/Pale-Moon

Pale Moon web browser (with mods i think are interesting)

OtherNOASSERTION

Pale Moon web browser

This is the source code for the Pale Moon web browser, an independent browser derived from Firefox/Mozilla community code. The source tree is mostly laid out like Mozilla-based products.

The upstream project seems beset with "personality". They drop Mac support. Then they bring it back (Thanks dbsoft@github!). Classic extensions are thrown out. Then they are back. They have their Trotsky who was apparently running things, and then rage quit, burning down the farm behind him.

But it has been my personally trusted browser since 2017. My initial attempt at interaction with upstream (a pull request to disable the BatteryManager API) resulted in dismissal and a threat (from Tobin? The origin repos have been removed from Github, so I would have to search my email archives). Moonchild finally saw the light and removed it in 2020. I don't remember if I also submitted my patch to remove canvas.toDataURL, but a month later Moonchild added an option to poison the data.

My mods

My intents are among others to compile Pale Moon for the Mac and to frustrate access to information that is not obviously the concern of a web browser. I also take a hostile position with respect to advertisements.

Blocked APIs:

BatteryManager

Blocked calls:

canvas.toDataUrl

Blocked DOM attributes:

HTMLAnchorTag ping HTMLAreaTag ping

Other:

The default User Agent is set to the empty string, which leads to the header not being included. Some sites receive a custom User Agent via code from upstream, usually when the site denies access to Pale Moon. In that case, the fake string is something indicating a mass-market browser.

I don't care if my mods make the browser "hard to use", throw up "big scary warnings" or violates "standards" demanded by the advertising industry. If a site rejects the browser because it tries to protect the user, the user needs to decide whether he actually wants to visit the site, or to use special protective measures.

To build on the Mac, I only needed autoconf-2.13 and yasm. It builds in only 10 minutes. Why did we professionals stop building our own software again? I've included my .mozconfig. mach build to start the build process.

Maintenance mode

This repository and incarnation of Pale Moon is currently in maintenance mode and will only receive critical and security updates. The new home for Pale Moon (v28+) is in the UXP platform repo where it is one of the included applications with the platform. ** Do NOT open new feature/bug issues on this repo, please, unless it is a sec or critical issue, and check if the Pale Moon unstable channel solves any issues you may have before opening new issues on the UXP repo.

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