When comparing Pale Moon vs Polarity Browser, 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 Polarity Browser is ranked 40th. 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 Fast and lightweight
According to their own tests Polarity takes up more than 10x less memory than IE, FF or Chrome.
Pro Multi-session browsing with Parallel Sessions
Parallel Sessions allows users to browse the web with different profiles with separate cache, cookies, and history. This enables users to login to multiple accounts to different websites like Facebook.
Pro Built-in privacy features
Polarity browser comes with ad block and Do Not Track built in.
Pro Customizable UI
It allows you to customize many things from window color, tab color and text color to window transparency and border size. You can set Background image or use Shuffle from Bing. You can also save the theme, import and export it.
Pro Custom Developer tools
Polarity comes with the standard Inspector for Blink based browsers along with its custom client that works with both Trident and Blink.
Pro Great HTML5 support
Polarity scores 512/555 on the HTML5 test. It is just a couple of points shy of Google Chrome.
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 Few annoyances left unchecked
The browser has a couple of bugs such as where extensions are not actually ran after installation despite a notification stating that they are.
Con Windows and Android only
No Linux, OSX or iOS version available.
Con Unstable and frequent crashes
Though the browser is really lightweight and lightning fast, it crashes many times and is clearly unstable.
Con Uninstallation problems
Polarity browser can only be uninstalled with a built-in deinstallation tool. This is very impractical.