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Pale as the Moon
Refusing to use software that does not work properly anymore (if it ever worked properly to begin with...

Show me some considerabler software which works and worked anytime properly - I claim, it doesn't exist. ("In every software is at least one error. If we eliminate it, the thing shall not stop to be software.")

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Pale as the Moon
Windows 98 is almost 20 years old.

How old are you, if I may to ask?

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Pale as the Moon
Or would you call a HDD better than an SSD, or a floppy disk better than an SD card?

In some aspects surely.

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Pale as the Moon
I refuse to use a wrecked car or if I refuse to live in a house without a roof am I complying to the mainstream by your definition?

Yes, I refuse to use a wrecked car or to live in a house without a roof too. But not because of the year, when these things were built but because of they are wrecked, without a roof. Also if they are brandly new. There are many good old cars which I would like to use, many huderds yeras old houses with a good roof where I would like to live.

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Pale as the Moon
IE 6 is/was most likely the most hated piece of software ever developed, for it failed to work properly even back in the day when it was first released. It does not even remotely handle modern sites well.

On every saying is something right. But so said it's a very one-sided view on the whole complex problem. ("The horriblest on every lie is the small bag of trueness containing in it" - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach).

There were more ideologies in the past declaring to be the best and the natural development and that its's not possible to turn the wheel of the history back, and the mainstream of their regions believed that. Now we all can be happy, they are away. But it's no guarantee that some fatal ones, in this point similar, will not enforce to us again. I don't want to say yet, it's now the case. But the mainstream with deficiency in wideview and the historical remain believes again in many things which are not sustainable and true.


I'm sure, nobody can stop you to take the Goanna engine and make your own "K-Meleon" on it (with another name, well understood), or find somebody who makes it for you, if you believe it's so much better. But I don't think it's a good idea to change K-Meleon in this kind.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2017 03:44AM by Mikk.

Quote
Mikk
I'm sure, nobody can stop you to take the Goanna engine and make your own "K-Meleon" on it (with another name, well understood), or find somebody who makes it for you, if you believe it's so much better. But I don't think it's a good idea to change K-Meleon in this kind.

Yes, the open-source concept allows to try all the possible ways to modify software. May be it WOULD be rather good road to future, may be. Or may be not. ;-)

It would be interesting to see something like 'Go-Meleon' working and supported.

No reason to disagree! But you should always take in account that K-Meleon isn't just Gecko wrapper for Windows. It's more complex concept mixed of modularity, macrolanguage command interface etc.

Gecko was only 1 of 3 basic elements of KM's identity. But historically - the main one.

@Mikk:

It makes no sense to discuss with you. Why? Because you clinging to old technologies for whatever reason seems to be a semi-religious asset for you. It is wasting my time and energy, as I'm N-O-T interested in this antiquated stuff. This has no ideological, but technical reasons. Understand that and move on. Enjoy your life... But before you go out of here I would like to know where you see all those superior charasteristics of HDD & floppy disk which I somehow fail to see. Enlight me with your expertise, I'm waiting.

And last but not least: I refuse to use IE 6 not only because it is old, but because it is unsupported and B-R-O-K-E-N in every way imaginable. A horrible product not on par with almost every alternative there is. Keep it for yourself, I certainly don't begrudge you. I hope this is finally unambigiously understood.

@rodocop: I didn't know that you are no professional coder. I thought you were because you have managed to release K-Meleon 76 Pro after a long time of stagnation. Since Goanna is nothing but a variant of the Gecko 38 engine K-Meleon 76 uses I thought something might have been possible. :-(

Sure it should be possible. But it needs someone who makes it possible in real life ;-)

"Then he dropped a bombshell that explained the stress. "The prototype we're feeling good about right now is built with Electron and React, not Gecko and XUL, our go-to technologies for building browsers," Mayo said."
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3055945/web-browsers/mozilla-explores-radically-different-browser-as-firefox-leaks-share.html

@rodocop: It seems like it lies within the responsibilities of Dorian to evaluate this proposal. When he again shows up, that is...

