Pale Moon is what Firefox should have been
Lately I've been using Opera as my primary browser. It's fast, but it directly apes Google Chrome in both rendering engine and interface. Firefox is a great browser, but recent and upcoming changes to the browser such as the Australis user interface and the uncertain future of useful extensions leave much to be desired. It's looking like Firefox is becoming a Gecko-based Chromium clone.
I just discovered Pale Moon, a browser forked from older Firefox code that seeks to preserve the features that Firefox has removed and move in a direction that encourages customizability and a sane interface. The app itself has really diverged from the Firefox code and has its own features and personality. Even the legacy Gecko engine has been forked and is actively developed to support web standards and provide security features. Most importantly, XUL extensions, which enable developers to make deep changes to Firefox-based browser's interface, are here to stay in Pale Moon, even as Firefox seeks to abandon them and support Chrome-ish extensions.
The only downside of Pale Moon is that it does not support plugins using newer Firefox APIs. This means my beloved 1Password 6 doesn't have a compatible extension. From what I understand, the extension will never function on Pale Moon's legacy Firefox base. This is a dealbreaker for many folks, but I have become accustomed to popping open 1Password mini and copy-pasting the password. Because of this, you'll want to keep other browsers around when you create new logins.
Moonchild, Pale Moon's main developer, is a Windows guy and doesn't have specialized macOS knowledge, but there has been work on a macOS port1 and it works really well despite being in beta.
So that's my little browser excursion of the month. I switch browsers every couple weeks, so we'll see if this one sticks.
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- <p>This is a link to the latest version as of this writing. You'll want to make sure to download the latest version from the newest post. <a href="#fnref1:1" rev="footnote" class="footnote-backref">↩</a></p>