14 DAY TRIAL // The team behind the Pale Moon browser is thinking of starting an alternative browser that could take over their main product if it ever becomes a reality and reaches a stable stage.
Pale Moon is a Web browser that comes as a fork of Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 24, which appeals to former Firefox users who didn't/don't like the new Australis UI or the choices Mozilla has made in Firefox in later versions.
The browser doesn't have a huge market share, but most people who use it are hardcore Web users who generally know what they're doing and how a browser should work.
In a topic on Pale Moon's forum, Moonchild, the project's owner and lead developer, has proposed a plan for the browser's future. This plan has the development team creating a new browser from scratch, on a more modern Firefox codebase, which, when reaching a stable tag, would replace the aging Pale Moon base.
Pale Moon is lagging behind in Web standards coverage
Moonchild explains some of the reasons Pale Moon is bound to run into a lot of problems in the long term.
First of all, the dev team has recognized that they've "missed the mark" for their forking point, choosing an older codebase for Pale Moon's starting point. This is bound to cause some issues since not all modern Web standards are currently supported in Pale Moon.
This list includes the Promises feature from ECMAScript 6 (JavaScript), some support for media streaming, Direct2D 1.1 support, and quite a lot of CSS features that have started to become more prevalent.
Additionally, as Firefox continues to evolve with support for e10s (multi-process) and WebExtensions, Pale Moon is bound to run into big complications with future versions of the Firefox codebase.
These complications would have been taken care of, but Moonchild also admits that they don't have the manpower to deal with them, and Mozilla is deepening this problem with more and more changes in Firefox's code.
Plans for the "alternative" browser
Moonchild's proposal involves creating a new browser from scratch, in a so-called "re-forking" operation, where the Pale Moon devs take a newer version of Firefox and rebuild Pale Moon on top of that.
"This re-forking would be done on the last stable version of Mozilla code that hasn't had a sledgehammer put to it yet and that offers the features and capabilities we as a project would still want," Moonchild explains.
Some of Moonchild's goals have the new browser retaining Pale Moon's current UI, keeping support for Tab Groups, full themes, Sync 1.1, XUL, XBL, and XPCOM-based extensions.
Furthermore, the new browser will also include support for all the latest Web standards, allow the devs to import newer Firefox features much faster, and add better Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 compatibility. Of course, the new browser will also operate on the "no DRMs or hidden telemetry data" principle that current Pale Moon users love.
At this point, the plan is only that, and Moonchild is waiting for input from fellow Pale Moon developers and the browser's community.