Now I can add Waterfox to the list of browsers to install and check out.

Thanks for the info !

Seamonkey is the unique one: The successor to the original Swiss Army Knife for the web (browser, mail, calendar, even a HTML editor, though the last one was a bit lame, last time I tried).

You forgot the IRC client, Chatzilla.

I'm using Seamonkey for mail and browsing every working day.

Isn't Seamonkey the ONLY open HTML editor out there? As far as I can determine?

At the risk of starting arguments, emacs is a perfectly good HTML editor.

If one wants to spend more time configuring their editor rather than using it.

ah, that reminds me of a text I saw a few years ago re. one particular brand of e-book readers: how to add an e-book to your e-reader in 42 simple steps.

was it an e-book ?

*cue Real code monkeys use Vim comment*.

Notepad++ is surprisingly competent for pure html.

Notepad++ is surprisingly competent for pure html.

the question, then, is "is there a native notepad++ for linux and mac?" ;)

Not really. There is BBEdit and its decent. But it converting to it from notepad++ will make you cry.

Yes - vim

I use Code-Fork, the version of VS-Code that doesn't have the proprietary MS stuff.

Ugh...Emacs. That tool is the equivalent of putting spinners and a spoiler on a shopping trolley. I know peopleove it and it is a good tool but it's massive overkill for HTML and quite a few other languages.

...I use nano personally for a large amount of PHP, HTML, Python, JS, C etc...if it's a complex project I use Atom. You just don't need anything with tons of bells and whistles

Literally any text editor is fine for that matter.

For stuff like PHP and Python you need at most, three terminal windows. One to run the built in web server / a debugger, one to edit the code and one to run the code.

Emacs as an HTML editor? Whatever floats your boat, I suppose. Although _exactly_ why the unwashed heathen masses don't bow down to the power of the One True Editor, Vim, escapes me*

*Have realised on occasion that I'm busy changing things with vim ... running in a WSL session in a VSCode terminal ... ho-hum!

Too bad the only Add On that works for use nowadays is UBlock Origin Classic.

I used Palemoon for a while, couple years at least(gave some donations too). I held on to Firefox 37? I think it was for as long as I could, tried Waterfox at the time, none of my extensions were compatible(this was years ago). Then I found Palemoon, and it worked with everything.

I had Palemoon as my "main" browser (excluding internal work stuff which runs on a VM), and I used Seamonkey as a dedicated browser for Logicmonitor SaaS monitoring(no real reason other than I just wanted to keep that seperate from browser restarts or whatever).

Fast forward to earlier this year(?), Palemoon put out an update that killed my extensions, every single one was shot down as incompatible. Looking at my /usr/local where I keep my browsers, it was probably Palemoon 29. Palemoon 28 was working fine.

I had been using those extensions, some for over a decade without updates, they were simple, and worked fine, perhaps they were obscure. Extensions such as Live HTTP Headers(miss that one a LOT), Cloud to Butt(made me laugh, miss that a lot too), Old location bar, Prefbar(miss it), RememberPass, Remove It Permanently(miss a lot), Save Link in folder, Tab utilities fixed, Zoom page. Looking at Palemoon 29 now and it lists all of those as incompatible(with the only option given to remove them). At the time I tried finding replacements, found some for other extensions but could not find any for things like Prefbar, Live HTTP headers for example.

Anyway I came across the forum post which highlighted the changes. So Palemoon removed the last reasons I had for wanting to use it (earlier they removed the cookie management that Firefox had withdrawn years earlier, I had more than 10k sites in my firefox/palemoon sqlite cookie permissions db). I understand the reasoning, I'm not mad at them. Just sad to see an end of an era for browsing for me.

So at least for the time being I went back to Firefox ESR and the only addons I have are Tab session manager, ublock origin(never used it till recently), and zoom page. It's certainly a lot faster than Palemoon though I'd take my old extensions back over the performance any day.

