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Add to SafariWhen comparing K-Meleon vs Pale Moon, 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 K-Meleon is ranked 31st. 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 Secure and fully under user control
No malware/adware toolbars/extensions can be injected. You can switch off Java, JS, Flash, popups, and Ads from the toolbar or with a hotkey.
Pro Extremely customizable
Almost every detail can be personalized:
- skin
- buttons (icon theme and on/off state)
- toolbar placement
- menus
- number of settings and preferences
- proxies (add and switch with ease)
- locale (switch on the fly without downloads and restarts)
etc.
Pro Fast and lightweight
Light on memory footprint: the smallest RAM amount used among all the modern browsers. Fastest application startup. Very responsive. Invaluable on the older and low-end hardware.
Pro Highly extensible
Has hundreds of its native extensions written on its own macrolanguage.
Supports dozens of XPI-extensions for Firefox.
Pro Native
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
Cons
Con Dead
Ended in 2016.
Con Stability issues
Con Extremely dated interface
The UI is ugly, which is forgivable, but sticking to a setup from the early 00s makes using it clunky.
Con Windows only
K-meleon is only available on Windows. It was previously available on Android and Linux, but now the both discontinued.
Con Uses Goanna
Its one of the oldest gecko forks which was made by one man.
Con Not secure
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
