even hangs. It seemed to be lightweight because it doesn't use multiprocesses like modern Firefox or Chrome, but it ram consumtion is high and I notice it very rarely release ram when I closed all pages except a blank tab but it indeed ever increasing.

p/s: I think I need to clarify. This is my experience from the last time I used  Palemoon, which is two years ago. I don't know the state of it now. But I think it's still true. Correct me if I'm wrong.


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## ko56 (Aug 11, 2019)

I am also very sorry to see the Palemoon port go. (I don't want to go into the
debate between the FreeBSD and Palemoon developers, because I can see both sides.)
Speed is not my only concern with a browser, and in any case I find that the speed of 
PM 27.9.4, which I still use, is fine.  For me the user interface and the extensions
are even more important. In those respects I greatly prefer PM over Firefox, Chrome, 
or Otter. (Not to mention the privacy issues.)
Also, Palemoon is as well-maintained, and updated at least as regularly, as the others.

I've tried to run the latest PM 28.6.x Linux binary using the linux-c7 compatibility layer on
FreeBSD 12.0.  Some additional Linux libraries are needed, but after they're installed, PM
dumps core on start-up, specifically a file "Compositor.core".

I also tried to run the Windows version under wine-devel-4.12. This one seems to work fine, 
except it does something that keeps the cpu pretty busy.

Has anybody tried any of these things?  Finally, does anyone know how to (attempt to)
build from source?


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## ekvz (Sep 22, 2020)

Shameless necro bump:

If someone still cares over a year later https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/male-poon.77078/ might be of interest.


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## Matlib (Sep 22, 2020)

hukadan said:


> I think it all started here : https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86





			
				wolfbeast commented on Feb 5 said:
			
		

> ...our in-tree libraries are often patched specifically for the quirks of our code, and  of very specific versions (system-installed versions may or may not work, since APIs and behavior changes).



I think it's best to stay away from code like this.


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## ekvz (Sep 22, 2020)

Matlib said:


> I think it's best to stay away from code like this.



I fully agree and that's actually not even the worst part about this. Lack of (from my perspective) viable alternatives (yes, i know them all) though...


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