Giantbomb.com/chat is not working at all on PaleMoon 26.1.1

Since upgrading to PaleMoon 26 the chat and video page have not worked at all. The video player will not appear and the chat will appear but not chat box or any of the rest of the UI elements.

@djarum What is PaleMoon 26? Oh its yet another Mozilla clone. Evidently they broke websockets. ...and rendering. That browser is all kinds of busted.

Thanks for reporting that bug though. But we're going to have to officially say we do not support that browser.

That's too bad, I switched to PaleMoon myself back when Firefox announced they were basically axing their current version of support for addons. It is a great little browser for folks that liked firefox before it decided to become another chrome. Stuff generally works great on it although I have to block giantbomb.com in noscript in order to highlight text normally for some odd reason when using it. I can't think of another site that doesn't work with palemoon out of the box that I frequent other than Giant Bomb. Their official forums are very good about communicating and helping folks with any problems they do have with sites.

What browser do we have to use to be cool and not mocked/ridiculed/teased or whatever this, I'm sure good natured, jocularity portends in the realm of supported browsers and is there a place where I can easily keep updated on this list?

I don't mean to speak for the Giant Bomb site devs, but as a web developer myself, I might have some insight. In a perfect world, you'd have an industry agreed standard for how a web browser works. And every browser follows that standard and does everything the same. That way the people maintaining websites don't have to write code for specific sites. But this is not a perfect world. Some browsers have different layout engines and specific quirks that set it apart from the rest. New standards get invented everyday. New functionality is implemented every day, but not everyone updates their browsers so there's no way to make use of it.

When a browser does something differently from other browsers, the developers have to spend extra time to make it work. And if a certain browser is only used by an incredibly small percentile of the visitors, as a developer, you have to make a choice. Do you get someone on your team to work on compatibility for that browser that only 5 users out of 100.000 use or is that time better spent making the experience for the other 99.995 users. Developers don't work for free. Often times they're actually pretty expensive. So they have to make a choice about which browsers are worthy of their time and their employer's money. In most cases, the minority that uses that uncommon browser doesn't get the support.

Most developers choose to only support a set list of recent browsers. At my last job we only supported the last two major versions of the biggest 5 browsers. Chrome, Internet Explorer/Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari. That covered 94% of our visitors, not counting mobile visitors and web crawlers. Other browsers could work, but were simply not officially supported.

Pale Moon is one of those browsers. Somewhere in the lifetime of Firefox, the Pale Moon devs created their own version of Firefox using Firefox's code. As development went on, they started doing things differently. The most important one is the layout/render engine. Smaller browsers often need more time to develop and mature because there's a much smaller userbase and development team. They're often slow to catch on to certain bugs and take longer to merge in new technologies. As a company making websites, you can't fully rely on these browsers to work, and you can't afford to spend time on trying to fix specific issues with them.

I think the best you can hope for is for Pale Moon to gather enough popularity to contend with Firefox, Chrome and IE, or develop better compatibility and conformity to (emerging) web standards.

Yep, all sounds pretty banal and I'm sure without malice. Browser facts of life are what they are but they still contain minefields that require the asking of a direct question to someone in possession of the discrete facts and the authority to speak on the topic. Not that I doubt the well written response from a friendly web developer that was passing by. I thank you for your efforts to respond in a less comical dismissive tone. I'm sure you basically hit the nail on the head but I don't want to move forward on assumptions if I don't have to. I, and I'm sure the OP, understand that there will be issues due to choice of browser. But while it's one thing to encounter issues it is another thing to be summarily dismissed when attempting to initiate communication about those issues.

I know that Giant Bomb works for day to day usage with Pale Moon. The only problem I've ever seen is inability to highlight text unless I do one of two things, block giantbomb.com in my noscript addon, or spoof my user agent as a modern version of Firefox. Maybe the latter of which might fix the live stream chat issue above, maybe not. I do not doubt that, if we could get a decent dialog going, we could root out the cause of any issues and perhaps get that information into the hands of the people that can do something about it. Be it the Pale Moon devs or Giant Bomb.

This leads into the topic of focusing developer efforts into areas where it does the most good. While I have the attention of at least two web developers in this thread I'll throw a hypothetical out there. Pale Moon is updated on a reasonable schedule and they work very closely with their own forum community to address user issues with websites and addons alike. If, with their help, we found that Giant Bomb was simply serving up a poorly functioning version of the site based on an unfamiliar user agent string reported by Pale Moon would it be asking too much to have something like that fixed on the Giant Bomb side? While it doesn't seem like an outrageously labor intensive request I don't want to commit that age old fallacy of, "It's an easy fix!"

