It's been more than a year since I reviewed Pale Moon browser, and a lot has changed. This XUL based browser is still evolving, and surprisingly they catch up with a lot of "Google-pushed stuff". Most importantly, they rolled out WebComponents support few months ago. Well, its better late than never :v

How does it perform?

The thing is, old pre-Firefox is just not performant. We can see a lot of people blabber about "why Firefox slower than Chrome" in Firefox forum at pre 52 time era. And because Pale Moon use the same old Gecko base (forked into Goanna, but still has the same problem), the overall feeling of slowness still stay.

It's slow. Especially when opening sites that have heavy Javascript and telemetry involved, such as YouTube. If you ask, why they are performant in Firefox/Chrome, well, they're multi-processed (e10s). Meaning they ran in a several process. The plus of that is when a website crashed, it does not bring the whole UI to crash with them. The negative, well, resource usage are heavy. That's why you've always seen memes that says Chrome is a memory hogger.

In some cases, like opening a page with a long text (for example a manual), PM load and perform better. Chromium based browser could never do that smoothly. Also, PM still has FTP support, although I don't see anyone that still use FTP right now.

When I reviewed the browser back in 2022, I was using Windows. PM had Linux support since long time ago, but there is no "draw in titlebar" menu like in Windows. Instead, it still use the old menu bar. I understand why they dont want to develop it, because its a pain in the ass due to Linux 'different standards' nature.

In the future

I will still use the browser as my main browser, because, well, I remember this reddit comment that says:

Pale Moon is the only browser that is not directly dependent on code written by Google, or money shelled out by Google.

To think about it, that's really the fact. I mean, browsers like Librewolf, Floorp, Brave, and etc is either based on (new) Gecko or Chromium.

We need a new rendering engine in the world. But it's definitely not using this aging Gecko rendering engine. I've seen some progress with Servo, a Rust based web rendering engine that used to be developed by Mozilla but then they abandoned it because they like Web Extensions API so much.

Maybe Servo could be the future of open source web browsing if it's used and utilized properly. The development is very slow, but at least there are progress, so all we can do is wait. In the mean time, let's use PM, and maybe contribute to it by hanging out in the forum and helping people. (early warning: the forum is a dangerous place, because you'll see some very conservative dudes there)