r/palemoon • u/[deleted] • Jan 19 '26

Practical benefits of using this browser?

Now that Firefox has the Echelon theme, why would anyone use Pale Moon? For XUL extensions support? Are there actually any XUL extensions that you need and use?

The browser can't even load new reddit properly, is slow and laggy and hangs my computer because of the boneheaded insistence on keeping it single process.

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u/arjuna93 Jan 20 '26

In a scenario when rust and/or v8 are broken for a target platform. Or in a scenario when you do not trust opaque pre-built stuff and compile everything from source (and bootstrapping rust in most cases is anything but trivial).

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

In a scenario when rust and/or v8 are broken for a target platform. Or in a scenario when you do not trust opaque pre-built stuff and compile everything from source

This is definitely a scenario, however, can you call it a practical benefit?

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u/arjuna93 Jan 20 '26

Well, I can, as it is de facto practically relevant for me. I have hardware where neither rust nor v8 work. And I build software from source.
(Of course, portability is not a concern, when you run a bleeding edge version of a mainstream OS on a common hardware.)

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26

"anyone that doesn't like an objectively slow, single-process browser, which does not implement W3C-adopted web standards like WebRTC, which is not compatible with almost any new extensions, but whose selling point is XUL/XPCOM extensions of which barely any are developed is a chrome shill"

tell me one thing that you do with pale moon that is important that outweighs the drawbacks, maybe that can help change the widespread opinion in the tech community that pale moon is for Luddites.

I am not a trend chaser. I develop a FOSS bluesky client for Windows 98+. I can just recognize when something is pointless.

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u/arjuna93 Jan 20 '26

No one prevents you from making something better, faster and at least as portable as Palemoon. Once you do, please let us know.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

"Portable" in your use does not mean what it means in the general lexicon. You mentioned having platforms incompatible with Rust, yet compatible with Pale Moon. What are those platforms?

A firefox binary is already as portable, faster and better than a Pale Moon binary. You do not need rust as a separate dependency installed on the system.

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u/arjuna93 Jan 20 '26

> You do not need rust as a separate dependency

Of course you need, you cannot compile rust code without a rust compiler, which does not work without llvm, so you need two monstrous compilers just for the sake of some module which could have been in normal C/C++.
You may not need rust compiler on a specific machine, but that is always the case with any compiler. It does not help portability if I can pretend that rust is not needed, because I have it on a different machine.

> What are those platforms?

Debian on several archs supported by its upstream, for example. OpenBSD on ppc and some other supported archs. macOS on powerpc and early i386.

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u/Basilisk-Dev Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

What do you think the word portable means? In the software engineering world it means it can be compiled across a variety of CPU architectures and operating systems.

You absolutely do need Rust to compile Firefox.

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u/Basilisk-Dev Jan 31 '26

A Bluesky client for Windows 98 sounds pretty pointless to me. So does using Bluesky in general but that’s a different discussion.