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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pale Moon vs Midori, the Slant community recommends Pale Moon for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop web browsers?” Pale Moon is ranked 5th while Midori is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Pale Moon is:
"Classic" Firefox add-ons can work, but they are not supported and should be updated or forked to become a Pale Moon add-on.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Has its own add-on ecosystem, built on time-tested technologies such as XUL (plus JS and CSS) and XPCOM
"Classic" Firefox add-ons can work, but they are not supported and should be updated or forked to become a Pale Moon add-on.
Pro Designed for usability, not the shiny new things
Pro Light on resources, although it's not its main focus
Pro Independent from Google and Mozilla
Pale Moon is an independent fork of an older version of Firefox. Therefore, it is independent from Mozilla and are not affected by their terrible decisions such as removing XUL, adding telemetry, pocket, etc.
Pro Customizable
Pro Stable
Pro Support for existing web standards
Pro Respects your privacy
Contains much less spyware than Chrome and Firefox and all of it can easily be disabled.
Pro Open source
So we can verify that the browser is not spyware.
Pro Supports complete themes
Pale Moon supports complete themes, something which Firefox used to have before version 57.
Pro Support for GTK themes
Pale Moon supports your GTK theme while Firefox does not.
Pro Uses Goanna layout engine
Unlike most other browsers, Pale Moon uses its custom engine.
Pro Has its own library of legacy extensions
Pro Very Independent
It isn't controlled by Google nor Mozilla, has its own engine.
Pro Good community support
Pro Optimized for modern processors
Pro Legacy Firefox
Pro Very fast
Midori is considerably fast. It starts up in no time and renders pages as fast as many other more well-known browsers.
Pro Lightweight
Incredibly lightweight with very little memory consumption.
Pro Allows using webapps as if they were desktop apps
Midori has a built-in functionality with which you can create web apps that can be launched from the desktop. For example, you can create a web app for the desktop to launch Gmail or YouTube or any other web app that you use.
Pro Available on several distributions
Midori is used as a default choice for a web browser for some distributions (like Elementary OS) and it's available for easy downloading for many other distros through their official repositories.
Pro Useful plugins are built-in
Some very popular and useful plugins are built-in and available out of the box. For example, there's an RSS feed reader plugin and an Adblocker built-in.
Cons
Con Unsecure
Pale Moon lacks the sandboxing and other privacy protecting features included in latest Firefox releases.
Con Still contains some spyware
Default homepage is spyware and search suggestions and automatic updates are enabled by default.
Con Outdated rendering engine
It is an really old fork of Gecko that misses many of the newer web features.
Con Pale Moon is based on very outdated Firefox code
Con Uses Goanna
It an old Gecko-fork that is developed mainly by one man.
Con Lacks popular extensions and adblockers
It doesn't have ublock origin and umatrix.
Con Does not contain multi-process sandboxing
Con Android version has odd behavior
Clicking does not work.
Con Pale Moon's website is cloudflared
Con WebAssembly enabled by default
Con Lead developer loves Cloudflare and hates Tor
Website is cloudflared and he thinks most sites should be hostile towards tor.
Con Incompetent developers
Con Development stalled
There have been no recent updates. Lags other browsers in supporting modern web standards. Many distributions have replaced it with other browsers.
Con Abandonned
Con Misbehaves with Google Web Apps
On some distributions Midori may not work very well for Google Web Apps. On openSUSE for example, Midori starts misbehaving when you are going through Google Drive's folder hierarchy.
Con Supports insecure cipher suites
This browser supports RC4 encryption which is known to be insecure compared to other encryptions such as AES.
Con Another bloatware as Firefox
It is described as a lightweight browser but it is just a bloatware. It crashes sometimes. It is a clone of Firefox which is said to be a RAM-eater.
Con Unfamiliar UI
The UI can take a little to getting used to because it's not very conventional or similar to other browsers. For example, it uses a trashcan icon to view recently visited links.
