Firefox 29 Not Better

[MJPollard]

Well, I'm using the Windows version of Pale Moon, and the migration utility they provide (pmmig.exe) worked flawlessly. Obviously, I can't speak to versions on other operating systems, as I haven't tried them. But, if you're a Windows user, it's effortless and seamless in my experience, and I have yet to experience a plug-in that doesn't work with it. YMMV, of course.

[hello_hello]

TreeTops, Have you tried manually copying your old Firefox profile?

http://www.palemoon.org/troubleshooting.shtml#The_Pale_Moon_profile_migration_tool
The Pale Moon profile migration tool (for 3.6.6 or later) doesn't work

Since there are many different setups of Windows, it is always possible that the migration tool doesn't do its job properly. In that case, you will have to manually copy your user profile(s) to the proper location for Pale Moon 3.6.6 or later. You can also use this method to manually copy a Firefox profile to be used in Pale Moon (they are compatible). Close down the browser and do the following:

1. Find your old Pale Moon/Firefox profile folder. Usually:
   On XP: C:\Documents and Settings\{your user name}\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox
   On Vista/7: C:\users\{your user name}\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox
2. Copy everything in that folder (subfolders and profiles.ini) to Pale Moon's profile folder, overwriting what is there. If you have already run Pale Moon at least once, it will have created the folder structure already:
   On XP: C:\Documents and Settings\{your user name}\Application data\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon
   On Vista/7: C:\users\{your user name}\Application data\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon

[TreeTops]

My paths are different: On Vista/7: C:\users\{your user name}\Application data\Local\Mozilla\Firefox and On Vista/7: C:\users\{your user name}\Application data\Local\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon

Note \Local\ on my path.

Anyway 8,082 files were copied and no difference on Pale Moon. No bookmarks, No addons, No 3rd party password manager.

[MJPollard]

Dumb question, but did you uninstall Pale Moon, remove the Pale Moon directory in Application Data\Local, reinstall Pale Moon, and copy the Firefox profile again?

[hello_hello]

TreeTops,
That ini file mentioned in the instructions..... you can modify it to put your profile folder in any location you like. Only the ini file needs to be kept in the same location. Firefox (and I assume Pale Moon) uses it to locate the profiles folder. For example the Firefox profiles.ini file probably looks like this by default. I'm using XP so it's located in "C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox"

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=Firefox
IsRelative=1

It would appear Pale Moon uses exactly the same system (I haven't gotten around to installing it yet myself). It might pay to check the profiles.ini file (the Pale Moon one) to make sure there's not something odd going on. You should be able to modify it and then copy your Firefox profile to anywhere you like. That's what I do. I put all those types of profile folders in the same location so it's easy to back them up. If you use Thunderbird, it works the same way.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=Firefox
IsRelative=0
Path=D:\My Stuff\Data Files\Firefox

Once Pale Moon is installed it should know where to find it's own profiles.ini file and the default profile location. You could try uninstalling it, delete any Pale Moon related folders remaining (so when you re-install it you're sure which application data folder it's using), re-install it and then open the Pale Moon profiles.ini file with notepad. Change "IsRelative" to zero and specify the location to where you copied your Firefox profile. When you restart Pale Moon, that's where it should look for it. Assuming it works the same way Firefox does, which it appears to. For some reason Pale Moon doesn't appear to know where the profile folder is (the Firefox copy). I'm not sure why.

PS. If you want to confirm Pale Moon is looking for the profiles folder in the correct location, specify one as per above (or delete everything in the existing profiles folder), but don't copy anything into the folder you specified. Start Pale Moon and it should create a default profile in the specified location. If it doesn't add a bunch of files to the specified folder when you first run it, then it's not using that location for your profile folder for some reason.

[TreeTops]

I gave up. Am I the only one having this problem with Pale Moon? I think not if the migration tool is broken as stated in a previous post by Hello. But much thanks for Hello and Pollard for trying to help.

[Kerry56]

I had no issues at all using the migration tool for Pale Moon. You might want to talk to the developer in the Pale Moon forum.

