We crosspost this posting from LawPundit as a public service
to people who do a lot of Internet research work.
to people who do a lot of Internet research work.
Pale Moon might be the alternative browser solution we have been looking for!
We are generally always a few steps ahead of the pack, except in the case of browsers where we have been very unhappy with Mozilla Firefox ever since they started ignoring the wishes of users -- users who originally migrated from IE because they did not want to be told what to do, but rather wanted to customize their browser any way they wished. It is no wonder that Firefox keeps losing market share. You do not survive in the digital world (or the real business world either) by ignoring user wishes -- not over the long term.
Starting with so-called Firefox 29 "Australis" things got totally out of whack and we had been using Firefox 28 since then -- until today -- because it was the last version of Firefox that still could run TabMixPlus which allowed us to have our tabs below the address bar and our other tab bars.
We sometimes use the computer for internet research 18 hours a day and we are FAST at what we do, probably much faster than anyone in your home or office. Hence, we want and need that lower tab location because we want what WE are doing to be in the immediate foreground and closest to OUR screen doings, rather than hidden above all the garble at the top of the screen.
We also want to reduce "mouse miles" -- something another errant company such as Microsoft has never understood, especially in its newest Windows and Office versions --i.e. the distance we have to push our mouse daily on the screen to get done what WE want done. LESS is more. We want less distance to travel on the screen and as few clicks as possible to get done what WE want to get done.
We don't care what other tablet and smartphone users do or want. We also have a tablet (full HD), we have a smartphone (octacore), but to get real WORK done, we use a PC, and there, time is money. NO NONSENSE. We do not want to see any of the adolescent useless stuff that dominates the handheld market. Most of it is for the kiddies. Nothing wrong with that. But that is not a graphic interface that a serious user wants to have to deal with.
Today, Firefox 28 started crashing every minute without reason -- we opened some other browsers at the same time to check, but they had no trouble, so Firefox was at fault. Who knows what they have changed out there.
That was the last straw. We had tried many alternative browsers in the past, but none of them did the job we wanted. There had to be another alternative.
AND THERE APPEARS TO BE THAT ALTERNATIVE,
though our enthusiasm must remain provisional until the browser discussed below stands the test of time. Thus far it is superb.
The browser is called PALE MOON. It is a "fork" of Mozilla Firefox 28 and a continued individual development from there which does not adopt Australis. BRILLIANT.
Among other things, it allows what appears to be -- at least it was for us -- an unproblematical lightning fast migration of your Firefox profile, although you have to download a special program to do that after you install Pale Moon. For us, the process went without a hitch, except that you have to activate your "extension" add-ons after they have been migrated.
Caveat emptor. Our applause for Pale Moon is no guarantee of suitability for you and we disclaim any and all liability for anyone switching browsers, since problems are never totally eliminated for sure and can depend on the hardware and software of any given computer system and the skills of the installer. Still, it IS ENCOURAGING!
Here are some of the features which we pass on from the PaleMoon.org site, whose logo is ""Pale Moon -- Your Browser, Your Way"
DuckDuckGo does not force your search into the region of the location of your PC, as Google does now, and which we regard to be illegal. When we enter google.com in the search bar that is what we should be given as a matter of law, and not, as currently happens, google.de. When we want google.de, we will enter that accordingly, otherwise, we want what we have entered, nothing more, and nothing less. When you buy something in a store, the clerk can not give you something else, and the same should be true for search engines.
The Wikipedia writes about DuckDuckGo as follows:
We are generally always a few steps ahead of the pack, except in the case of browsers where we have been very unhappy with Mozilla Firefox ever since they started ignoring the wishes of users -- users who originally migrated from IE because they did not want to be told what to do, but rather wanted to customize their browser any way they wished. It is no wonder that Firefox keeps losing market share. You do not survive in the digital world (or the real business world either) by ignoring user wishes -- not over the long term.
Starting with so-called Firefox 29 "Australis" things got totally out of whack and we had been using Firefox 28 since then -- until today -- because it was the last version of Firefox that still could run TabMixPlus which allowed us to have our tabs below the address bar and our other tab bars.
We sometimes use the computer for internet research 18 hours a day and we are FAST at what we do, probably much faster than anyone in your home or office. Hence, we want and need that lower tab location because we want what WE are doing to be in the immediate foreground and closest to OUR screen doings, rather than hidden above all the garble at the top of the screen.