Hopefully I've not given the impression of a ranting, bearded mountain man making outlandish demands. While I AM bearded and DO live on the side of a mountain I CAN be reasonable. I am aware that Giant Bomb are in day 16 or so of putting out fires due to a behind the scenes change up in video distribution that has left that aspect of the site all kinds of busted. Totally understandable that emergency issues like that need to take precedent and that it may take weeks to fully iron out before we can get back to little things niche browser support.

They just said they're not supporting it.

For what it's worth , i'm using Waterfox which totally works fine with Giantbomb. So if you want a different variation of Firefox, that's an option.

There's also Seamonkey, which is based on the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite/Netscape code. Only issue I've had with that one is that it doesn't allow you to make videos entirely full screen, it always keeps the address bar visible. Despite being a suite including a whole bunch of features you'll never use like built-in IRC, Newsgroup and E-mail clients, it runs way faster than Firefox and Chrome for some reason.

I've been out for a while with extreme health concerns but I'm feeling better and just in time to pop back in and discuss some of these responses!

That is indeed how the topic started. I get why you might want to respond that way from the title of the thread and the initial response but the topic had grown and changed a bit. Right now we're looking into why PaleMoon doesn't work (it actually does totally work, see below) and if that why is too big of a hassle to be considered and addressed. It's the slightly more effort version of the, "I put PaleMoon into a search engine after rhetorically asking what it was and having already decided it is beneath my notice" style response. We are also looking for answers as to which browsers, specifically, are supported and if we're lucky, why.

Any chance you're yet another web developer that wants to chime on the questions I've raised? I can update the specifics a bit if it will help narrow down the exact problem. Using a user agent string override, found in the about:config for the most recent versions of PaleMoon, if I put a specific override for giantbomb.com as...

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0 PaleMoon/26.0"

...the site works, as near as I can tell, one hundred percent! Including today's test of chat with the retro quick looks. This is from a user side experience, afaik maybe it makes everything explode over at server central?

To reiterate the relevant question, if all they have to do is serve the correct, I assume Firefox compatible, version of the website to PaleMoon, is that a difficult or unreasonable ask? If it isn't unreasonable then we can get back to seeing if they would like to support it.

Today's test actually revealed a pretty decent answer to one of my original questions. Which is the supported or cool browsers for giantbomb.com? Browsing to the live show chat on the PS4 revealed an error prompt for the chat (although you could still watch the video the chat did not work) an a hope that I could upgrade my browser. As Austin has said repeatedly as of late, "Good luck with that." The following was listed after a hilariously snarky paragraph about Mel the IT guy and his security policies.

"We strongly suggest Chrome"

"We're totally cool with Safari"

"We deal with Firefox"

"Oh and there's Internet Explorer"

Makes sense, Chrome has a huge market share and maybe giant bomb see's a skewed version where that is even bigger in their specific experience. What I'm seeing, in my experience, is that, if you can deal with Firefox you can deal with PaleMoon you just have to serve the Firefox version of the site rather than whatever is getting served to PaleMoon. I'm hoping, in light of this new evidence and the fact that it addresses the concerns of the OP when trying to participate in live chat, that we can reexamine the case and perhaps make an exception. With the reasonable understanding that, things may not be as simple as they appear.

I'll totally check out Waterfox. I hadn't heard of it before but I'm open to it, particularly if it is going to continue support for many of the addons that are going to go extinct in the upcoming language changes. Hopefully it does!

I actually have heard of Seamonkey, I used to use it myself a while back. I think it is a good example of why folks might use an off brand browser. To put it maybe a bit too flowery, it is made with love and care. As popular as Chrome is, there are alterenatives that can do things better and it looks like Seamonkey is, for fisk0, one of those. Appeal to popularity is one of the least popular fallacies with my generation. ;)

I joke. To be fair, popularity is a solid reason for giantbomb to build towards Chrome as their lead platform so to speak. It's just sort of common sense, nothing to laud or damn a business for. If you want to do something impressive or praiseworthy then look into supporting more than the big 4. You can't be expected to support every browser but perhaps some consideration and regard towards those that your customer base has been inspired to approach you about.