Anyone want to test new build of Pale Moon 28 rc for Buster?

[stevepusser]

Edit: tests are over, so the repo was deleted. Thanks for the feedback!

WARNING: The new version will make your Pale Moon profile incompatible with earlier releases, so you should back up the hidden ".moonchild productions" folder (yes, they have a space in the folder name ) in your home folder if you should ever need to go back. Of course...you're backing everything up already, anyway, amiright?

The developers told me that it has experimental support for the default gcc-8 in Buster, but I'd like to see how stable it is when built with it before I force it to build with gcc-7 instead. You can manually download the debs from a temporary build repo I set up: https://software.opensuse.org//download ... e=palemoon This is progress from earlier PM releases that were only stable when built against gcc 4.7-4.9.

Thanks in advance!

[cds60601]

Nice work, Steve!

On install (not adding repo)

mars:/home/dillydilly/Downloads# dpkg -i palemoon_28.0.0~rc1~repack-1_amd64.deb
Selecting previously unselected package palemoon.
(Reading database ... 164987 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack palemoon_28.0.0~rc1~repack-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking palemoon (28.0.0~rc1~repack-1) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of palemoon:
palemoon depends on ffmpeg | libav-tools; however:
Package ffmpeg is not installed.
Package libav-tools is not installed.

But, after installing ffmpeg, all seemed to install fine.

Quick run-through and all seems good. Imports of bookmarks are good.
The start page is kinda neat - something I myself would not use, but is nice to have.
I also love that you are using duckduck for the default search engine
Quick question - is there a way to import passwords?
But so far, it looks good.

Cheers
Chris

[stevepusser]

Nice work, Steve! Let me ask you this, if I wanted to test this out, would there be a need to change out my current Firefox prof?

Cheers
Chris

No, it only makes changes in the hidden .moonchild productions folder, not ~/.mozilla, so won't affect Firefox.

[cds60601]

Nix the password import question - I just ran through the FAQ. May need to look into this.

Chris

[stevepusser]

Nix the password import question - I just ran through the FAQ. May need to look into this.

Chris

DDG for the search engine is built into the default profile for palemoon--us packagers aren't supposed to mess with that at all if we want to use the "Pale Moon" branding--otherwise we would have to use some other name like "New Moon". The older versions will crash pretty frequently if they were build on something like gcc-6.3 in Stretch, so I had to build gcc-4.9 in my Stretch repo just for it to build against and run crash-free. I wouldn't have to do that for gcc-7 in Buster for this new version, but hopefully it's going to work with gcc-8. I was told this new version builds against gcc-4.9, 5, 6, and 7, with experimental support for gcc-8.

You can also use apt or gdebi to install local deb files; they'll automatically pull in missing dependencies...though looking at Firefox, I wonder if all it needs is a version of libavcodec instead of ffmpeg, which does pull in libavcodec as a dependency.

[cds60601]

Got ya. Yeah, all working well over here with my Buster (updated today).
Nice work.

Chris

[stevepusser]

Thanks for the feedback! The devs tell me they'd prefer PM to build on gcc-7 for Buster until the gcc-8 support is finalized in 28.1.0, so I've just uploaded "-2" sources to the OBS repo that'll have Buster do that. I was also told that a version of libavcodec is all that's needed for multimedia playback, so I made that change in the depends, too.

[bedtime]

Pale Moon appears to run just fine, but I will not continue to use it, and I can see why it's not in Debian's repos.

It lacks privacy:

Pale Moon sells my data. This could be seen as soon as the app loaded; I saw a duckduckgo page with Pale Moon integration and info about how my info will be sold: http://www.palemoon.org/privacy.shtml

About 10 years ago, I switched to Linux (from Windows) to get away from this very type of intrusion. And I now use Falkon or Epiphany browser (in Debian repos) because I trust that my info isn't being sold by those apps.

I'm really sorry to be so negative, but so far as I've seen, this is nothing more than a rebranded Firefox with the ultimate goal of making money, and it seems to be an inferior product to boot.

As is, I hope it never makes it into deb's repos.

[stevepusser]

I'm looking at the page, and I can't find the parts where PM says it'll sell your data. I see this:

Search and search suggestions (provided by your chosen search provider): When you perform a web search from the address bar or search bar, your query and standard web browser information will be sent to the search provider to service your request.
Search suggestions is a feature to help you to find out common phrases that other people have searched for. These search suggestions are offered by your search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) and not by Pale Moon. If you enable this feature, and your chosen search engine supports suggestions, Pale Moon may send the terms you type in the address bar or search bar to your chosen search engine provider to retrieve suggestions.
How this data is handled is governed by the applicable Privacy Policy of your chosen search engine provider.

and this:

Data disclosure to third parties
Data about your visits is not transmitted to any third parties. Any backup and inspection of such data will be restricted to transfer over encrypted connections to prevent eavesdropping.

