White Star going forward...

[dbsoft]

I am going to be out of town for a few day and when I get back I'll be working on getting the next version of White Star ready, since Pale Moon should be releasing on this coming Tuesday.   But I wanted to put this idea out there after a private conversation with someone...

The original plan was to keep White Star completely aligned with Pale Moon, just continuing the Mac releases I had been doing.  However since the Pale Moon team by ripping the Mac code out of the source base immediately has forced me to fork the code base... therefore since I have to do tons of work with each release picking and choosing what commits to include which to skip... I have no reason to follow the Pale Moon teams choices completely.

With that in mind, White Star is for the former Pale Moon Mac users, what would be best for you all...

Are there any ways you want White Star to diverge from Pale Moon?

Things that have been discussed were putting the old Dual System back in allowing unmodified Firefox extensions... enabling some experimental options that Pale Moon has disabled by default. 

Please post your ideas here... and why you want/need them.  If you don't want something that someone else has suggested... please let me know and why you don't want it. 

If a consensus can't be reached I might release two versions... one that follows Pale Moon as closely as possible and an experimental version with these other options included.   

Not sure if I will be able to incorporate the changes for the Tuesday release or not, but if there is a set of changes people want I might release an update later in the month with the changes.

Brian

[darksidekevin]

Although using Big Sur on one machine, I have others effectively running much older OS's. So for me it's mainly about having a decent browser that works right back to Lion. I know parrot geeks Firefox legacy does this, but having the option to switch browsers sometimes is a benefit. I'm now using white Star as default on all my mac's. That probably doesn't tell you what to leave in or out, but it's what I'm looking for.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

I don't see any reason to diverge from Pale Moon Prime. I mean, I would be using Pale Moon right now if I wasn't stuck on a Mac. Forget the speed and low RAM useage, I've gotten used to the extensions too.

I don't believe it is right to create a brand new browser. There is already plenty of choices:
– Firefox, for those "freedom lovers" ignorant of what Mozilla stands for now, or don't care
– Waterfox, for those who do, but don't want to run away from Mozilla too far
– Pale Moon, which exists and you all know that
– Chromium, for those not wanting Google's botnet, but still okay with Google controlling how they use the web
– Safari, which works I guess
– Edge, which is not all that edgy
– Brave, which some people use I guess
– Vivaldi, which some people don't like I guess
– Otter (for Linux and Windows), which is like a sapling in between trees, but I feel has a bright future before it

Removing White Star from Pale Moon further is like Isle of Man declaring complete independence from the UK. Which it CAN do, but it is just not practical.

[Goodydino]

I like White Star the way it is.  I would certainly miss the Pale Moon extensions and themes, so I think they should remain enabled.

[dbsoft]

Not sure people are completely understanding what I was saying... not saying go far from it, but if many people don't like Pale Moon removing Firefox compatibility.. I could just leave that change out..... not saying anything drastic. Just thought I'd give the users of White Star some input into it.

[KlarkKentThe3rd]

If you can leave the support in, please do.

What could also be useful is having an easy to do guide of porting extensions.

[noobsoftware]

WebRTC support and performance improvements. Performance improvements will of course come with time when UXP/Pale Moon is developed further but i still find some animations don't perform as well in White Star as in my now defunct basilisk build. Most animations seem on par but for example an animation an extension i developed called Silver has a tab sidebar that appears in the page, and it lags a bit when toggling it in White Star. I don't really know if that's something that is even possible to improve from the macOS side or if it's totally dependent on the UXP/Pale Moon code but if it were possible it would be cool. Because White Star is only slightly laggy on my mac in some hardcore animations where as Safari displays them without lag. Though it may be unrealistic to expect White Star to be completely on par with Safari performance-wise it would be cool if it were, as White Star is the superior browser in many ways.

Slight correction: None of the animations i have tested are sluggish on Mojave, only on Big Sur.

[realmdee]

Keeping White Star compatible with OS X 10.9.5 as I am using White Star to keep my older mac chugging along, and adding back compatibility for compatible Firefox add-ons that are no longer being updated and retaining the Firefox compatibility mode as some web sites brake with out it enabled.

[Goodydino]

I am using some old Firefox extensions with Pale Moon information added to install.rdf. So far, they still work. It would be nice to have them continue working.

[dbsoft]

The two basic requests have been Firefox extensions and WebRTC... I'm trying to help with a Waterfox Classic bug right now, but when I finish that I'll do a build with Firefox extensions and WebRTC using the newer SDK... and see what people think or if it causes any issues.