[oi-dev] Would OI be interested in Pale Moon?

[Michal Nowak]

On 12/11/19 12:51 PM, Jeremy Andrews wrote:
> This is an interesting discussion, and I did want to address some
> additional comments...
> 
> Actually, the restrictions they have are on the use of the official
> branding. They are saying you have to build it a specific way if you
> want to use their official branding, and they have very specific
> requirements to get permission to use official branding that I've
> managed to comply with thus far. However, if you were to use alternative
> branding like IceWeasel-UXP does:
> 
> https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:project:iceweasel-uxp
> 
> Then you don't have to follow those requirements.
> 
> I assumed since you weren't interested in Pale Moon, you weren't
> interested in anything like this at all, but I heard someone talk about
> issues with Rust and then someone else mention IceWeasel which reminded
> me there was an alternative. The big advantages of the UXP platform are
> that it supports more modern websites than older Firefox does, doesn't
> have Rust or telemetry, and still supports XUL extensions and NPAPI plugins.
> 
> The irony of all this is, the reason Pale Moon has the branding
> restrictions is because they haven't tested any system libraries other
> than their own internal ones, they don't want to provide support for
> custom builds, and they're worried about their browser getting a bad
> reputation for being buggy due to being built in an unsupported
> configuration. But now their browser apparently has a bad reputation
> because of their licensing restrictions.

Jeremy, thank you for the explanation. We value your work and interest. 
Even-though we won't accept Pale Moon, I hope this whole exercise helped 
you understand web browser's internals.

As others I invite you to work with us on bringing Firefox 68 ESR to 
OpenIndiana. Your skill-set looks right for the task. Currently we 
update LLVM (https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/pull/5389) so we 
can build newer Rust, and thus build new Firefox 
(https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/pull/4999). Talk to us on 
#openindiana Freenode channel if this suits your interests.

Michal