Firefox (Pale Moon) project?

[Yousuf Khan]

Anyone been using the Pale Moon editions of Firefox? It's supposed to be
more optimized for Windows than standard Firefox, including x64 and SSE
support available.

The Pale Moon Project homepage
http://www.palemoon.org/

Any problems with it that was noticed?

Yousuf Khan

 

[occam]

Anyone been using the Pale Moon editions of Firefox? It's supposed to be
more optimized for Windows than standard Firefox, including x64 and SSE
support available.

The Pale Moon Project homepage
http://www.palemoon.org/

Any problems with it that was noticed?

I used it for a while, before abandoning it. Here are some of the
reasons why:

1- Pale Moon is 1-man production. If s/he goes, Pale Moon goes under.
2- Pale Moon releases lag behind official FF releases by 1-2 weeks (at
least).
3- In the past, Pale Moon releases were bugged (which the author claimed
were due to 'hidden' bugs in FF)
4- The claims of 25% performance improvement on the Pale Moon site are
conditional (read the small print). I certainly did not see 25%
improvement on my oldish PC.

There were other lesser put-offs... but the above should give you food
for thought.

 

[Mayayana]

I'm using Palemoon currently. My understanding is
that PM basically *is* FF, but with a few things left
out that most people won't use. I haven't really tried
to compare the two, though it does seem like PM loads
faster than FF. (Which, of course, is hardly an impressive
feat.) Frankly I don't get the discussions about speed,
x64 optimization, script benchmarking, etc. with a high-
speed connection even bloated pages load almost
instantly. Anyone who can't wait an extra 3/4 of a second
has bigger problems than needing to choose a browser.
To my mind the whole speed issue is just created by the
media to make headlines about a non-existent horserace.

My preference is K-Meleon, which I think of as being
what Firefox is supposed to be: A lean, functional
browser built for people. (MS builds IE for corporations,
Google builds Chrome for Google, Mozilla builds Firefox
for Google, and they all build to serve online corporate
commerce.)

But the K-Meleon project doesn't get much
attention and there are a few functions that I miss when
I use K-Meleon. So lately I've been using Palemoon.
(I'm a bit surprised that there aren't enough idealists
left in the Mozilla fold to break away from the Firefox
fiasco and maintain a single, clean browser project.)

I almost never enable javascript, but on occasion I
visit a site where I decide to enable it. Rather than
switch settings back and forth, I now save Firefox
for the script-enabled sites and use Palemoon for
everything else.

So I like Palemoon but I'm not thrilled. I think FF has
been going in the wrong direction ever since they began
being funded by Google. Since Palemoon is pretty much FF,
it also includes the general bloat, faddism and "corporate
sellout" changes that now characterize FF.
A good example: 3rd-party image blocking. K-Meleon still
has an option in its settings to block 3rd-party images
(which are usually web-beacon ads). Mozilla.org removed
the setting from FF (thus it's missing from Palemoon), claiming
it was "confusing". Not only that -- they also changed
the prefs.js line (about:config) that controls the behavior,
to make it even more difficult to block 3rd party images.
One can still do it, but only Mozilla.org employees and a
few "power users" know about it.

Mozilla.org was getting most of their funding from Google.
Google is Doubleclick. Doubleclick is the biggest operation
online in terms of ads and spying via web beacons. If people
can't block 3rd-party images then there are very, very few
websites where Google can't track a visit. (Even webmasters
who don't use Doubleclick ads or Google Adsense often
add code for Google Analytics because they don't know
how to process their own server logs.) And to be even more
sneaky, Doubleclick and others now often put their ads
inside a superfluous IFRAME, which qualifies the ad as 1st-party,
since an IFRAME is a full-fledged webpage.

All of which means that with 3rd-party ads, script and IFRAMES
enabled, your actions online can be tracked in meticulous detail
by Google/Doubleclick, Microsoft/AQuantive, and various other
targetted ad operations. In other words, Mozilla.org sold out a
long time ago.

--
| Anyone been using the Pale Moon editions of Firefox? It's supposed to be
| more optimized for Windows than standard Firefox, including x64 and SSE
| support available.
|
| The Pale Moon Project homepage
| http://www.palemoon.org/
|
| Any problems with it that was noticed?
|
| Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I'm using Palemoon currently. My understanding is
that PM basically *is* FF, but with a few things left
out that most people won't use. I haven't really tried
to compare the two, though it does seem like PM loads
faster than FF. (Which, of course, is hardly an impressive
feat.) Frankly I don't get the discussions about speed,
x64 optimization, script benchmarking, etc. with a high-
speed connection even bloated pages load almost
instantly. Anyone who can't wait an extra 3/4 of a second
has bigger problems than needing to choose a browser.
To my mind the whole speed issue is just created by the
media to make headlines about a non-existent horserace.