@J.G.: Yeah I know that Mozilla is looking for a future outside of Gecko and XUL/XPCOM... So what? They are not relevant enough anymore, so whatever they come up with most likely won't make it into the mainstream. K-Meleon should look at browsers like Pale Moon which aim to keep the architecture K-Meleon is also building on. I don't see anyone here willing to completely rewrite the program, which is why my proposal objectively makes a whole lot of sense. When this is done general compatibility will have improved a lot.

Looks more and more like a planned quick death for KM to me, if it becomes just a PaleMoon clone. No thanks.
This XP-compatible Iceweasel thing in another thread looks a lot more promising for KM fans.

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siria
Looks more and more like a planned quick death for KM to me, if it becomes just a PaleMoon clone. No thanks.
This XP-compatible Iceweasel thing in another thread looks a lot more promising for KM fans.

Uhm, no. IceWeasel was nothing but a rebranded Firefox. Furthermore "IceWeasel" was given up in favor of Firefox ESR which was the product behind the brand anyway. The current Firefox 52 ESR does still support XP/Vista until mid-2018, but will then be abandoned in favor of Firefox 59 ESR which will NOT support XP/Vista.
More info here: https://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel

And no, K-Meleon would most definitely not be a PM clone. By that definition it would be a Firefox clone as of now because it uses Gecko...

This post revolves around adopting the Goanna 3.0 engine which Pale Moon uses, because it was forked from the same Gecko 38 engine K-Meleon currently makes use of. Hence it is its closest "relative" and would be easy to implement.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2017 01:38PM by Pale as the Moon.

@Pale, I have tried to search the very first post here in this forum and I think it's one from August 2000. The user said the next: "Posted by: dope2000, Date: August 22, 2000 09:17PM, this is all we need and its good. keep on going the development, and this kmeleon, will shine... :-), excellent work". And look at me, using this browser since few days 17 years later. So I agree completelely @siria words because them are full of respect to such a survivor like this browser, with good people working on it -- that I'm sure they won't left it alone. I have been enjoying Rodocop's KM Pro for a short time for what I need, but in my country we said that "it's better later than never". Just my two cents to support the K-Meleon team and its users!
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?1,4

Are you F****** here ?
Windows 7 and newer is bloated crappy oses with extremely unstable memory manager and resources manager? You are a fool nothing else . Have you seen the face of computer security tuts even ? Newer malware and viruses does not work on xp they just shows not a valid win32 application. Palemoon itself is super insecure. Fool moon child might do not know anything.their soarce is showing security holes everywhere. You are saying advanced chrome Is bad then you are somebody who is again a big mad . It is stable than orginal chrome running on supported platform. Moon child is simply blocking xp in his palemoon by means of Gettickcount64 (this function do nothing in the browser) with silly not valid PE image fake os blocking tricks. Have you remember 98% wannacry victims are 7 user not xp? Where is microsoft technology of bloody security.
K meleon DeV's do not move to buggy and insecure gonna it is hell in earth. Merge newer hotfixes and security fixes from latest ff and keep your best browser alive.

9x is different story. XP has all needed api even most new apps use xp api only . Newer nt6.x are just stubs . Yes supporting xp is not big deal as vs 2017 still support it . More over keeping xp support will give lean zero browser. Well unless some fools like moon child will say such excuse.

@Dibya said "Merge newer hotfixes and security fixes from latest ff and keep your best browser alive."

How they can be merged? Anyway, it sounds like a good idea for me.

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Dibya
K meleon DeV's do not move to buggy and insecure gonna it is hell in earth.

I've tried the latest two versions of Pale Moon (27.3 and 27.4). Aside from security issues (on which I'm no expert), yes, it is certainly buggy with regard to performance. Don't know if it's the Goanna engine or the overall design of the browser itself.

For example, when I tried 27.3, none of the video streams --YouTube or otherwise -- played smoothly. They moved in jerks, almost as slow as a slide show, because frames were constantly being dropped. None of the recommended tweaks solved the problem, including disabling or enabling hardware acceleration. Recently 27.4 was announced. It claimed to have focused on improving media playback, so I tried that and the performance was either exactly the same or even worse. K-Meleon, however, plays videos very smoothly indeed.