I now run 2 firefox instances in linux in different user accounts, one is dedicated to outlook web access and atlassian products for work, the other is my regular browser(I keep the UIs/themes different to tell them apart, and they run on different virtual desktops, of which I use 16). Then still have seamonkey, AND still have another firefox ESR in a windows VM for internal work stuff. I switched off google search to bing several years ago(just because), and noticed when using bing and outlook web access it kept me logged into bing, which I did not want(if I logged out it would log me in again). So I introduced the new firefox instance (on a different account run via sudo) dedicated to OWA and similar work things. Configuring pulse audio to work with these firefox instances running under sudo wasn't easy(had to configure PA for network which isn't the default many head scratching moments at the time trying to figure out why audio wasn't working). Not that I need audio often in my browser just a few times a week at most.

I have read bad things about recent firefox UI changes (those haven't hit ESR yet I don't think), but maybe I will switch again when they do.

My laptop has 48G of ram, I should only need no more than 16G, currently using 12(including a VM that is allowed to use 10GB, though guest is using 4GB). I was "forced" to upgrade to 32G 2-3 years ago because of newer linux swapping bugs which would cause it to swap like crazy when I still had a few gigs of ram left. System would be unresponsive(even with SSD). Older laptop did the same workload with 8G of ram that newer one needed 16 for just to account for newer versions of software. Upgraded again to 48 for no reason, probably will upgrade to 64GB once prices come down a bit again for no reason.

Side note on linux swapping/memory issues I have been tracking what are to me massive memory leaks in linux 5.4 and 5.8(Ubuntu 20), vs 4.4 (Ubuntu 16) this year. Really annoying. I went as far as to install the Ubuntu 16 kernel on a few test Ubuntu 20 systems so the ONLY thing different was the kernel for the exact same workload(systems behind a load balancer), and the memory leaks slowly over time, eventually swapping, then have to reboot. I sort of gave up trying to find a real solution it's just easier to reboot every once in a while. The leaks are in the kernfs_node_cache and buffer_head caches (flushing the caches has no effect on the overall trend). Been using linux for just about 25 years and have never come across this kind of situation before. I see the same trend on another system running backups over NFS, I more than tripled the memory from 2G to 6G and it still swaps every night(I have crons that clear the swap every hour and flush buffers). It never swapped on linux 4.4 or earlier going back the past 6 years.

I read Waterfox was acquired by an Ad company? or something else kind of shady I don't recall off hand, maybe that info was wrong but kind of surprised me when I read that post. I never used it for more than 10 minutes years ago since it didn't work with any of my extensions at the time.

> Configuring pulse audio to work with these firefox instances running under sudo wasn't easy

huh! I use a sudo based scheme to setup different firefox instances (one for every site I need a login for, and one for others; currently have 11 such userids)

only one of them needs sound, and it was a simple matter of adding that user to the group "audio"; never had to mess with PA networking

Fully agree that Mozilla seem to enjoy doing their utmost to alienate long-standing users. I used Firefox as my primary browser for many years, but migrated to Pale Moon after the awful Australis makeover came along. It wasn't just the "Chrome-clone" theme that alienated people incidentally, it was that Mozilla also removed a lot of customisation options with Australis and locked many of the UI elements in place.

Since then, every single makeover seems to have focused on stripping out customisation and extensibility that used to be Firefox's USP. With fewer and fewer reasons to use Firefox over a Chromium-based browser, it's little wonder that their market share continues to slide. Meanwhile, forks such as Pale Moon and Waterfox have largely retained market share because they've done their best to retain the unique selling points that Firefox used to have.

There's still one OVERWHELMING reason: It's not a Chromium based browser...

Monocultures are bad and while there's definitely been changes to Firefox that I've disliked but had to adapt to, it's still my daily browser. I'm a tab whore and I still think TreeStyleTabs is one of the best implementations of side-bar tabs. It's a no-brainer for today's widescreen displays.

"There's still one OVERWHELMING reason: It's not a Chromium based browser..."

But neither is Pale Moon.

I agree, but for most people the rendering engine isn't really a concern. Interface, speed, compatibility, flexibility all tend to be attributes that matter more.

Don't get me wrong, for the more technical minded person you're absolutely right. However the typical geek that cares about rendering engines is also usually the same geek that likes the very customisability that Firefox keeps clamping down on...

