PALE MOON/BASILISK/WATERFOX USER EXPECTATIONS VS REALITY

Pale Moon is a web browser once forked from Mozilla code. As such, the browser shares many similarities with Firefox as far as style and feel. While built around older Firefox code, it is actively maintained and patched with security fixes that pertain to Pale Moon and only Pale Moon, which decreases the chances of incompatibilities and improves on code that is no longer being maintained by Mozilla anymore. Mozilla went a different direction and while on XUL they may have implemented some of the same features that Pale Moon does as of now, it is now up to Moonchild(MC Straver), to maintain this project himself with his team of developers. Pale Moon works with XUL and XP COM, both technologies no longer being supported by Mozilla, so much of the underlying code that gets implemented as security fixes in big updates, gets separated from other Mozilla code by Moonchild himself and instead he adds his own workarounds and code to patch other portions of the browser. Most people fail to see this aspect and accuse Pale Moon of being unmaintained and thus less secure. Many users who don’t care about the underlying code and customizations will often read articles from other bloggers/vloggers like Howtogeek, etc. While their concerns are valid, they are misguided and these rants and raves are based on having not fully read documentation and faq’s of the projects. Pale Moon also may behave differently on different sites, but this isn’t necessarily a flaw, it is just that it is a different browser and people refuse to see this. Furthermore, Pale Moon uses many of its own extensions now and seeing as the list, while growing, isn’t as big or far reaching as AMO extensions at the moment, this may be it for a while. Firefox has dropped all non web extensions that refuse to move towards a more Chromium-esque model and so, will no longer be maintained by extension developers either. Pale Moon features and code base support themselves will, in the future, be based off of a new project called Basilisk. Basilisk is maintained by the same lead developer of Pale Moon, so it is in house. Basilisk is basically a newer code base of Firefox with the Pale Moon engine called Goanna. In the past, when Pale Moon got too far behind on web compatibility, Moonchild would port javascript capability and media capability into the browser from a slightly newer ESR code base, but this is becoming increasingly hard to do as many updates no longer fit easily into the overall code, thus Basilisk was born. Basilisk is another open source alternative to Firefox that uses a similar yet completely different rendering engine. Basilisk works really well with more recent Firefox changes, however, bits of code pertaining to multi-process and pre-Quantum have been taken out. Basilisk is the code-base that Pale Moon is beginning to use. It’s an image of older Firefox without all the useless bits of telemetry and other things that no one really wants. If you prefer Waterfox, but don’t care to set an extra setting for multi-process or e10’s, then you’d appreciate the design. Basilisk may also allow you to play DRM content if you prefer that functionality. If you plan to use Basilisk, remember it is beta software, even the developers say that. Waterfox is another browser based on Firefox ESR code, but this uses more Mozilla code and is thus more like a true fork or even a clone of Firefox with privacy hindering code stripped out. Waterfox relies heavily on Firefox ESR versions and thus has very little in the way of extra features or big coding projects being done to it, it is mostly getting the right patches ported without all of the telemetry that Firefox uses. Waterfox was the first rendition of Firefox code to be truly 64 bit and so, for a while, it was the fastest of the Gecko-based browsers. Most of what sets this browser apart is the ability to better maintain privacy. Efficiency is also a plus thus it is forked from ESR. While this browser has many of the same capabilities, including that of using some Web Extension-based addons, it can still use XUL as well. It also might not support all the latest Quantum themes yet. Some suspect that this will change eventually when ESR becomes Quantum. These browsers are a testament to their developers and what they deem important to the web. If your ideas align to the ideals of the developers, these browsers are right for you, but attempting to discredit or say that something is what it is not is not benefiting new users or the developers themselves. Most of the developers are on borrowed time from their jobs and families. Pale Moon accepts donations because