Another issue was site loading. For example, I could not stop The Guardian from loading and reloading background stuff even after I had read half an article or was watching one of their videos. This made navigation response very slow and jerky. Again, in KM, no problem. Loading of that site and others stops in a reasonable amount of time.

The only other browser I've tried that runs as smoothly as K-Meleon is SRWare Iron, a Chrome clone, but I don't like either the Chromium UI or its association with Google. TheWorld 7 wasn't too bad, but it no longer plays any YouTube videos.

Naturally there are drawbacks to using an outdated version of Gecko. I've now encountered three non-YouTube streaming sites that don't work in either KM 75 or KM 76 (Gecko 31 and 38 respectively). However, I spend more time searching for information or reading articles than I do watching streaming media, so I'm better off sticking with K-Meleon until the bitter end, whenever that comes.

---
Gerry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/20/2017 09:05PM by foliator.

I enjoyed this discussion, despite the strong sentiments.

The idea that only the developer can think about these issues is wrong.
Frankly, K-Meleon is more than the developer.

Think about it--can only car engineers think about car design. Uh no.

Let's be open and entertain ideas, not freak out when we disagree.

if KM moves to 52ESR Code it will be awesome

AFAIK "Goanna" is itself a fork of Mozilla's Gecko.

Maintaining and developing broswer engines (layout + ECMAScript) is a tremendous work.
Since Google seized the browser market it became even much harder.
You'll need many full-time job programmers to get at least a theoretical chance.
No wonder that even a company like "Opera" couldn't keep up and resigned by adopting Google's engine. So Opera became Google wrapped in a proprietary shell.
Opera co-founder Tetzchner launched with his full-time job programmers "Vivaldi" which is aslo Google wrapped in just another shell.
So far about browser diversity and the scary monopoly position of Google.

As for "Goanna", I wish all the luck to Mr Straver and his team. He will need it for sure...

Below is a link reminding of this thread and some predictable reactions...
Gecko vs Goanna for Thunderbird Independence

@Yogi probably the market is towards a 'Google market' itself.
Anyway, I dislike the new way of browsing: it's an entire shame.

Newest Firefox and newest Chrome have become two monsters with unpredictable behaviours under large amount of work. I use Chrome in my office and everybody said the same: it freezes a lot, it's becoming a software to test, not for work. Every new version is more and more Beta. PaleMoon? No way for me, I just got tired of tweaking things to simply browse. In the near past 'main' browsers worked better, do believe me. I don't know why.

Now, I am using the Kmeleon RC2Pro by Rodocop and I have only 45 Mb in the entire folder, while Chrome has near 310 Mb with no cache at all, just to get freezings and to restart W10 with no reason. The more I use Kmeleon the more I dislike Chrome. Kmeleon is a browser to browse. Period. Just my two cents.

Quote
Dibya
if KM moves to 52ESR Code it will be awesome

Yes, it would. Having said that, when one compares 38ESR to 52ESR, I suspect that the number of connection points and methods to connect KM to ESR is enormous. Now, I am not a programmer in C++, so I don't speak from experience. I think that the code for Gecko is moving to JavaScript. That must complicate the problem of matching KM to Gecko and it also means KM must obtain a JS debugger. Good ones, complete and having the correct APIs are not just laying around in an abundance.

Dorian is good at programming, but he is only one person. KM does not pay him. I think it just his hobby.

If "WE" want KM to use a later Gecko engine, then "WE" must find a way to provide much more support than translation and testing.

I am 75 years old and now have some medical conditions which limit what I can do. My typing has gone back to hunt and peck with two fingers much of the time. I would make an effort to help move KM to 52ESR, but someone would have to explain to me what I needed to do. My programming experience was in mainframe SAS and a little bit of PL1. I have done neither in this century.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage named after Robert J. Hanlon that states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

JamesD

I've tried to stay out of this one, but well...

Go to https://www.yr.no/place/Australia/Western_Australia/Perth/hour_by_hour_detailed.html. See my post here in this General Forum.