I'll put my flamesuit on, but those technically-minded typical geeks, also seem nowadays...to be pretty damn rigid. They frankly seem unable, or worse unwilling, to try new things and adapt to changes. They believe that their way is the one 'correct' way, changes be damned.

Yes, sometimes change is for the worse. Yes, change is hard. But change is a constant of life itself.

Unless a change majorly, and I mean majorly , breaks something, I personally have much, much better things to do than fixate on the constantly changing aspects of technology and sit to fester over it. I look at the changes, adapt, get over it, and move on with the more important things my mind needs to process. For too many of these damn 'geeks', a change to the Windows Start menu is reasons for war, how dare you change because you CAN!! I'll have to relearn a BRAND NEW LOOK!

Blasphemy!!

I will have to take a look at the Firefox alternatives noted in this article. I have stuck with Firefox through the changes, sometimes indeed frustrating ones, but as I only depend upon NoScript, with UBlock and Privacy Badger seen as less-important though otherwise welcome additions, Firefox's changes haven't bothered me enough to seek alternatives.

Hmm yes and no. Does the change break or remove functionality that a user needs/enjoys/makes use of? To take your Start Menu as an example.I've moaned about the Win 10 version, because it makes managing it quite tricky and I like a simplified menu -I use software that I might only fire up once or twice a year and which frequently has a bloody stupid name that I can't immediately remember. I need to be able to group programmes and cut out crap entries so that I can find what I want. (e.g. Macrium Reflect - though I do use that one a lot, or Belarc Advisor, or Balabolka etc etc)

Win 11 sounds like it's be a deal breaker for me on that score alone. And a letter printed by PC Pro a few months back said the same thing from some one else- presumably the editors chose to publish that one because it rang a chord.

Just because we can learn a new interface doesn't mean we must do, especially when the change does not improve productivity.

"For too many of these damn 'geeks', a change to the Windows Start menu is reasons for war, how dare you change because you CAN!! I'll have to relearn a BRAND NEW LOOK!"

You can't seriously be advocating change for the sake of change. Check out our new model SUV, it has the brake on the right and the accelerator on the left! Because CHANGE! Don't complain like a geek, just be cool and get used to it like me.

Killing the start button was really, really expensive for business and the return on investment was a big fat zero.

I didn't mind the interface change in Australis. What put me off it was the loss of core functionality. I'm not talking about extensions, I'm talking about whole pages that simply refused to render. They would, e.g., get stuck while loading some frame, and the central two-thirds of the page simply remained blank.

A couple of releases later they seemed to have fixed that, but why did it ever ship in the first place?

The comment about copying Chrome is very much on the mark. Just like Gnome trying to copy the feel of Windows, copying someone else is trying to compete on someone else's home pitch by their rules. It's doomed to lose. You can never be "a better Windows than Windows" because Windows defines what Windows is, and you can never be a better Chrome than Chrome because Chrome defines what Chrome is. Success comes from doing YOUR OWN thing and dancing to YOUR OWN drummer.

Mozilla forgot that. Firefox set out its own turf, then abandoned it to follow Chrome in some kind of vague hope that becoming more like Chrome would increase its slumping market share, failing to understand that by doing so, Mozilla was walking away from any reason to use Firefox. I'm one of those who switched to Pale Moon, but I abandoned it recently due to Pale Moon too ceasing to support most classic Firefox addons (including ALL of the most important ones I used), more and more sites not functioning properly in Pale Moon, and — to be honest — the incredibly toxic developer culture at Moonchild Productions, with the developers frequently screaming invective and abuse at people who are just looking for help or even TRYING TO help. The day came when Pale Moon had nothing **left** to offer me that was worth putting up with that level of abuse.

I'm still a Firefox user, but many of their decisions have been unfathomable to me. Open Source projects need to LISTEN TO THEIR USERS or they are missing half the point of it and stand the chance of devolving into a Tower of babel-like Goo of random forks with the whole being less than the sum of its parts. We are all weary of the Microsoft credo of "We'll change it on our whim and you can like it or lump it."

And (just to nitpick) why do the latest releases of FF not have a home button enabled by default? You can add it back or bookmark your favorite pages, but really? And whose 'artistic' vision was it to have the floating tabs?