[PowerFalcon]

In what way do the rounded tabs integrate better than the old ones?

Aerodynamic.

Maybe !

There more inviting, visible. The new tab shapes nicely flow with the UI of FireFox. The old shapes seemed out of style, clunky & soon far, although I hope I don't speak to soon, the browser is much more stable.

[hello_hello]

I finally got around to trying Pale Moon today. Aside from having to select the "tabs on top" option (because I'm used to having them there and I do think it's a better place for them), I just copied my Firefox profile and mostly, everything worked. All my Firefox extensions are working with the exception of URL Suffix. Pale Moon says it's not compatible with the current version of the browser, but it's compatible with Firefox 28. I'll try to fix that later. LastPass works. I was most concerned about that one. So far the only other thing I've needed to do is add an "open tabs" icon to the tab bar, because TabMixPlus's "open tabs arrow" doesn't seem to work.

TreeTops,
If you want to try again, here's what I did. I downloaded the portable version of Pale Moon, unzipped it and ran it. Then I shut it down and had a look for the location of the default profiles folder. Being a portable version the profile seems to be kept in a subfolder of wherever you put Pale Moon (ie PaleMoon\User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default). You should be able to delete everything in the "Default" profile folder, replace it's contents with a copy of your Firefox profile, and you should be good to go.

In my case I put the copy of the Firefox folder in the same folder as I put most of my other data files. To tell Pale Moon where to find the profile folder (I'm referring to the the portable version of Pale Moon as the "installed" version probably does it differently), you need to open the "Palemoon-Portable.ini" file with notepad. Inside it you'll find the following lines:

[FileToRun]
PathToExe=$Bin$\$AppName$\$AppName$.exe
Parameters=-profile "%MOZ_PROFILE_PATH%"

All you need to do is change the third line to reflect the location of the profiles folder (assuming you didn't leave it in it's default location) and everything works fine. In my case I changed it like this:

[FileToRun]
PathToExe=$Bin$\$AppName$\$AppName$.exe
Parameters=-profile "D:\My Stuff\Data Files\Pale Moon"

I wasn't looking forward to upgrading to Firefox 29. I figured I'd probably need to spend time getting Firefox 28 functionality back, and if I wanted to use a browser which looks like Chrome, I could use it instead. Now I don't need to worry as it seems I'm no longer a Firefox user. For me, Pale Moon and Firefox 28 look virtually identical and pretty much everything seems to be working as it was previously.

Firefox 28:


Pale Moon:

[hello_hello]

I think the hardest part of switching to Pale Moon for me is going to be getting used to not having the orange Firefox icon on the task bar button. I'm so used to just moving the cursor to the orange one. Now it's blue..... it's blue now...... blue.....

[hello_hello]

If anyone else happens to be using the URL Suffix extension with Firefox, there's no way to get the current version to work with Pale Moon, however the previous URL Suffix version (0.6.0) works fine with Pale Moon 24.5.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/url-suffix/versions/

[MJPollard]

If anyone else happens to be using the URL Suffix extension with Firefox, there's no way to get the current version to work with Pale Moon, however the previous URL Suffix version (0.6.0) works fine with Pale Moon 24.5.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/url-suffix/versions/

Have you tried this extension?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/

It disables all add-on compatibility checking (there used to be a global setting for this, but it was disabled in later versions; this extension brings it back and enables it by default). It will probably allow current and future versions of URL Suffix to work, as well as other extensions that would normally become obsolete solely because the browser version gets bumped up a notch out of the extension's "allowed versions" range.

[DarrellS]

I made the mistake of upgrading to 29 when they advertized that it was the most customizable Firefox yet. The first thing I did was try to move the address bar onto the menu bar and to my surprise, they had the address bar locked down with no way to unlock it. Most customizable my ass.

I went to multiple links on Google trying to find answers but every Firefox reply was a snotty reply, telling the user that they were going to use it and like it because they had put so much hard work into.

I went searching for an older version but everywhere I looked, there was a message that Firefox had asked them to remove the older version and to only link to version 29. Luckily I had backed up my unzipped folder to another drive and had a portable copy of firefox there. The portable folder that I had on C:\ had been upgraded.

