Post History

## Pale Moon

Pale moon is technically a Firefox based browser, but it has diverged considerably over the years. It was originally a fork of an old version and has retained many "good old" FF features which were replaced with arguably inferior designs by Mozilla:

* In 2014, Firefox overhauled its UI and changed to Australis (v29). Australis was less flexible and had worse usability (following mobile-like UI trends) for power users, but presumably Mozilla felt the need to do this so that it could expand into the mobile market. PM stuck with the pre-2014 classic interface.
* PM's dev team maintains their own rendering engine, Goanna, which was forked from Gecko (used by FF). I am not aware of any significant practical consequence from this for every-day web usage. Sometimes, poorly made websites designed for Gecko may not work quite right, but this seems rare.
* In 2017, Firefox declared XUL extensions "legacy" and began switching to new WebExtensions. WebExtensions are more limited, ostensibly for security, and some existing extensions were either discontinued or had features degraded as a result. PM remains compatible with old FF extensions (XUL). They also claim to expand the format, but I don't know exactly what additions they make.

I'm part of the "old guard" so I think the PM UI is excellent.

For regular browsing it seems to work quite well. There is always the push/pull problem: FF need not struggle to stay compatible with websites because web authors see it as a de facto standard and make an effort to stay compatible with FF. But they do not bother (or even know about) PM, so it is up to PM to ensure compatibility with millions of websites. It's rare that PM breaks a site, but when it happens your main recourse is to ask the small PM community for help.

Back in 2017, the extensions were great, better than FF. Many did not have a WebExtension update yet, so you could use them in PM but not in FF. Even the updated ones were often better in PM (in their old XUL versions). Now that it's been 6 years, a lot of those original FF extensions are obsolete and don't work well. The PM community continues to develop some XUL extensions for PM, but they are smaller so there's not as many.

Lastly, the PM dev team is small and opinionated. Sometimes they make surprising, radical decisions. For example, in the past the main PM dev declared that ad blocking was unethical, which caused some chaos because the main PM extension delivery mechanism (where ad blockers are served) is also maintained by the same PM devs. I cannot adequately describe the culture and politics here, so I would recommend checking out the PM forums when considering switching to it, because that will be your main place to for support with PM issues.