Pale Moon displays it well, as does IE11. Unfortunately, this page has 484 markup errors, and 48 CSS errors. KM is fault-intolerant, and will break any poorly assembled site. I have no expectation this will change even if Dorian does produce a late-model (ESR52) KM77. Pale Moon is for me a backup browser like IE11 to be used when nothing else works.

____________________
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic. [Florence Ambrose, "Freefall" 01372 January 22, 2007 http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1400/fv01372.htm]

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gordon451

Pale Moon displays it well, as does IE11.

So does latest FirefoxESR I have tested with.

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gordon451
KM is fault-intolerant, and will break any poorly assembled site.

I'm afraid it's not that Gecko is fault intolerant but K-Meleon based on Firefox 38 is for some pages a little bit outdated.

At least for me, Kmeleon Pro 76RC portable by Rodocop works better than PaleMoon.

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J.G.
At least for me, Kmeleon Pro 76RC portable by Rodocop works better than PaleMoon.

For me too

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Pale as the Moon
This would provide K-Meleon with several advantages:
- the workload of K-Meleon development could be reduced tremendously
- making the rapid releases of Gecko iterations redundant
- you would avoid problems when it comes to features like e10s later on
- Goanna is very fast, K-Meleon could profit here
- synergy effects for Pale Moon and K-Meleon development

Another thing with which K-Meleon could benefit would be the possibility of making it multiplatform (depending on whether the components and libraries used by the browser are Windows exclusive or not). And maybe this could also benefit Pale Moon, either by including K-Meleon optimizations or other program tools (such some K-Meleon extensions or the macro library).

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smallhagrid
It is a good browser, but...PM has dropped support for XP.

Then maybe could use that was implemented in New Moon (Pale Moon fork for Windows XP).

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smallhagrid
Folks who prefer K-M also have a preference quite often for a minimalistic, classically oriented browser as opposed to those who think it is just great to chrome-ize EVERYTHING.

I think that's a point that the users of both browsers have more or less in common because the Pale Moon users (and I) are disappointed by the chromification that Firefox has suffered in recent years, besides leaving unsupported the NPAPI plugins (except Flash) and classic extensions.

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Pale as the Moon
But what about our devs? Do they really have resources to make this connection working?

Some time ago someone compiled Seamonkey using Goanna so technically it should be possible, but I think that for this to work the developers of both browsers have to sit down and talk.

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Ящер
I'll support Pale as the Moon. The browser does not develop, Dorian abandoned it, it does not appear on the forum. The browser does not meet the challenges of the time. Please update the browser - it's not a whim - it's a must. If Dorian continues to ignore the fans of the browser, he (the browser) will die.

The code is in https://sourceforge.net/projects/kmeleon/ for anyone who wants to make a fork.

Speaking of the benefits of the Goanna engine - an excerpt from an older article which still applies as of today:

Quote

FossaMail/Pale Moon uses the Goanna rendering engine, a old frozen fork of the Gecko rendering engine used by Thunderbird/Firefox/SeaMonkey. Thunderbird (as of January 28, 2016) is currently at version 38.5.1 while Goanna is using the equivalent of Thunderbird 24 so it is behind over 100 security fixes according to Security Advisories for Thunderbird.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2017 01:00PM by Yogi.

@Rekufad,

you have pointed some very interesting ideas and thoughts.
However, always in my humble opinion of common user:

- I will prefer a "Reloaded Edition of the KM76 by Rodocop" for becoming stable release. Why? Simply, if KMeleon is no longer being developped, there is no obstacle to release whatever version, you won't care at all. And why not to release the best enhanced KMeleon version we can get now, with all patches and all bug fixes found till today or with all updating improvements known? It sounds very hilarious that I have recommended it to at least one dozen of persons and they can't find it at the official 'Download' section. A fork is a fork, and an old non official fork is like a stone in the water.

