When comparing Pale Moon vs Artix Linux, the Slant community recommends Pale Moon for most people. In the question“What are the best web browsers for UNIX-like systems?” Pale Moon is ranked 3rd while Artix Linux is ranked 21st. 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 No systemd
Pro Runit
Artix actively supports the runit init system known from Void Linux. (Equally besides the OpenRC init system known from Gentoo).
Pro Close to bare Arch Linux
No learning curve if you're coming from Arch or any of its derivatives.
Pro Lightweight
Only the software you would need like Terminal emulator, file manager, media player and a browser.
Pro Compatible with Arch Repositories
It is fully compatible with almost all packages from community, extra, multilib and AUR.
Pro Rolling distro
Pro Flexibility
You can have a functional system in less than 10 mins using GUI installer OR you can do it "the Arch way".
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 No systemd
Some packages flat out won't work because systemd is non existent, sadly pipewire needs systemd to run. Hopefully Pipewire becomes usable soon. Edit: Pipewire does work but you will have to make a startup script.
Con Few Arch packages might not be available yet
Developers are working migrating all packages into their own repositories while ensuring there's no systemd malware.