Any possibility of a community based ff28 branch...??

[Rickkins]

Know what I mean...??
Something like Seamonkey is, community driven at arms length to mozilla corpco.

Are there coders that would be capable of taking up the torch..??
And willing..??
Legal hurdles..??
Would the masses support such a beast..??(I suspect that they would)

Any thoughts..??

[TheVisitor]

Very unlikely IMO.

[malliz]

No. And we have given reasons why relying on third party builds for too long won't be a good idea.
The main one is the effort needed to maintain the old code past the cut off point that most of us consider to be when the ESR branch switches over to Australis. At the moment most (if not all) of third party builds are based on the esr branch that is still being maintained and gets security updates. There will be a whole jump in complexity when that branch is closed. I honestly believe that most third party builds will be forced to swap to the Australis UI and code

[SnoutSpout]

Rickkins, SeaMonkey has a common Core with Firefox and UI code inherited from the original Suite. It's ideally suited for low-intensity independent development, with a largely legacy userbase that is tolerant of such a development model. If a third-party Firefox build wants to graduate to a true fork, it has to do it with less manpower and has a more uphill task. And just like with SeaMonkey, a lot of addon developers simply won't bother developing for such forks because maintaining the code just for Firefox alone is hardly a walk in the park these days, unless all you care about writing are the type of extensions that are a dime a dozen on Chrome.

So no, long and short of it is that it's very unlikely and even less likely when the people clamoring the loudest for such forks can neither code nor bugtest effectively. You can think of it this way, the people who are up to the task are also the ones where their devhours are very precious, and very few of them are going to fight a guerilla war out of sheer principle because some disgruntled users want them to.

[Gingerbread Man]

Pale Moon, Waterfox, Cyberfox, IceCat… enough forks already.

[SnoutSpout]

They're barely even sporks, more like vanity compiling projects.

[Rickkins]

I agree it's unlikely, and I admit I am not a coder.
I also believe that if nobody asks, nothing ever gets done... and it takes so little effort to ask the question.

And ya never know...

[Matt A. Tobin]

Pale Moon, Waterfox, Cyberfox, IceCat… enough forks already.

They're barely even sporks, more like vanity compiling projects.

While Waterfox is ONLY a poorly compiled AMD64 version without any major modifications and Cyberfox is an exercise in everything that is wrong with forks these days and IceCat is just a rebrand to comply with OSS licenses and trademark issues for inclusion in Linux distros.

Pale Moon is the real deal. It has significant changes to not only the code that lives in /browser but also happens to have some improvements in the backend as well. Including finally a fix to the damned Windows Platform Update KB2670838 and Windows 8x issue (you know instead of the current MozCo approch of just blacklisting graphics cards) as well as other unique improvements and also backporting of some select items. (I suggest you run a diff before you trash a divergent project)

One of the best things about OSS is that anyone can take that code and create a new project. It fosters innovation and development. I don't think any of the mentioned divergent projects are for fame. Pale Moon for instance wasn't expecting to become important to so many people so the bar is being raised. All it takes is one person with a vision to take a project in a different direction. Of all the forks of Firefox out there Pale Moon is steadily diverging from MozCo's vision of reduced everything (chromification) and has become it's own thing. This will continue despite the ending of the ESR24 branch.

[Rickkins]

Hey, that's the spirit.

I don't know what's wrong with some of you other guys.... seems like ya'll could suck the fun out of a room at 50 paces...(kinda like my ex wife...)

[LoudNoise]

Since they have removed the reporting and accessibility stuff and have "optimized for speed", doing a diff is sort of pointless. You have to slog through a great deal of meaningless crap before you could find much of anything.

[Matt A. Tobin]

The "removed" features such Accessibility is merely disabled thus not built via a --disable-accessibility in the mozconfig or a few have their /browser code entry points commented out but over all the entirety of the mozilla-esr24 structure is still in parity as much as possible.

Also I have done a diff on it. It is actually quite interesting.

[LoudNoise]

Is there a reason why the fellow doesn't like people with disabilities?

[Matt A. Tobin]

Is there a reason why the fellow doesn't like people with disabilities?

I seriously doubt Moonchild has ANYTHING against those with disabilities it is just for the target audience it was not AS important to include those features at this time. This may change in the future. Also since the code is open source you could compile with --enable-accessibility for someone else. Just like when I compile Seamonkey I don't include it or webrtc or many other optional build options. Speaking of Seamonkey it doesn't have much in the way of accessibility either are you gonna say the Council doesn't like disabled people as well?

[LoudNoise]

As far as I know, Seamonkey has the same set of accessibility features as Firefox and Thunderbird. If you care to share specifics I will ask the SeaMonkey folks about.

I couldn't compile it since I don't have a compiler nor the desire to compile it.

That said, if Palemoon is really that great and inventive it seems sort of mean to purposely exclude folks with disabilities. I find it hard to believe that the folks involved have managed to define a target market the specifically excludes those who have mobility problems.

[Matt A. Tobin]

All you need is VS2012 Express, DirectX June 2010 SDK, and MozillaBuild to compile!

Also..

If you are that concerned about having the accessibility features in Pale Moon I would suggest you head over to http://forum.palemoon.org/ and discuss the issue with the Community and Moonchild. Perhaps you could dedicate your self to providing on going maintenance of the accessibility features or even contribute an accessibility-enabled 3rd party build perhaps diverging a bit to enable superior accessibility to those with disabilities than MozCo currently does.