Well, my main concern is memory usage, Firefox has got terrible garbage
collection and it starts growing in memory usage even if you haven't
visited a single new website and just have it sitting idly minimized in
the bottom. So hoping this Palemoon solves any of that.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Mayayana]

| Well, my main concern is memory usage, Firefox has got terrible garbage
| collection and it starts growing in memory usage even if you haven't
| visited a single new website and just have it sitting idly minimized in
| the bottom. So hoping this Palemoon solves any of that.

I haven't seen that problem, but I can see what
you mean in Task Manager. Both FF and PM are
starting out using 30-35 MB RAM, which is already
surprisingly bloated. I don't see them growing at idle,
but both seem to add 5-8 MB for each page loaded,
which is far more than the actual page content.
And they don't let it go. It appears that they're
designed to keep a cache of the page files plus the
document object model data in RAM for as long as
they're running. That's like MS word keeping all
documents loaded, with Undo information, even
after they've been closed. The memory usage is so
great that I wouldn't be surprised if they're also
doing things like building a search database for each
page behind the scenes.

K-Meleon starts out at a much leaner 16-19 MB,
but exhibits the same unnecessary caching behavior.
I guess the point must be to make the Back button
work very quickly.

 

[occam]

On 02/09/2011 9:37 AM, Mayayana wrote:

Well, my main concern is memory usage, Firefox has got terrible garbage
collection and it starts growing in memory usage even if you haven't
visited a single new website and just have it sitting idly minimized in
the bottom. So hoping this Palemoon solves any of that.

No, it does not.
There is no new code in Pale Moon. It is Firefox, minus some bloat (e.g.
accessibility features, etc.)

 

[Yousuf Khan]

| Well, my main concern is memory usage, Firefox has got terrible garbage
| collection and it starts growing in memory usage even if you haven't
| visited a single new website and just have it sitting idly minimized in
| the bottom. So hoping this Palemoon solves any of that.

I haven't seen that problem, but I can see what
you mean in Task Manager. Both FF and PM are
starting out using 30-35 MB RAM, which is already
surprisingly bloated. I don't see them growing at idle,
but both seem to add 5-8 MB for each page loaded,
which is far more than the actual page content.
And they don't let it go. It appears that they're
designed to keep a cache of the page files plus the
document object model data in RAM for as long as
they're running. That's like MS word keeping all
documents loaded, with Undo information, even
after they've been closed. The memory usage is so
great that I wouldn't be surprised if they're also
doing things like building a search database for each
page behind the scenes.

And the interesting thing is that neither Firefox & Thunderbird use
nearly as much ram in Linux. It's been said that Mozilla spends an
inordinate amount of time concentrating on making the FF and TB
experiences under Windows the best, and it pays only secondary attention
to their ports to other platforms. But it looks like that's actually a
good thing for Linux.

Anyways, this is such a well-known issue under FF for Windows, that they
actually made two Windows-only add-ons (there could be more)
specifically designed to handle this. One is Memory Reboot, which simply
warns you when memory reaches a preset interval and can optionally
reboot FF automatically to start it again from the beginning. Another
one is Memory Fox, which is a bit more sophisticated and actually
triggers garbage collection automatically in FF.

I've seen FF reach 500MB in RAM utilization! And even worse, I've seen
TB go easily over 1GB, sitting in memory. I got 8GB of RAM, but even I
pay attention when I start seeing total memory usage go over 50%
regularly. My original intent was to put in 8GB of RAM on this machine
as a silly but comfortable amount of RAM that I didn't expect to fully
utilize most of the time, except as disk cache.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

No, it does not.
There is no new code in Pale Moon. It is Firefox, minus some bloat (e.g.
accessibility features, etc.)

Okay then, that statement just about clinches it for me. If there's no
real memory improvement, then what's the use?

Thanks for the feedback everybody.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Mike S]

Well, if it loads much faster on startup, which I think it does, that's
enough for me. (Firefox seems to take a few seconds for initial startup,
and since I only use it occasionally, that startup delay is quite
noticeable). (I usually use IE8 for most work, however).

Since you mentioned faster load speeds, I use the UPX packer on Firefox,
Pale Moon, Thunderbird, Photoshop 6 and 7, and other programs, and it
speeds up load times, sometimes significantly. It's free and works great:

http://upx.sourceforge.net/

There are free "shell" programs that provide a gui for UPX, I think you
select a folder and the compression level, then click a button to pack
all of the exe and dll files in the folder you selected automatically.
Here's one, I never tried it (I wrote my own in Visual Basic, will send
upon request), I think I've seen other free ones too so you may want to
look for one that has features you like.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/upxshell/

Mike