Does Anyone Here Use Pale Moon?

It's a fork of Firefox (whatever the fork that means) that I've decided to switch to because it's much better and more powerful than standard Firefox. I have a few questions about it. What do people think about it in general? In the words of Duran Duran, is there something I should know? And does anyone know how best to encode a 1080p MP4 so that it plays smoothly in Pale Moon's native player without pausing on any frames? I can get any 720p MP4 to play smoothly without any hitches but every time I try a 1080 video, I get at least one brief pause consistently every time the video loops. Exactly where those pauses occur changes depending on what program I've used to encode the video.

 

There are regulars here that use it as their default browser, it's been mine for ~6years, I guess.

What's the spec of your rig, OS and what security? Do you have hardware acceleration enabled in PM?

Got a link to a test video?

 

It's a pretty low-end Acer laptop with Win 8.1.

OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 64-bit

CPU Intel Celeron N2830 @ 2.16GHz Bay Trail-M 22nm Technology (currently at 45 degrees C, according to Speccy)

RAM 4.00GB DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)

Motherboard Acer Aspire ES1-511 (CPU 1)

Graphics Generic PnP Monitor (1366x768@60Hz) Intel HD Graphics (Acer Incorporated [ALI])

Storage 465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000LPVX-22V0TT0 (SATA) (currently at 35 degrees C, according to Speccy)

Optical Drives HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GUA0N

Audio Realtek High Definition Audio

I'll make a test video and PM you a link to it.

 

1080p playback on a 768p display means the CPU has to work harder to convert the video down to display resolution, that alone might be the cause of any problems. Trying to force a display to show a movie of higher resolution than it can natively show isn't the best idea on a low powered rig, probably better to use a lower res and allow the CPU to upscale it.

 

Great. Thanks. Sounds sensible.

EDIT: Oops, forgot your other two questions.

I have Avast Pro, and I have hardware acceleration enabled in both PM and Flash.

 

Avast can be a little 'picky' with PM, I used the free version for 2-3 years with it until December 2015 and I ended up modding Avast more and more as they kept adding 'features' to it.

Hardware acceleration is something you'll need to test out, you might be better without it, try all combinations for yourself.

 

I actually found that I'm better with it. Videos play better in PM, for me at least, with hardware acceleration turned on.

 

Do I need to hold on to Firefox in order to use Pale Moon, or can I uninstall it?

 

Keep it (and keep it updated!) in case you come across a problematic site, it can be useful for troubleshooting.

 

Thanks. I've just discovered Waterfox though, which I've found to be even better than Pale Moon. Waterfox can play full 1080 MP4s on my system without a single pause anywhere. Just as well as if I was playing them in a media player. I think I'll be switching to that instead. And for that, you definitely do need to keep Firefox, I think. Waterfox just automatically imports everything from Firefox, history, logins, even plugins and everything. So that's what I think I'll be sticking to.

 

Waterfox is a 64-bit rebuild of Firefox with a few tweaks, it often works well but sometimes doesn't get updated frequently enough and is then a security risk, it's stability/usability/performance can see-saw across different versions. It uses the same Profile as Firefox, no imports needed but that also hinders basic troubleshooting. You can uninstall Firefox completely, should you so wish, just don't allow the uninstaller to remove the data (aka Profile).

Pale Moon has had an x64 version for years (there's a wide range of PM builds and 3rd party PM builds), there are other 3rd party x64 builds as well.

Bear in mind that x64 browsers are limited with the range of plugins that are built for x64 being much fewer than those available for x86 browsers.

 

Thanks for the info and advice. I was a little hasty about Waterfox. I'm noticing now it can be a little slow or unresponsive. I'm testing it now to see how many of my Firefox plugins it can cope with.

 

It turns out I'll be sticking with Firefox after all. It turns out all my problems with it, which had to do with the way it plays videos, were caused by the VLC Web Plugin. I was gonna test the 64-bit version of the VLC Web Plugin with Waterfox so I thought I'd uninstall the 32-bit version from Firefox because I don't really need it. As soon as I did, Firefox's native video playback SHOT up. NO freezing, NO stickiness, NO pausing. PERFECT. It now loads animated gifs much faster too. I've spent the last several months wondering why Firefox had suddenly declined in video and animation playback when I hadn't changed anything about the way I encode videos or create gifs, and all this time it was that bloody plugin was slowing everything down. Well good riddance to it.