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Comment by HouseAtTheSea | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is the argument for using the Pale Moon browser? I am genuinely interested since I see it floating around here and there but even when reading the descriptions on the website I have a hard time understanding what really distuingishes it from other browsers in a good way, especially Firefox.

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It is my browser of choice because: 1. I feel in control. No auto updates in the background, no SoftwareReportingTool, no Pocket, no nonsense. 2. It has a certain "feeling" to it's use that I like. hard to explain. 3. It is more stable/predictable than other browsers in how it evolves.

Thanks for your input!

From what I recall, the main selling points for me were that it supported the old plugins and extensions.

Thanks, I understand.

i'm using it because it empirically runs faster with less resources on my machine than other browsers i tried while rendering feature-creep websites at a good degree, plus it supports old XUL-style firefox extensions - i guess the 'freedom' part points to this.

Thanks!

It might use fewer resources, but the JS engine chugs. That's fine if you're a No-JS ascetic, but the second you pull up a PWA it's hang city.

It started as a fork of Firefox when Mozilla decided to restrict UI customization, and make most existing add-ons incompatible. Partly it was also about how these changes were communicated. That was a couple of years ago.

For a while it was a better choice over the redesigned Firefox ("Australis"). I then switched to using Chromium, so not sure what the situation is now but it can't hurt to have more choice.

Thanks for the feedback!

This is the project's general information, https://www.palemoon.org/info.shtml

This is the project's technical details, https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

Thanks for that but that was kind of my point. I don't get the argument for Pale Moon from reading this. "A browser with a large degree of freedom" - what does that mean, especially when one considers that few lines under that it says that the functionality of newer extensons cannot be guaranteed. Also it says that it's faster, but that seems like something all browsers claim. That's why I was a bit confused.

FF does not run acceptably on an old but otherwise perfectly good netbook with 2GB of RAM and Slackware. Pale Moon does.

I found it worked on an older Mac than similar browsers.

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