Pale Moon

Ah, Pale Moon... it's not without its merits, certainly. But those flaws—those persistent lags, the bugs that creep in so quietly—how could I ignore them? It's almost tragic. Four stars... and that, perhaps, is generous.

Extremely old technology that aged like milk. While Pale Moon had its time and place, that has long past now. The lack of multiprocess support is probably the biggest flaw, meaning that one slow GIF will cause the whole browser to freeze. The older XUL tech is really fun to work with, but Mozilla is right - it's horribly insecure against modern organized/militarized cyber threats and can basically rewrite the whole browser at a second's notice. And the developer has also been a bully at times, putting a "my way or the highway" approach on development.

If you really wanna retro compute, spin up an XP virtual machine with Firefox 3 installed. Don't touch Pale Moon ever again.

Back in the day of the real Mozilla, Pale Moon was the best branching. Leaner, quicker, more secure.

Nowadays, though ...

Standards have evolved. Pale Moon has nae. Their buffleheaded refusal of HTML5 for security reasons may have some thuth as it basis, but the end result is that many, many modern sites are broken. OAuth2 ? Disnae work properly, so Office apps will go bonkers from time to time. HTML5 ? No sir, so no point-to-point crypted transfer possible. Forget wormholing or banking sites. And so on and so forth.

It's come to the point they need their very own plugin repository because the old XUL Mozilla ones are not guaranteed to work.

And Moonchild constant aggressiveness does nothing to bring in developers or solutions, search the BSD Palemoon debacle on the web.

So, all in all, this was a very good browser, that is now dead by lack of evolution.

Still has its niche use though, you can have the portable version, put a NPAPI flash plugin inside, and play old flash games :D Or actually work with Canon's incredibly outdated extranet.

Pale Moon is based on extremely outdated Firefox code, lacks proper sandboxing with site isolation, and still uses XUL which was dropped from Firefox years ago as it was a huge security risk. Pale Moon is a security nightmare and one of the worst browsers for privacy. It's much saner to use Google Chrome and disable telemetry in the settings.

I was extremely surprised that this suddenly became my new favorite browser after just a little bit of customization. Although the ready made themes are somewhat limited, luckily I found a few that I liked, & 1 in particular (the Halloween themed one) that I very much enjoy. It works quite well, even with my tendency to have way to many tabs open, & is still quick & stable. It has a pretty descent amount of extensions available (some users may miss the google store add-ons, but I am NOT one of them, so for me this is a plus, not a negative.) It already has Ublock Origin as 1 of the available add-ons, which I already use in other browsers, although I need to use another available script blocker for Pale Moon, (eMatrix in my case) instead of my usual no script add on, but this seems to work just as well for my purposes in this browser, so no drama there. I love the way I can drag & drop customize the layout of the tool buttons etc. when it is customizing mode & that after I am done arranging the modifications to the lay out, closing the customization menu, it "locks" them in place so that I don't accidentally drag & drop them in normal use mode. :) It is true that I have trouble downloading most applications from this browser, but maybe that is just an error in my settings on my part, but it doesn't affect me because I just download from one of my lesser browsers when I need to do that, which is not that often. I thought this would be a difficult browser but I was very pleasantly surprised at how well we get along, & I have found myself saying regularly that "I LOVE Pale Moon way more than I expected to at first glance" & that "I hope it never ever becomes discontinued"....