When comparing Pale Moon vs Opera Neon, 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 Opera Neon is ranked 51st. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Modern look
It is a very modern version of Opera. It looks like a desktop app instead of a web browser.
Pro Futuristic interface
Opera Neon innovates with its clean aesthetic pleasing interface.
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Con Outdated rendering engine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Con Pale Moon is based on very outdated Firefox code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 Owned by Chinese Consortium
Pretends to be a Norwegian company, but is actually a Chinese company. Opera does not respect user privacy and is not trustworthy!
Con Not meant for general use
This browser is not meant for general use. It only exists, because the Opera developers had some ideas for the user-interface, and wanted their users' feedback. If you want a browser that you can use day-to-day, something with bookmarks and security updates, look elsewhere.
Con Bad UX
The usability is not the best since the left and right bar take up space and there is no way to resize them.
Con Never updated
The Opera folks came out with a browser as an experiment - and then they essentially abandoned it. It really was great, but since they never planned to support/update it and it's closed-source, it's not recommended.
Con No Adblock
There is no Adblocker like in the original Opera.
Con No extension support
Due to the way the browser is built, it does not support Chrome extensions even though it is Chromium based. Opera extensions are not supported either.