Thoughts on Pale Moon and Seamonkey ?
What are your thoughts on these browsers?
Avoid them.
Seamonkey follows the Mozilla trademark policy, and all of the problems that come with it, creating the same problems as with Firefox.
Pale Moon has their own trademark policy, and it too is problematic.
Both stretch trademark into areas it's not supposed to go into by containing actual distribution restrictions.
Just two examples; not the full list:
"There is NO CHARGE for the download or distribution of the browser package."
Problem: As explained in the Free Software Definition, all four freedoms must be available on both a commercial and non-commercial basis. This serves to limit Freedom 2 to gratis distribution only, making the software nonfree.
"This license may be updated without notice, so please make sure to check back on occasion if you redistribute the browser in any form."
This seems to provide the ability to change it at will, even for copies already obtained. To also quote the Free Software Definition: "In order for these freedoms to be real, they must be permanent and irrevocable as long as you do nothing wrong; if the developer of the software has the power to revoke the license, or retroactively add restrictions to its terms, without your doing anything wrong to give cause, the software is not free."
For Trisquel, Abrowser is definitely the best browser if you want good compatibility with the web. Pale Moon doesn't have a mature version of the webComponents suite of tools like Firefox/Abrowser have, so some websites which use those features won't render correctly on Pale Moon. I think Seamonkey is missing some of the same features.
If you do want to run Pale Moon without running afoul of the trademark policy, I put up a how-to awhile back to build an un-branded version: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/how-build-apparently-libre-version-pale-moon-browser-trisquel
Unbranded Pale Moon uses less memory than Firefox/Abrowser, which is why I use it. But you do lose some of the website compatibility.
I appreciate the information. I'm new to using Trisquel and was curious what people thought. I'm a big fan of Abrowser, I would agree with that statement. I use it as my default browser on my laptop running Pure OS.
I am a member!
> Problem: As explained in the Free Software Definition, all four freedoms must be available on both a commercial and non-commercial basis. This serves to limit Freedom 2 to gratis distribution only, making the software nonfree.
Then the entry in https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Pale_Moon should be updated!
> Unbranded Pale Moon uses less memory than Firefox/Abrowser, which is why I use it. But you do lose some of the website compatibility.
A rebranded (gtk2?) version of both palemoon and epyrus (like abrowser & icedove) would be an exceptional candidate for trisquel-mini. Although, as I have never maintained any package, I guess it is much easier said than done!
I have sent this message to directory-discuss:
I think Pale Moon is not a good candidate for the Directory, and this
is why. I don't intend for this to be an all-exhaustive list for all
of the concerns about the redistribution license when someone is
exercising Freedom #2; only to show that software freedom problems
exist with it.
Pale Moon has a similar trademark problem with Firefox [0]:
> There is NO CHARGE for the download or distribution of the browser
> package.
As explained in the Free Software Definition, all four freedoms must
be available on both a commercial and non-commercial basis. This
serves to limit Freedom 2 to gratis distribution only, making the
software nonfree. The FSF has previously communicated that such a
thing in a trademark policy makes it nonfree [1]. Perhaps someone
could host a rebranded verion of Pale Moon that doesn't have this
problem, much like how GNU IceCat solves the problem for Firefox, but
Pale Moon itself seems ineligible for being in the Free Software
Directory.
In addition:
3a seems to contain restrictions on exactly how Pale Moon can be
distributed (can't be part of AppImage, flatpak, or SNAP). With free
software, people should be able to package programs for use with
any kind of package management system.
#4 on the prohibition of "download managers" might be able to be
interpreted as not allowing other package managers like APT or
RPM too since they also function as a way to download software.
Finally:
* We reserve the right to withdraw permission for the use of official
branding and/or redistribution of officially-branded binaries
either as a whole or for specific target environments at any time,
with or without stated reason.
This affects someone's ability to exercise Freedom #2 where the
ability to share exact copies can be terminated at any time and for
any reason. This seems to go against this part of the Free Software
Definition that: "In order for these freedoms to be real, they must be
permanent and irrevocable as long as you do nothing wrong; if the
developer of the software has the power to revoke the license, or
retroactively add restrictions to its terms, without your doing
anything wrong to give cause, the software is not free."
If Freedom #2 can be revoked at their will the software should not be
considered free.
0: https://www.palemoon.org/redist.shtml
1: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2011-08/msg00014.html
I am a member!
I have forward your message to palemoon's forum as well. I got a response that the developer is open to discuss if an fsf member is willing to contact him in private : https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=29133#p234298
"Perhaps someone could host a rebranded version of Pale Moon that doesn't have this problem..."
"...if they really feel they want Pale Moon..."
