Pale Moon

An open-source browser focused on customizability, Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox and is available as an independent browser for Linux and Windows with a few differences that set it apart from the competition.

Pros

• Support for existing web standards
• Designed with usability in mind
• Independent from Firefox and Chrome
• Open-source and customizable
• Support for themes
• Dedicated library of extensions
• Available for multiple platforms

Cons

• Outdated rendering engine
• Lack of popular adblockers and extensions
• Contains spyware

If you are a Firefox user, a fork-like Pale Moon will surely impress you with a familiar experience and functionality combined with advanced features. This browser differs from Firefox in terms of add-on support, user interface, and running in single-process mode. It uses the interface of Firefox from earlier versions and supports some plugins no longer supported by Firefox like Flash.

Pale Moon offers optimized builds for 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows. It is developed to make the most of the latest processors and does not run on outdated hardware. The browser is free to use and offers an intuitive interface resembling Firefox. The only difference is the blue-centered theme for the interface. Another difference between this fork and Firefox is that Pale Moon uses a tweaked Gecko engine that renders pages up to 30 percent faster than the existing browser.

One of the primary benefits of this modern browser is that all the extensions from Firefox can be used as the browser is sourced from the Mozilla project. However, compiled plugins may not work as Pale Moon does not possess what is needed to run them. There is also support for add-ons exclusive to Pale Moon including a large number of themes. This also includes the feature ‘Complete Themes’ that applies to the whole interface and not a few elements.

Conclusion

If you are an adventurous user who likes trying new browsers, Pale Moon might seem interesting to you. While it receives low scores from users, the performance ultimately depends on your hardware and software configuration. The browser has been known to report data breach incidents as well, but it has got better over time and is an excellent choice for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android users.