You’re probably right. But this is one way to vote. The consumer votes with their patronage.
I’ve just switched to Pale Moon and it’s basically the same thing as FF. A couple of things are moved around (minor) and you don’t get the frequent pages when you open a new tap. There’s a ‘most visited’ button on the left side that gives you a drop down menu of those things.
Bookmarks were imported from FF and it’s exactly the same as I had with FF. Other than the blue landscape, it’s the same browser.
(Not necessarily trying to convince you of anything - just general information for anyone who’s interested. I got a little chatty with this post.)
This is actually really cool (I’m actually really, really happy with this switch!):
http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=4016
Why was the default search changed to DuckDuckGo?
Since several people have asked this question, and I expect more people will, I’ll highlight the most important reasons for changing the default search engine to DuckDuckGo in Pale Moon 24.4 and later:
Unbiased search results: With the previous default search provider (Google), the results of your search would be biased based on who you are: your geographical location, your search history (yes, Google keeps a history of everything you ever searched for), ads you have clicked on and tracked sites you have visited. Although it’s marketed as “providing you with more relevant results” I think this kind of bias is bad. It will show you more of the same stuff you already like and know and have searched for before. If you use a search engine, how often do you want to look up the same thing or want to be given the same kind of results? It would be the bane for any actual research you are doing.
No profiling: As said above, Google keeps a history of your search results. Don’t believe me? go have a look yourself here: https://history.google.com/history/
This kind of recorded history helps Google with building user profiles, which in turn can be used commercially. Based on your past results you may even be shown completely different providers for goods and services (in different price brackets) because you fall in a certain group of people, for example. Not to mention that aggregated data from user searches can also be sold to interested parties. And I think most people didn’t even know this kind of (very personal!) data was being collected.
Privacy-aware search provider: DuckDuckGo is privacy-aware. They make efforts to not track you and not store any sort of data (well they do, briefly, for normal search engine operations, but it’s being immediately thrown away when no longer needed). While there are other, similar search providers with the same privacy goals, I’ve chosen (a while back already) to include DuckDuckGo in Pale Moon for providing a current-day, complete package with relevant results based on proven technology.
I had no trouble resetting my theme on Pale Moon. It was the only thing that did not transfer from FF.
It was no trouble to open “Add-ons” and set PM to use the theme of my choice.