There appears to have been enough space for a slight misunderstanding to slip in. Anyway, I would support Rising Sun, the rebranded version of Pale Moon fully compatible with the four freedoms. As for my personal use, I believe I am going to stick with Abrowser.
Abrowser has Rust. The power of Cthulhu over you is troubling. We may need to stage an intervention.
As mentioned in an earlier thread, I am busy creating Stainless-C with the valuable bits in Rust. Any botched intervention now, and we are all going to get stuck on the Rust tentacle - forever.
That said, were you not suggesting there that you were planning to host Rising Sun after you are done feeding your chicken seafood rusticini: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/how-build-apparently-libre-version-pale-moon-browser-trisquel#comment-167177 ?
>"That said, were you not suggesting there that you were planning to host Rising Sun after you are done feeding your chicken seafood rusticini"
First of all, chicken seafood rusticini sounds incredible. I like your style. I may have to sacrifice a chicken in the oven tonight.
Secondly, I would never name it Rising Sun, it would be Inyanga, the Zulu goddess of the moon. Speaking of which, did I ever share this Zulu song with you? I've been absolutely in love with it for 17 years now, I pray that you'll give it a good listen: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=6SyWwQ0P5Y4
The song also goes by the name "Likufanele", and was released in Europe and America by the group Zero 7.
Yeah, maybe I need to have a chat with the Pale Moon devs and figure out how to rebrand Inyanga.
So you think ritually sacrificing your pet chicken to Cthulhu will protect you from their evil shadow? I believe it would still be safer to keep changing the project codename until it is ready to be revealed to the world. I have now taken to calling it Durin Light.
>"I believe it would still be safer to keep changing the project codename until it is ready to be revealed to the world."
Ideally, the project name (and website) would always change, and the project would never be anything more than a myth - the great Chrome-slaying browser that no one has ever seen or tried, but that everyone hears whispers and stories about. As soon as it is actually released, people will criticize it and the legend will die. It should be like King Arthur - the greatest king of the Brits (who never existed) (unless he did).
King Arthur left far too much compromising material for his existence to be denied.
Seamonkey is great. It makes sense to me to integrate internet browsing and email client, for example go to a website you can easily click to subscribe to the RSS feed, which then creates a subscription in Seamonkey Mail. Sure you can string together a bunch of xdg-open stuff to be a bit more unix-philosophy, but I'm ok with a big homogeneous application. Doing so also allows you to share configs like TOR proxy for your RSS feeds, which you can't with say GNOME Evolution. The Website Navigation Bar is also super neat as it allows for a complete divorce between navigation and content, too bad it never caught on.
There's also a number of GUI features modern firefox, and forks like Pale Moon do not have[1]
Seamonkey's interface has been largely unchanged since it was Netscape in 1998[1], and the developers are committed to keeping things as they are. I can't think any of any large GUI program with that distinction.
The biggest problem of course is making the jump to Qauntum Firefox's (v57) engine, required for compatibility with newer extensions and websites. Work is being in Seamonkey to do this, however it's been years and still no end in sight.
Unfortunately I find myself opening up chromium for 'life stuff', interacting with government, jobs, online shopping, etc.
As an aside, GNUzilla originally was the Netscape Internet Suite[3] (which became the Seamonkey Internet Suite). Debian had IceApe for a long time, and it appears Parabola still has a form of it[4].
[1] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/wrestling.html
[2] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20061011185309/https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
[4] https://wiki.parabola.nu/Iceape
I'm trying out the Seamonkey RSS feed reader, that is a pretty nice feature, you are right.
RSS was too powerful for those who wanted to turn 'the internet' into a skinners box for ads and tracking. Be smarter, let your computer tell you what's new on the internet instead of manually checking a bunch of websites.
So far I only know of Thunderbird and Seamonkey that allow for using proxies while fetching RSS feeds (as well as having a whitelist). They also support web extensions... though I guess since Seamonkey doesn't support Quantum extensions it's a little less useful, we have a ublock fork and noscript at least.
I use Seafox and Seatab-x to make the UI a little bit more modern, as well as Lightbird to add the calendar icon to the 'status bar'.
Why not using a dedicated client, such as Liferea, by default in Trisquel?
Huh, I just tried it, I must have done it wrong before, it does support tor proxies (be sure to add "socks5://" in the proxy path otherwise it will try it as an HTTP proxy).
There's two reasons I will probably stick with Seamonkey as my RSS reader though. 1 Seamonkey supports browser plugins, I can in theory change the RSS reader however I desire (even though I actually don't). 2, and far more important to me, Seamonkey stores all RSS feeds as regular mbox files, Liferea stores them in an sqlite database.