A tool a day (aToaD): introduction & Palemoon

There’s been a pretty serious lack of updates during the last months, partly because I didn’t have much time, and also partly because I didn’t have many ideas. At least, most of the ideas I had were too time-consuming. However, since I recently got I new computer and thus had to reinstall all my stuff on it, I realized I lacked a list of the useful programs I use. Making a list of all those programs is definitely tedious and, again, too time consuming. But presenting, say, one program a day, although even more time consuming on the whole, sounds kind of fun. So that’s what I’ll try to do, briefly present a program I use every day.

The criteria for inclusion won’t be more specific, except that I will only present “useful” programs (ie not games, yet maybe a few trainers if they are somehow noticeable – like the Fable 3 trainer which I’ve had a hard time just downloading…) which aren’t too massively mainstream or generic (like, not an OS, not MS Office, etc). I’ll try to focus on exotic stuff, although since the endgame of this is to end up with a list of my programs for my personal use the next time I reinstall, I’ll also post more classical things (like, say, COMODO firewall). Since one key characteristic of these posts is that they shouldn’t be too time-consuming, I usually won’t post any screenshots or self-hosted/self-mirored download links, unless it’s specifically useful for the tool (like, again, the Fable 3 trainer – I know you can’t stand the wait already ^^).

aToaD #1: Palemoon

Browser. Optimized, independent (no shared settings) Firefox equivalent.

Without further ado, the first tool will be Palemoon. Palemoon is a custom build of Firefox specifically optimized for Windows and with some features removed for further optimization. Well, that’s how they sell it, at least. Or rather, that’s their main argument. There’s also the user interface and default settings which are more like the good old Firefox (with still the possibility to configure it like the newest trend), think for instance of the crappy add-on bar vs the good old status bar.

This latter reason is actually what first brought me to Palemoon, but I now use it very regularly for another reason: it’s globally just like Firefox (you can use all the same extensions), so it allows me to have the “same” browser twice but configured completely differently. Like, one for standard use and the other for Freenet use via a proxy. This is something you can’t do with Chrome/Iron because the moron uses Windows/MSIE connection settings, or with Opera because the retard still can’t use SOCKS. Since Firefox is my primary browser and I can’t use those others as proxy browsers (I could use Maxthon I think, but I really don’t fancy their UI), well Palemoon very gracefully fills the blank. Most other “optimized” Firefox builds, such as Waterfox, can’t do the same because unlike Palemoon they stupidly use the same settings folder as Firefox so you can’t run both at the same time…

So, for me, Palemoon is a way to have 2 Firefoxes which I can simultaneously run 😉 The optimizations, although good to take I guess, don’t really matter and aren’t noticeable in daily use IMO.