We also want to reduce "mouse miles" -- something another errant company such as Microsoft has never understood, especially in its newest Windows and Office versions --i.e. the distance we have to push our mouse daily on the screen to get done what WE want done. LESS is more. We want less distance to travel on the screen and as few clicks as possible to get done what WE want to get done.
We don't care what other tablet and smartphone users do or want. We also have a tablet (full HD), we have a smartphone (octacore), but to get real WORK done, we use a PC, and there, time is money. NO NONSENSE. We do not want to see any of the adolescent useless stuff that dominates the handheld market. Most of it is for the kiddies. Nothing wrong with that. But that is not a graphic interface that a serious user wants to have to deal with.
Today, Firefox 28 started crashing every minute without reason -- we opened some other browsers at the same time to check, but they had no trouble, so Firefox was at fault. Who knows what they have changed out there.
That was the last straw. We had tried many alternative browsers in the past, but none of them did the job we wanted. There had to be another alternative.
AND THERE APPEARS TO BE THAT ALTERNATIVE,
though our enthusiasm must remain provisional until the browser discussed below stands the test of time. Thus far it is superb.
The browser is called PALE MOON. It is a "fork" of Mozilla Firefox 28 and a continued individual development from there which does not adopt Australis. BRILLIANT.
Among other things, it allows what appears to be -- at least it was for us -- an unproblematical lightning fast migration of your Firefox profile, although you have to download a special program to do that after you install Pale Moon. For us, the process went without a hitch, except that you have to activate your "extension" add-ons after they have been migrated.
Caveat emptor. Our applause for Pale Moon is no guarantee of suitability for you and we disclaim any and all liability for anyone switching browsers, since problems are never totally eliminated for sure and can depend on the hardware and software of any given computer system and the skills of the installer. Still, it IS ENCOURAGING!
Here are some of the features which we pass on from the PaleMoon.org site, whose logo is ""Pale Moon -- Your Browser, Your Way"
- You are able to import existing Firefox profiles with the migration tool
- You have the option to put tabs not only above, but also BELOW the address bar
- Under the Pale Moon "Status Bar" preferences at the tab option "Address Bar" you can click "Show progress in the Address Bar - and the line style that appears in that bar: none, bottom, top or fill -- try it out -- great!
- The whole philosophy of Pale Moon is what made Mozilla Firefox popular in the good old days -- USER customizability, not tyranny by software programmers or other company types trying to be important and pushing their ideas and preferences on others against their will. The USER is king.
"Pale Moon is a free and open-source web browser based on Mozilla Firefox, available for Linux, Windows, and Android, developed and distributed by Dutch developer M.C. Straver. Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox, retaining the fully customizable user interface as seen in the previous era of the Firefox browser, and focusing on the core tasks of web browsing."We might note that Pale Moon offers inter alia Google, Bing and Yahoo as the search engine of choice in the search bar (also Wikipedia, Twitter, AddThis -- the latter may have been added by our AddThis extension, we do not know since we did not check beforehand), but the default search engine is set at DuckDuckGo at https://duckduckgo.com/, so we tried it out, and it does have a SIGNIFICANT feature that may cause us to switch our search engine preferences, even though we have been a staunch Google user from the start.
"Developer(s) M.C. Straver
Initial release October 04, 2009
Development status Active
Written in C/C++
Operating system Windows, Linux, Android
Engine Gecko
Platform IA-32, x86-64
Available in 85 languages
Type Web browser
License Source code: MPL 2.0, Binaries: Proprietary freeware"
DuckDuckGo does not force your search into the region of the location of your PC, as Google does now, and which we regard to be illegal. When we enter google.com in the search bar that is what we should be given as a matter of law, and not, as currently happens, google.de. When we want google.de, we will enter that accordingly, otherwise, we want what we have entered, nothing more, and nothing less. When you buy something in a store, the clerk can not give you something else, and the same should be true for search engines.
The Wikipedia writes about DuckDuckGo as follows:
"DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yummly.
The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States, in Greater Philadelphia, and has 20 employees. The company name originates from the children's game duck, duck, goose.
Some of DuckDuckGo's code is free software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is proprietary. On 21 May 2014, DuckDuckGo launched a redesigned version that focused on smarter answers and a more refined look. The new version added often requested features such as images, local search, auto-suggest and more.
On 18 September 2014, Apple included DuckDuckGo in its Safari browser as an optional search engine. On 10 November 2014, Mozilla added DuckDuckGo as a search option to Firefox 33.1."It looks like a switch to Pale Moon and DuckDuckGo is possible. We shall see.
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