Open Source projects need to LISTEN TO THEIR USERS ...

You'd think so, but it is alas a hallmark of Open Source that developers don't listen to their users, or see any reason why they should. After all, if users don't like something they can just modify the source, can't they?

One example from many. The Anki flashcard system is quite nice, but one of the most frequently requested features is the ability to reset a card deck and run through it again. Perhaps for reinforcement, perhaps after a spell away - "why" doesn't matter; it's something users want. The developer(s), however, simply say that nobody should want to do that. Screw 'em.

There was a similar incident with Firefox a few years ago that drove me to Pale Moon. They removed the option to clear the "Downloaded Files" list (and ONLY the downloaded files list) on browser exit, instead replacing it with something that cleared the browsing history (or something like that, it's been a few years...). Numerous of us users complained in Bugzilla, but were told we didn't have a good use-case for re-instating the fuctionality. Even after we pointed out that all they had to do was call the click() event for the "Clear Downloads" button, we were still told "No. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.". The devs were so haughty about it, I quit using FF (had been a user since Phoenix) and went to Pale Moon.

Another in agreement here. It seems to be endemic in many larger Open Source projects that the developers know best, go away or write the code yourself. I even did this a few times, and submitted patches. They were either rejected as "not in their vision", or the new function was accepted but completely rewritten in a kakhanded way that made things worse than before. I wasn't asking for a major rewrite of anything, just a small change that was restricted to a single file. And the changes to UIs, removal of settings, and the simplifications they feel obliged to push down on us users is infuriating.

the simplifications they **FEEL** obliged to push down on us users is infuriating.

emphasis mine. They certainly are NOT THINKING, that's for sure!!

@Unicornpiss

Probably that total wanker who was well on his way to destroying Apple (until they finally got rid of him) "Sir" Jony Ive.

No probably more like Lennart Poettering who is so up himself, he wont even reports of bugs if he thinks its due to you not using systemd in the way he envisioned.

> not using systemd in the way he envisioned

Or using any *other* software in the way his latest patches expect.

There was an incident with kernel cmdline (debug flag? don't remember) where Linus had to come down hard on this jackass and his minions, if I recall, because the then-latest systemd prevented something that was working before, but these people tried to claim the other guys need to change.

Yeah that was rambling, but this was some years ago so I don't quite recall the details.

Great. Lots of versions of Firefox. That will allow it to compete with Chrome, Edge and Safari just as effectively as having dozens of Linux distros have led to triumph over Windows and MacOS on the desktop.

I've more or less dropped Firefox since their crappy major update in the summer. Vivaldi on Linux seems very nice, though it has some quirks: it occasionally hammers the disk with constant reads to and writes from its "Top Sites" files (a Chromium bug, apparently) and doesn't hide the fact that it's Adblocking as well as UBlock does. Other than that it's much faster than Firefox, much more stable than Firefox and, unlike Firefox, works with my bank and work websites.

Totally agree. The last thing I want is another 6 browsers to test my code on. I fucking hate choice, because it means I have to make decisions about something I couldn't care less about. I just want to look at cat pictures, I don't care what fucking colour the tab bar is.

Thunderbird enjoys regular releases and remains a best-of-breed tool.

Never got on with Thunderbird myself so I can't concur with that. But does have the advantage of being cross-platform.

As for Waterfox, if it's now based on FF 78, I assume this means it using the Quantum engine as well. The reasons for dropping XUL when it happened were more than sound: a very unwieldy codebase and potential for exploitation by malicious add-ons.

However, I don't really think that Mozilla could do much about the decline in market share given the market dominance of Chrome and users' inertia to changing default software, especially on mobile platforms which are now dominant. The number of those that realy want something different is probably pretty small but maybe enough if Vivaldi is anything to go by.

But, personally, despite some irksome UI decisions (today's version wants to give me more colours for some reason) I find the Quantum based Firefox faster and more stable than its predecessor.

I'm sorry, Vivaldi is a Chrome skin. Anything based on Blink is the work of the devil.

