Cooperation with Pale Moon possible? The post-XUL scenario.
Hey TenFourFox developers & community,
just wanted to ask if any kind of cooperation with the Pale Moon team is possible. The Pale Moon team is committed to keep up XUL/XPCOM and their browser is also Gecko-based. There are Pale Moon builds around which do run on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and newer (OS X 10.5 Leopard INTEL has not been confirmed yet, somebody would have to test). They are currently lacking expertise when it comes to OS X development, yet are very experienced when it comes to UI development and any kind of work on the core engine.
Have a look here for more info regarding the situation of Pale Moon for OS X: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41
I made a proposal on their board in regards to a possible cooperation with TenFourFox today: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&p=113004#p113004
They are planning to make a fork of current Firefox versions which will have the Australis interface, and are trying to create a platform where other software using Gecko (and XUL) can build on: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15505 AND https://forum.palemoon.org/download/file.php?id=7647&mode=view
Since Pale Moon is lacking OS X development expertise but is committed to keep the current-day Firefox (with Gecko + XUL/XPCOM) alive I can see great synergy effects should a cooperation with TenFourFox come to pass.
This has already been brought up by your lead dev: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.de/2017/04/the-bites-back.html
So, what do you think of that? Since M.C. Straver (Moonchild) is in search for possible partners this could be a good thing.
Have a nice day
Pale as the Moon
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 30 Apr, 2017 11:09 PM
Their response is somewhat disappointing, but if they feel it doesn't offer them anything, that's their call, I suppose. The idea would have been to jointly help backport security patches and in return to offer a baseline Mac build that works. That said, if their major interest is only current Macs, that does certainly clash with our priorities because it would be unacceptable to us (and me) to run a project that doesn't support 10.4.
Conversely, though, we don't gain anything by using them as an upstream. Without going into great detail, Goanna is too different from Gecko to be beneficial to us, and we would lose some features by using Pale Moon as a code base.
I do think there is some fundamental misunderstanding on Pale Moon's part of what TenFourFox actually does (I've lurked periodically in the forums); as you know, it's not merely a port to restore compatibility (which is itself a big job), but also value-adds other PowerPC features such as a PowerPC JavaScript JIT and AltiVec support for VPX and other media codecs, and all that requires substantial additional development. The real question is whether they think that's worth it to them and clearly they don't, so that's that.
I guess it was a nice thought, anyway.
2 Posted by Pale as the Moo... on 01 May, 2017 11:41 AM
@Cameron Kaiser:
There are some serious issues plaguing the Mac build of Pale Moon, more here: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=15254 I had some hope that somebody with skills like yours would be able to fix them, as the Pale Moon team is (according to themselves) lacking OS X development expertise (hasn't been the focus of the project).
I thought this would have been possible in exchange for them helping you to keep up the platform. It seemed beneficial for both sides to me.
However, don't overrate what Matt is stating in the thread. he is not representing the Pale Moon team, nor is he a member of it. You should take into consideration what Moonchild, Pale Moon's lead dev, is stating.