Pale Moon Reviews

Summary: I am a web developer by trade and I couldn't do my job without Pale Moon.

As a general web user, I cringe thinking about how I'd get by without it. Every other browser has lost my interest a long time ago by doing one thing or another I don't agree with. If it weren't for Pale Moon I'd have to seriously reconsider if I need the WWW that badly, or possibly give it up.

Positive: The user interface is almost infinity customizable. Customization removed from Firefox years and decades ago still remain in Pale Moon. For instance, disabling tabs is a simple setting click away.

The user interface honors the system look & feel. I don't know how Firefox and Chrome/Chromium and clones get away with not honoring the system's theme. With Pale Moon your scroll bars and menu bars and the lot will all look as they should on your OS.

There is no telemetry.

The developer tools are fully featured and here to stay.

The extension technology is much more capable than that of Chrome (which is ruining ad-blocking one update at a time) and more capable than that of Firefox. Extension creators can do much more here, and the myriad of available extensions shine (that said with how good PM is I only need 1-3 of them).

Pale Moon is easily the most secure browser available, with a smaller code-base than any of the main browsers, no currently-known vulnerabilities, and newly discovered vulnerabilities aggressively fixed.

No DRM.

Extremely responsive developers and highly active support forum.

The most standards compliant browser in existence. You won't find another browser that sticks to standards better than Pale Moon. It is a joy to develop against for that reason. If it works on Pale Moon, it will surely work on everything else you care about.

Negative: The Pale Moon browser is no longer the speed demon it used to be. Application load times are a tad slow. Web pages with truck loads of JavaScript might render a little slower as well.

Some web developers are not creating standards-compliant web pages, so those may not render perfectly. Everyone targets Chrome (just like they used to target IE 6) so using Pale Moon can feel like using Firefox back when "designed for Internet Explorer" was the norm.

Some web developers don't feature-detect properly, and use User Agents instead to determine what your browser can and can't do. Often they get this wrong for Pale Moon, and web sites might falsely tell you that Pale Moon is out of date, or can't use such-and-such feature, or similar.

Most of the problems with Pale Moon are not Pale Moon problems, they are caused by web developers doing poor feature detection, non-standards compliant design, or outright browser discrimination.

Summary: The Pale Moon browser is my favorite since 2017. Thank you Pale Moon developers! I really appreciate your work.

Positive: Real privacy [not like what became of Firefox].
Customizable.
SSL security.
HTML5 support.
Permissions in settings [Bravo and thank you].
Beautiful design.
Less cache.

Negative: Slow download.
No idm integration.
No fast dial integrated or xpi.

Summary: Completely and utterly unimpressed. Vivaldi, Brave, Opera, and even Firefox provide a more user-friendly experience than Pale Moon.

Positive: Quickly downloaded over our 5G WiFi network, and easy installed on my Lenovo Flex 5 Windows 10 laptop.

Negative: I honestly don't have the time or energy to devote for something in-depth, so I'll just say this: From the time the browser opens after installation, when your brain is suddenly assaulted by Pale Moon's retrograde design, which tricks your eyes into thinking it's the early 2000's all over again, to the time you start fiddling about with the settings, suddenly it hits you: Why am I bothering with this? I've already got five other browsers, and not one of them has been satisfactory. So, maybe it's finally time to walk away from Windows.