Indeed. While the article describes the forks as thriving (I'm sure they are in relative terms). I imagine they've got a fraction of the market share of Firefox. And I don't imagine they'd stifle the decline if they became the main Firefox release. Because most of what is happening to market share is not down to Firefox's decisions but down to Google and Apple and the shape of the market. And there's no magic exhaust port that can be used on those Death Stars.

not down to Firefox's decisions

My reasons for abandoning Firefox are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT down to Firefox's decisions. They're the ones that dropped the features and functionality I needed and drove me away.

Features that have disappeared:

* Ability to turn off javascript

* Ability to not use tabs

* Activity indicator

* User profile manager

* Tab groups

* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs)

* Sound (now PulseAudio only, no ALSA)

* RSS reader

* "Save tabs and quit"

* Ability to export history

* FTP

* Ability to turn off javascript - Use NoScript? Perhaps the bigger problem really is that so little of today's web will work without at least a minimum of JavaScript enabled (and even sites that did, with mature codebases, sadly seem to end up acquiring mandatory JavaScript somewhere, as baby so-called developers who only seem to know how to shovel-load JavaScript libraries rewrite newer bits)?

* Ability to not use tabs - There's nothing stopping you opening new windows, although, yes, I suppose we are stuck with the tab bar visible even if there is only one 'tab' in it, which is somewhat annoying if you are short of vertical screen space.

* Tab groups - Wait, I thought you said you didn't want to use tabs? ;-)

* User profile manager - Still there, try: firefox --new-instance -P or equivalent. I use several profiles: default, financial stuff, and a tainted one (delete everything on exit) if I have to visit a Google site or something similarly icky, etc

* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs) - I'll grant you that, but at least there are various add-ons which help…

* RSS reader - Sadly the media got slaveringly excited about Twitter and the like instead, and (mostly) lost interest in RSS. Not that that was a good reason for Firefox to remove the existing capability.

* "Save tabs and quit" - Do you mean "Save session on exit" (still there) or something else?

* Ability to export history - I have to say that I didn't know that had been a feature. You can still export/import bookmarks, though.

Agree.

I should add that there's nothing wrong with removing core features and pushing them into addons if they're reasonably similar. Reducing core is always a good thing.

* Ability to turn off javascript - Use NoScript?

You could even try the very tiny [1]JavaScript Toggle On and Off extension

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/javascript-toggler/

Mine too, but the people on this site really aren't representative of the overall user base

My friend, did you not realise this is an IT site?

If you include the number of people we install it for then I think you'll find we probably account for quite a substantial majority of the userbase.

You know, since one user here can be doing between hundreds and thousands of installs across our desktop estates, leaving aside issues such as recommendations to home users, and them picking something familiar to what they are used to at work.

non-UI features can be deal with via plugins.

It's the " MODERN " UI that irritates me... and they somewhat-recently did it to THUNDERBIRD as well. I used to see actual dialog boxes in settings for T-bird (FreeBSD ports from a couple of years ago, version 60-something - still worked with the retro UI plugin). Not any more. Apparently, THIS is what happens when they " continue to develop " it.

Re Thunderbird: I froze updating it and remain on 68.12.

Why? because after that they made sharing a profile across different PC's impossible - each time it "updated" in created a new empty profile unique to that PC.

When I use 4 different PC's here (for varying reasons) to access to same 12 odd email addresses (only 1 at a time of course) I want all the passwords, email rules etc to be the SAME.

I'll take it all back if they have fixed it but somehow I doubt it.

I think the reasons for dropping XUL were Mozilla let it rot. Mozilla didn't produce much XUL documentation and barely any for XULRunner. In turn people had difficulty using XUL and XULRunner, and those small developer numbers self-justified Mozilla's lack of interest in promoting its own project.

Waterfox Classic is based on FF56, just before Quantum. They're updating it but it's having trouble with more websites now, e.g. IBMs. But I'm in no doubt that Mozilla could have kept XUL and XULRunner going as well if a small team, a one-man band during some periods, have kept Waterfox Classic going.

Mozilla spend time cutting features and futzing about with the UI in their flagship project and don't support other projects properly - FirefoxOS for phones has turned into KaiOS and FirefoxOS for TVs is being maintained by Panasonic, so they were viable projects. The fact that there are still features to cut in Firefox shows how powerful it was.