In principle, we never disclose visitor data to third parties, including our partners. An exception to this non-disclosure principle is if your visit or behavior is either suspect of abuse or criminal activity (i.e.: if you perform misconduct, we may report you to the relevant authorities), or if such disclosure is mandated by a court order that is valid in the country where either the domain owner or the hosting server resides (i.e.: we will not obstruct justice, but will not volunteer this information unless legally required to do so).
We may also disclose this information in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to third parties to prevent fraud).

I must have missed the part where they are selling your data for filthy lucre. I'd appreciate it if you'd highlight that for me.

[cds60601]

I agree Steve. I opted not to reply since I have been known to overlook things before (lol).
That being said, I read through the privacy page and I didn't come away with what the Op took away with.
Then I looked into the FAQ page and found other information that perhaps the Op missed.:

Is Pale Moon safe to use?
Absolutely! Pale Moon is based on the Mozilla release source code that has a large community of developers and security-aware people, next to having seen over a decade of development by now. In addition, the Pale Moon team checks and verifies any reports of issues that might impact your safety on the web. It includes, among other things, protection against dangerous add-ons, automatic checking for updates of add-ons, password protection (master password), website-identity information in the address bar, and private browsing.

Pale Moon's development includes a critical evaluation of potential security risks which are addressed in each new release, with on occasion a point-release for critical issues that is released as soon as possible after the security issue comes to light.

And in the same FAQ under the "What are the differences with Firefox?" heading:

Also please note that Pale Moon has not run rampant with its releases and even though there is a big gap in version number between the two, you should never assume Pale Moon is somehow an "outdated Firefox". Pale Moon is a completely separate product with its own roadmap, direction, versioning and release schedule, unlike all other "Firefox-based" browsers out there.

Perhaps the Op just missed some of this information or perhaps my understanding is some what different from what the Op projected.

In any even, I hope all goes well for you and the development team.

Cheers
Chris

[sunrat]

Just installed on siduction. Works fine in a 2 website test.

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$ uname -r
4.17.11-towo.1-siduction-amd64
$ gcc --version
gcc (Debian 8.2.0-1) 8.2.0

[debiman]

http://www.palemoon.org/privacy.shtml

i think they are required to post this info because of new regulations.
to me it looks like what every browser does, and i know most (if not all) of these things can be switched off in palemoon settings.
surely firefox does the same things, and it is in debian repositories.
if you care to elaborate, i'd love to see falkon's or epiphany's privacy policy.

[bedtime]

Okay, I was wrong; I spoke too soon about the selling of info. I am sorry.

I should mention that I'm from the 70's—when people actually had some privacy, so I've grown up expecting it; I think many 70s children have a little Stallman in them, and I see no issue with this.

Pale Moon does seem to collect info and hold it, and the Pale Moon site mentions about reporting criminal activities, which may or may not be a factor to those using torrent services. They also store the IP address and can identify their users. And while their devs might not be on course with Firefox's agenda (a good thing, IMO), the FF code it is built on concerns me. I didn't see any of this on Falkon's website. Perhaps this is because they just don't store cookies—a plus, in my mind.

I've tried Ungoogled and Waterfox, and I find it difficult to trust that they've purged all the privacy-inhibiting code. Falkon seems clean by default. I believe Epiphany can be easily made to be quite private via deactivating addons, Google's safe browsing, and the FF's sync; but even Epiphany seemed to use cookies on its site, which was sad to find out.

Anyways, sorry for the bluntness of my rant. If I could be assured that Pale Moon was not sending my info away, I'd like to try it, but that is a castle in the air at this point.

Also, I see other browser companies such as Brave Browser that are rather deceptive to their users in how they operate and so my trust has been abused.

[stevepusser]

Just installed on siduction. Works fine in a 2 website test.

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$ uname -r
4.17.11-towo.1-siduction-amd64
$ gcc --version
gcc (Debian 8.2.0-1) 8.2.0

You might have installed the gcc-7 version I had the new -2 revision build for Buster yesterday. It has a couple additions to the build code that test if it's building on Debian Buster or Ubuntu Cosmic and force gcc-7 builds there. (Cosmic not available in the OBS yet, it's just in case someone else borrows my code for a PPA or builds it locally). The developers are confident with their present gcc-7 support.

If you want to build my packages on a Debian derivative that doesn't report "buster" or "cosmic" from

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lsb_release -cs

it will then use the default gcc for the release. So, for example, Sparky Linux or Siduction reports a different name, you'd want to add that to the list in debian/rules if you want to have it also build with gcc-7.

Edit: I see that there's now an official release here: https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/releases

I'll have it build on the main Pale Moon OBS here, but will leave it unpublished and invisible until Pale Moon officially announces it, then take down the test repo in the first post here.

[sunrat]

You might have installed the gcc-7 version...

you're right, gcc versions 5,6,7 and 8 are all installed here.

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apt policy palemoon
palemoon:
  Installed: 28.0.0~rc1~repack-2