- If KMeleon gets the Goanna engine, I will use Pale Moon. In other words, I will not use any longer Kmeleon browser. Why? Because it's like to use a Ferrar* with a Ford engine, simply like that, so I will prefer to drive the Ford with its own Ford engine inside. However, that's my alone opinion, of course, from the point of view of a common happy user.

- If a Kmeleon 76 "Reloaded Edition" was released, probably Kmeleon will gain time. That's what this browser needs, time, because in eight months Kmeleon will make three years (!) with no minor release, with no minor bug fixing and whatever minor improvement.

- I tested Pale Moon Portable 27.5.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/3.3 Firefox/52.9 PaleMoon/27.5.1, and now I have another useragent string for KM.




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/12/2017 02:38PM by J.G..

I really disagree thinking joining PaleMoon guys. They despise XP, the best OS ever done, one in which you are the master of the OS and not a bare "I would do what U want." Windows Seven on with its "automatics updates" "defender" or "MSE" are pure spyware. In W10 all pcs using it are sync and tracked in a web. And eventhey they are going to an Android system -- no more Windows.

And remember tht we have many untended XP versions made in 2016, that are better than original XP versions.

Even so, and albeit I also have "new" hardware, i disagree with K.Meleon dropping down SSE requirements because then K.Meleon 76 and further just stopped working in many AMD "old" processors RUNNING XP, and maybe others, so I humbly ask you turn back the SSE requirements to K-Meleon 76 and future releases, and I know that other K-Meleon users think as I do.

Thank you for that.

NS

Oh yeah, also just HATE those evil spy methods - but who cares for laws today. GRRR.

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Nitrolobo Soloviev
Even so, and albeit I also have "new" hardware, i disagree with K.Meleon dropping down SSE requirements because then K.Meleon 76 and further just stopped working in many AMD "old" processors RUNNING XP, and maybe others, so I humbly ask you turn back the SSE requirements to K-Meleon 76

Could it be you have a translation misunderstanding here? Dropping the "requirement" for SSE-processors means that KM76 now runs on all processors again, old and new, not only newer ones with built-in SSE... (unless I got something wrong now??)

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Yogi
Speaking of the benefits of the Goanna engine - an excerpt from an older article which still applies as of today:

Quote

FossaMail/Pale Moon uses the Goanna rendering engine, a old frozen fork of the Gecko rendering engine used by Thunderbird/Firefox/SeaMonkey. Thunderbird (as of January 28, 2016) is currently at version 38.5.1 while Goanna is using the equivalent of Thunderbird 24 so it is behind over 100 security fixes according to Security Advisories for Thunderbird.

In the rumor control you can read this:

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Moonchild
Pale Moon has been on a divergent path with its own code for a long time already. It was a rebuild in 2009, yes. It was a rebuild with minor changes in the Firefox 4.0 era, yes. But we've come a very long way since then with an increasing amount of different code being carried over each time it was re-based on later Firefox code. It's a true fork now and has been employing rapid development (as opposed to rapid release) to solidify this independent direction with its own focus and attempt at keeping the browser sane, lean, and offering users choice and stability.
At the same time, Pale Moon's focus on security and evolving networking standards has added features and kept pace with those developments in other browsers, by e.g. adding TLS 1.1/1.2 support a while back, by offering OCSP-stapling, by keeping a close eye on encryption and the browser's security by continuing to port or re-implement security fixes that apply to Pale Moon as a browser. It is neither old nor outdated, it is not a "rebuild" and it does not use obsolete technologies or have security holes.

I suppose that with Goanna it should be more or less the same. And as you can read in these release notes, Fossamail received the same security updates as Pale Moon before being officially discontinued (and I say officially because Moonchild is still publishing its private builds, the most recent one is a few days ago).

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J.G.
- I will prefer a "Reloaded Edition of the KM76 by Rodocop" for becoming stable release. Why? Simply, if KMeleon is no longer being developped, there is no obstacle to release whatever version, you won't care at all. And why not to release the best enhanced KMeleon version we can get now, with all patches and all bug fixes found till today or with all updating improvements known? It sounds very hilarious that I have recommended it to at least one dozen of persons and they can't find it at the official 'Download' section. A fork is a fork, and an old non official fork is like a stone in the water.

