I’m giving up on Palemoon

I like to think of myself as a patient man, and a loyal man. When I find something I like, I tend to stick with it, even as it slowly corrodes from within, leaving behind a husk of its former self. This certainly explains why, up until now, I’ve quietly put up with the many “quirks” of the Palemoon web-browser as it fell deeper and deeper into disrepair, and conversely explains why I even started using the browser in the first place.

Now, anyone that’s spent any length of time in my presence has probably been subjected to one of my rants about how Firefox 3.6 (and earlier) was the pinnacle of web-browsing, and everything past that has lead us further and further astray. It was this attitude that convinced me to give Vivaldi a try around it’s launch in 2016, with its promise to bring us back to the golden age of the web. I gave it a go, and while it didn’t gel with me (mainly due to the devs at the time showing outright contempt for anyone wanting to load new tabs in the background as default, you know, like 98% of all web browsers), it did get me nostalgic for the time when web browsers were still good, and this led me to seek out alternatives, and eventually find Palemoon.

Palemoon advertised itself as a throwback to the late-2000s, and that was enough to get me to climb aboard and adopt it as my default browser, and for the first few years, I was pretty happy. I wasn’t blown away by the performance, but it did as a requested of it, and preserved features I personally enjoyed (such as customisable search bars). But over time, performance started to dwindle, and I grew disillusioned with the browser.

The first sign something was wrong was a couple of years ago, when I found myself trying to read an article on IGN, and found the page contained numerous massive white spaces, several times the height of my screen. These occurred under the title, in-between certain paragraphs, everywhere. This should have been a red flag, but seeing as I rarely visit IGN, I didn’t really care, and besides, surely that’s their fault, not the fault of my browser, right?

After that, things slowly got worse. Fandom wikis started loading and responding incredibly slow, which, again, I put down to being an error on their end, considering the amount of ads the site tries to bombard you with. Then most non-youtube video players stopped functioning, and it became clear that no, the problem was on my computer.

Being the stubborn person I am, I dug in my heals and decided to make do. I started using chrome as a secondary browser to load the troublesome sites, and went on with my day. I think at the time I blamed Google and Chromium (I still do) as their dominance over web standards↗ has been well known to cause problems and break the web↗ especially for non-chromium users↗ for years now. Using a non-chromium browser made me feel like I was using the web as it had always been intended; available to anyone, accessed on your terms, rather than those of a shady mega-corp.

Sadly, the past month or two have represented the final straw. Palemoon now barely functions when it comes to rendering or interacting with the modern web. Youtube videos regularly crash when trying to skip forwards or backwards (and sometimes during standard playback, just to keep you on your toes.) Scrolling through facebook felt like scrolling through treacle, and sometimes notifications wouldn’t load at all. Possible the worst was reddit, which was beyond a joke. Look at the following screengrab of a reddit comment section I just took from Palemoon.

That’s right, Palemoon can no longer display posters user-names, replacing them all with a full stop. This is beyond pathetic. Trying to post a comment is also difficult, and if you attempt to copy-and-paste any text then the whole thing seizes up. As a bonus, all threads now have to be opened in a new tab, as if you try and open them in the same tab, all you get is a blank screen. Marvellous.

There are two things I don’t understand I don’t understand about this situation. The first is the obvious “What are the devs even doing?” question, as it’s not like Palemoon is abandonware or anything, it seems to be updated once or twice a month, as you’d expect, but what’s the point in keeping it updated if it doesn’t actually work correctly anyway?

And the second question is, who is even still using it enough to justify keeping it going? The forums seem lively enough (through which I can glean that the issue with reddit is unlikely to be fixed any time soon, same as issues with some banking sites) so enough people obviously believe in Palemoon’s mission enough to stick with it and implement workarounds.

So, I guess it really is just me that’s fed up with it. A non-conformist among the non-conformists. Huh.

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