Re: [gentoo-user] Re: firefox managed by my organization?

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2020 at 12:30:51PM +0000, Michael wrote

> I haven't yet given Palemoon a spin and consequently have no
> experience of it.  How does it compare to FF?  I am curious as to
> security and performance comparisons.

  It's kept updated regularly for security.  See
http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml for update info.  "CVE-"
mentions are usually for code inherited from Firefox.  The reason the
version number is "so low" is that update increments tend to be +0.0.1
instead of full integer +1 like Firefox/Chrome.  Major milestones are
where the integer increments occur.  I believe that performance is
roughly the same, but I don't use both, so I don't definitively know.
BTW, Pale Moon is still XUL, versus Firefox Webextensions, so the
respective addons/extensions are incompatible.  Pale Moon stuff is listed
at https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/

> Would they differ in performance terms on an old AMD powered laptop?

  1st question; how old is the AMD laptop?  Pale Moon requires at least
SSE2-capable cpus.

  2nd question; how old is the AMD laptop?  As per thread
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=23031 the official
32-bit tarball will no longer be generated as of Nov 2020.  Note that
this will not prevent you from building it yourself in Gentoo or "the
hard way", or "community versions" or whatever.

> What is the recommended way to install in Gentoo?  I noticed
> the palemoon overlay has ebuilds for source and binary options.

  You can go the overlay route to manage it by Gentoo, but remember to
disable system libs.  This will continue to work for 32 and 64-bit.

  Or you can pull down the tarball and extract to your home directory
and point your program launcher to ${HOME}/palemoon/palemoon  The entire
program is contained in ${HOME}/palemoon so it doesn't splatter stuff
all over.  "Uninstalling" consists of "rm -rf ${HOME}/palemoon".  You
can set it to auto-update (64-bit only after November) if you install it
in a directory that you have write-access to.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications