[gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

[Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de>]

Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
> Mind you, the Pale Moon team may not
> have the staffing level required to write a new compiler, maintain a
> politically correct "community", integrate real-time-chat into the
> browser, integrate "Pocket" into the browser, rewrite the GUI every so
> often, yada, yada, yada.

Why do you mention only some irrelevant points here, ignoring
the crucial ones (on top of them: security) which I was talking
about?
The only relevant thing of those you mention is "new compiler":
It is really security relevant to have bindings to current C++
libraries, especially if the other libraries use them.
(Reasons: bugfixes and unpredictable side effects.)

And if you mean rust: I expect that this will give (and probably
already gave) an enormous security boost to firefox.

>> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely excludes
>> that there is some convergence of the fork in the future.
>
>   As an end-user, I think you're missing the whole point of Pale Moon.
> If I really wanted a Chrome-like browser, I'd use Chrome in the first
> place. I, and a lot of other people, switched to Pale Moon precisely
> because we *DO NOT WANT* what Firefox has become.  To quote an old
> meme... I didn't leave Firefox... Firefox left me.

Again, I was not talking about relatively irrelevant things like
user experience here. As I said, I also liked palemoon in the
beginning. It simply turned out an unrealistic project so that
I found myself forced to decide to not use it anymore due to
security considerations.

>> Also the refusal to implement webextension apis (which is consequent,
>> since it is hardly possible to maintain 2 more and more diverging
>> apis) has the side effect that only obsolete versions of the actively
>> maintained extensions like noscript and ublock-origin can be used.
>
>   Wrong.

No, correct: Current noscript and ublock-origin cannot be used
and never will usable with palemoon again.

> Pale Moon has its own XUL extension ecosystem at
> https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/

Sure, they have to. This doesn't mean that this is worth something:

> Noscript equivalents...
> * https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/

This is not  "equivalent" but the legacy noscript itself
which I had mentioned. As I said, _currently_ this is still
maintained (in the sense that most severe bugs are fixed)
because of the tor browser. Upstream's main activity is
clearly the web extension.

BTW, this is nothing new: For a long time one had to use
2-years old versions of noscript, because important new
APIs current noscript needed  had not been implemented yet.
Eventually the new API was pulled from firefox upstream, so
that currently at least the most recent (obsolete) version of
noscript can be used. In future, you cannot expect such a
thing to ever happen again.

> * https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yesscript/

... and another legacy extension whose maintainance
apparently stopped 2 years ago.