I am pissed off at all the browsers since I've moved to Windows 7. I was using Chrome as my main browser but it uses the most resources (all modern browsers are resource hogs) and it has a problem with of not finishing loading websites. It gets to 80% and just stops. No error messages, it just stops. If I hit the stop button then the webpage shows up, completely loaded.

Right now, I'm using Firefox portable as my main browser because it seems to use the least memory even with all the plugins (1.51 GB with one window open). I've gone back to using Opera without cookies and scripting for my other browsing and stopped using Chrome at all since it is unusable.

I'd be tempted to start using IE6 if I could use it on Windows 7 and I'm considering going back to XP since Windows 7 is such a memory hog.

[DarrellS]

Well, I had the same problem that I had with Chrome while trying to post the reply above so it's either a problem with the new website software or my copy of Windows 7 is screwed up. Not sure what to do. Reinstall XP or try and repair Windows 7.

[jagabo]

Right now, I'm using Firefox portable as my main browser because it seems to use the least memory even with all the plugins (1.51 GB with one window open).

It usually hovers between 300 and 400 MB for me.

[davexnet]

As was mentioned earlier in the post, all the old versions of Firefox can be found at the link here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

I've settled on the new design myself. I activated the menu bar and removed the hamburger icon. Seems OK,
I'm getting used to it. Update to version 30 beta 3 today.

[DarrellS]

Right now, I'm using Firefox portable as my main browser because it seems to use the least memory even with all the plugins (1.51 GB with one window open).

It usually hovers between 300 and 400 MB for me.

I use a program called Firemin while surfing with Firefox and between Firefox Portable, Firefox and Firemin, I'm only using 4MB of memory. It's Windows 7 and the 62 processes using 32% of my memory that is the problem. Using XP, I rarely ever used 1.5 GB of memory (if I did, I just restarted my browser or Photoshop if I had it opened) but that is the minimum I use with Windows 7.

I'm going to stick my XP drive back in. The only reason I installed Windows 7 was to run the x265 encoder but I'm through screwing around with it also. It will never get close to x264 encode speeds.

[DarrellS]

As was mentioned earlier in the post, all the old versions of Firefox can be found at the link here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

I've settled on the new design myself. I activated the menu bar and removed the hamburger icon. Seems OK,
I'm getting used to it. Update to version 30 beta 3 today.

It didn't seem too bad when I first tried it but after they advertized it being the most customizable Firefox yet and finding out I couldn't even move the address bar to the menu bar was bad enough but reading how the Firefox personel treated everyone who were searching for answers was it for me. The links on the forum that I tried didn't work. They all wanted to install version 29. Thanks for posting the link.

[TreeTops]

Hello-Hello...Thanks for trying again. I found another PaleMoon Profile in Roaming. I deleted that and put the Roaming Firefox profile there. Now Pale Moon says it can't find its profile and does not open at all. Guess it's time to uninstall Pale Moon. When using Firefox I am getting hourly nags to update to firefox 29 but haven't done that yet. Anyway to turn off the nags?

[Ai Haibara]

When using Firefox I am getting hourly nags to update to firefox 29 but haven't done that yet. Anyway to turn off the nags?

In the Options/Preferences, click on the "Advanced" tab, and then the "Update" sub-tab. Under the "Firefox updates:" header, select "Never check for updates (not recommended: security risk)".

[hello_hello]

Have you tried this extension?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/

Thanks for that. I used to have the Mr Tech Toolkit extension installed to disable the compatibility checking annoyance, but it went the way of the Dodo long ago and I didn't know the checkcompatibility extension existed.

Mind you, I'd already made the current URL Suffix compatible myself (it's not hard to do once you know how) which allowed me to install it, but unfortunately it didn't work. Everything I typed into the address bar was completely ignored until I uninstalled it and installed an older version.

TreeTops,
I don't know what's happening with your setup, but try the portable Pale Moon and the instructions I posted yesterday. It was pretty easy for me to copy the Firefox profile folder and get Pale Moon to use the copy. I don't think it should be any harder when running Win7.