To make clear that it is a fork, I suggest that it should be distinguished from the official version with a more concise name (maybe K-Meleon community edition/revived/refurbished or something like that) since anyone who is not internalized might believe that Rodocop's fork is a symptom of "spontaneous versionitis" from the developers.

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J.G.
- If KMeleon gets the Goanna engine, I will use Pale Moon. In other words, I will not use any longer Kmeleon browser. Why? Because it's like to use a Ferrar* with a Ford engine, simply like that, so I will prefer to drive the Ford with its own Ford engine inside. However, that's my alone opinion, of course, from the point of view of a common happy user.

I'm not sure if I understand that analogy well, but I just said that Pale Moon could benefit from the optimizations that the K-Meleon developers make to the engine, how? Removing dead weight (as Mozilla legacy shitty code or remnants of telemetry) and things that are superfluous and/or considered unnecessary to keep K-Meleon as fast and light as ever. Eventually some of these modifications could be merged to the official version of Goanna/Pale Moon.

Quote
J.G.
- I tested Pale Moon Portable 27.5.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/3.3 Firefox/52.9 PaleMoon/27.5.1, and now I have another useragent string for KM.

You have some useragent variants in https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/blob/master/browser/branding/shared/pref/uaoverrides.inc (or in about:config finding general.useragent.override).

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Rekufad

Quote
J.G.
- I will prefer a "Reloaded Edition of the KM76 by Rodocop" for becoming stable release. Why? Simply, if KMeleon is no longer being developped, there is no obstacle to release whatever version, you won't care at all. And why not to release the best enhanced KMeleon version we can get now, with all patches and all bug fixes found till today or with all updating improvements known? It sounds very hilarious that I have recommended it to at least one dozen of persons and they can't find it at the official 'Download' section. A fork is a fork, and an old non official fork is like a stone in the water.

To make clear that it is a fork, I suggest that it should be distinguished from the official version with a more concise name (maybe K-Meleon community edition/revived/refurbished or something like that) since anyone who is not internalized might believe that Rodocop's fork is a symptom of "spontaneous versionitis" from the developers.

I meant if no further new KMeleon official release will be done, of course. IMHO everyone will respect main chief developper decision, mainly considering that these are low suggestions. We should be enoughly proud of what we have now because we won't know about we will have tomorrow. :mad:

Quote
Rekufad

Quote
J.G.
- If KMeleon gets the Goanna engine, I will use Pale Moon. In other words, I will not use any longer Kmeleon browser. Why? Because it's like to use a Ferrar* with a Ford engine, simply like that, so I will prefer to drive the Ford with its own Ford engine inside. However, that's my alone opinion, of course, from the point of view of a common happy user.

I'm not sure if I understand that analogy well, but I just said that Pale Moon could benefit from the optimizations that the K-Meleon developers make to the engine, how? Removing dead weight (as Mozilla legacy shitty code or remnants of telemetry) and things that are superfluous and/or considered unnecessary to keep K-Meleon as fast and light as ever. Eventually some of these modifications could be merged to the official version of Goanna/Pale Moon.

The analogy is very simple: if your heart is replaced, you will never feel your 'own' heart again. And probably, you won't feel your 'own' deepest feelings again. So sad to be truth, mainly if you consider the 'truth' as the most dignified way to reach something good in so many aspects of software development work: if we don't know where really we are, it's a nonsense to go backward or forward. :s

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Rekufad

Quote
J.G.
- I tested Pale Moon Portable 27.5.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/3.3 Firefox/52.9 PaleMoon/27.5.1, and now I have another useragent string for KM.

You have some useragent variants in https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/blob/master/browser/branding/shared/pref/uaoverrides.inc (or in about:config finding general.useragent.override).

It was an ironic way to say that I have got no benefits from Pale Moon by now.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2017 10:19AM by J.G..

Quote
Rekufad

Quote
Moonchild
It is neither old nor outdated, it is not a "rebuild" and it does not use obsolete technologies or have security holes.

OK, I take back my above statement and I'll take Moonchild at his word.