On Mon, 2 May 2016 18:38:15 -0400 (EDT) Felmon Davis davisf@union.edu wrote:
On Mon, 2 May 2016, E. Liddell wrote:
(Me? PaleMoon, which is a fork of Firefox from before they trashed the UI, but I'm a control freak with unusual requirements.)
please just a little bit about how Palemoon suits your control freak/unusual requirements?
Basically, it has all of the configurability Firefox had before Mozilla started systematically gutting it a little while back. This includes supporting at least 75% of the Firefox extensions that existed when it was forked.
My primary browser profile has a whole bunch of add-ons and settings designed to keep me from seeing anything I don't want to see. I don't, as a general rule, load scripts, video, audio, webfonts, or even images unless I actually feel that they'll add something to the page. The extension I use for image filtering (ImgLikeOpera) no longer works with Firefox, and all the substitutes I've tried are inferior. It still works perfectly well with PaleMoon. Like I said, control freak. ;)
In this profile, I typically have 100+ tabs open, spread across eight windows. PaleMoon doesn't seem to have any problem with this, and remains responsive.
The profile I use when dabbling in web development has a completely different set of extensions--Firebug and such. Another profile points at a proxy server. Not all browsers make it easy to have multiple diverse profiles for the same user.
Also, because PaleMoon uses the old, pre-Australis Firefox UI, it doesn't try to hide important things that I want to see, like the address bar and main menu. It's even still got a status bar. And the tabs are where I expect them to be, above the content and below the address bar. It's *possible* to wrestle current versions of Firefox around to the point where they look sane, but you have to download and configure a couple of extra extensions that wouldn't be necessary if they'd just left well enough alone.
Note that I do not claim that PaleMoon is particularly lightweight. My main desktop is fairly beefy for a Linux box (3.2 GHz quad-core, 16GB RAM), and the only things that (sometimes) eat more memory than those 100+ browser tabs are VirtualBox and some really heavy compiles.
I should also note that there are certain features that a lot of people seem to want that I *don't* need. I don't care about multiple device synchronization support, for instance, and I don't generally watch streaming video. So I don't know how good my browser of choice is at those things.
(That was probably a bit disorganized. Sorry.)
E. Liddell