Pale Moon and why it may be a Firefox fan's only hope

Yesterday I blogged about Seamonkey, a community-run project affiliated with Mozilla. While I like Seamonkey, after googling about the upcoming deprecation of XUL based addons in Firefox (which is a bad decision because it basically makes Firefox a Chrome clone), I noticed that people were saying that Seamonkey will probably follow suit, as they are a much smaller team, and will likely follow whatever bad decision Mozilla ends up making.

In the past few years, Mozilla has been removing useful features from Firefox and announcing that it will remove even more, alienating its core userbase in the process. These days, they (Mozilla) are basically acting like children, putting their fingers in their ears shouting "Na na na na I can't hear you!" at any criticism they get.

I know in the past blog post I said I stopped using Pale Moon for "various reasons", well... I don't remember what those reasons were. Maybe it was because I thought Firefox wasn't going to go down this route.

Thankfully, Pale Moon isn't going to be deprecating the XUL based addons. (As far as I know from what I've read) It also is compatible with way more addons than Seamonkey is. It is a fork of an old version of Firefox, but modified and updated, and they forked Gecko and called it Goanna.

One downside is, that it is a much smaller team then Firefox. That could be said about any fork, though.

To install Pale Moon in Linux, you can use the Pale Moon installer. That is what I am currently using. However, you can also install it with the third party yet fully endorsed repository for Debian and Ubuntu (and Linux Mint + any other Ubuntu derivative) here: LINK

For more information about Pale Moon, visit it's official website at:
https://www.palemoon.org/

Seamonkey - An Alternative to Firefox - Plus, my recommended themes and addons

Firefox on Linux is good these days, but it can be a bit bloated. I was using Firefox as my main web browser for a while now, but I wanted something more 'lightweight' with relatively the same amount of features. I previously blogged about Pale Moon, but I don't use that as my main browser anymore for various reasons.

I found Seamonkey, which is a community-run continuation of the "Mozilla Application Suite" based on the same source code, but updated with newer Mozilla code bases. (Thanks Wikipedia! :P)

Seamonkey includes a lot of the same features as Firefox, it supports some of the same addons, but looks like it's from 2005. The way it looks isn't really a problem for me, as I prefer function over form. I did tweak the look with some addons though, which I'll show later.

The reason I use Seamonkey is it is faster and less bloated than Firefox while having a lot of the same (if not more) features.

You can install Seamonkey in Ubuntu or Linux Mint by downloading it from the website, but in my opinion it is better to install it via adding the ubuntuzilla repository, which you can do with the following commands on the ubuntuzilla web page on sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/p/ubuntuzilla/wiki/Main_Page/

Also I recommend launching it with firejail to improve security.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deki/firejail -y && sudo apt update && sudo apt install firejail -y

Then launch seamonkey with firejail.

$ firejail seamonkey

(without the dollar sign, that's just meant to show these are terminal commands)

Also, use menulibre to change the seamonkey launcher so it launches with firejail.

Now, the addons I recommend:

First off, one of my favorite addons is Greasemonkey. The official version of it doesn't support Seamonkey, so you'll have to get a ported version from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmport/. Just grab that xpi and you'll be able to use all your favorite userscripts.

Now here's some other addons, also, if you have a problem with a grey download button saying the addon is not compatible, sometimes it's as easy as clicking that button and clicking "install anyway", and chances are it will still work.

In alphabetical order:

Chatzilla - IRC client
Compact Menu 2
Copy Plain Text 2
DownThemAll!
Flagfox
Flashgot
Foxyproxy Standard
Greasemonkey (duh)
HTTPS Everywhere
Lastpass
Noscript
Open With (to open videos / links with MPV, VLC, or another web browser etc)
Private Tab
Sea Fox (Make Seamonkey look like Firefox 3.0)
Slim Add-ons Manager
Stylish (for user styles)
Tabs Open Relative
uBlock Origin
User Agent Switcher

The theme I use is "GNOMErunner".

If you have any suggestions on addons to get, let me know, as I only just started using Seamonkey.
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This is what Seamonkey looks like with my setup: