Browser: Firefox --> Pale Moon --> Basilisk? Or something else?

[RealBlackStuff]

My (getting old) desktop has AMD Phenom II X2 555 [Black Ed.] CPU, 16GB RAM and nVidia GeForce GT 730 gfx.
Inspired by dr_st, I have been running the Pale Moon web browser for many years now, mostly to my satisfaction.
Lately I do get an occasional lagging (scroll-stop for a few seconds) though, when scrolling down large(r) webpages.

Is the newer Basilisk browser at least equal or better than Pale Moon?

After reading this, I'm not too convinced: https://www.howtogeek.com/335712/update ... -basilisk/

What say you?

[dr_st]

I don't know about this, you can try.

I haven't noticed a major difference in performance between the two. The reason I switched to Basilisk is that I started hitting Pale Moon compatibility problems. For starts, WhatsApp Web (which I use a lot) does not support pasting images from the clip board in Pale Moon.

Is there a point in switching to Basilisk? Maybe. Staying with Pale Moon? Maybe. Abandoning both and going back to Firefox? Maybe. Just moving to Chrome? Maybe. All depends on one's preferences.

When Mozilla announced they would be completely refactoring and breaking the Firefox front end (moving to "Australis"), Pale Moon team made a point of keeping that front end to support legacy extensions, and made a promise to never have Australis in the browser. Pale Moon supporters predicted that Mozilla would lose a lot of client base and extension support, which Pale Moon will get to keep. Everyone else was telling them that they were crazy and they would never be able to get enough of a client base to get anyone to cater to them, nor stay up-to-date with innovations in Mozilla's core without re-forking and bringing the entire code base (including the changes they wanted to avoid).

The end result? All important, supported extensions got updated to work with the new Firefox (because that's where most customers stayed), and Pale Moon kept the old, almost obsolete ones. Every time there was a problem to support both browsers with the same extension version, developers naturally catered first to Firefox (because that's where most customers stayed). Pale Moon started lagging behind on features, as was predicted by everyone else. It seems that in the "battle" between the believers and the nay-sayers, it's 1-0 to the nay-sayers at this point.

Now it's happening again. Mozilla announces that it will be finally refactoring and breaking the old Firefox back-end (XUL). Well, the Pale Moon team again jumps to the fray to keep it. They are re-forking Firefox, calling it Basilisk. Of course, at this point, they got Australis and all the front-end changes they wanted to keep out of Pale Moon. It seems they were not as terrible as Pale Moon team predicted. Of course, the same predictions now take place again - Pale Moon team says that Mozilla will finally lose all of its customers and extensions that will be p!ssed at the back-end platform changes; everyone else claims that the world will adapt and move forward, together with the bulk of customers / extension developers, while Pale Moon / Basilisk will stay behind.

Given what happened before, who are you more inclined to believe this time?

And this I say as an avid supported of Pale Moon and Basilisk. I would love to see them succeed; I just have serious doubts about the long-term. Apparently, it's really hard to do meaningful original development, really hard to get new people to join the team, and really hard to keep up with the useful features of the browser, without having to fork and re-fork the Mozilla core. And if that's all you do - what's the point?

And yet I still have hope, and keep using Basilisk and Pale Moon wherever and whenever I can.

If you don't like the look of Basilisk versus Pale Moon, you can "fix" a lot of this using the "Classic Theme Restorer" addon. I used it to add the search engine icons to the search box (the new Firefox theme does not show them until you start typing, which to me was annoying).

[SurrealMustard]

I followed almost the same journey. Firefox "originalist" since 2008, used it well past the time when things went off the rails until sometime around 2014, when I switched to Pale Moon. At the time, it was modern, fast, and feature-rich, especially when compared with its mainstream rivals. It was great, for a time. Unfortunately, compatibility issues (first on the web, and then with the operating system) tarnished the experience, and I ultimately switched to Google Chrome (for the first time) in 2017. I've been happily using it since then, but am anxiously dreading the impending introduction of its fugly new graphical interface (a whitewashed ripoff of Firefox, which itself was a lumpy ripoff of Chrome not that long ago; I guess this is what GUI design feedback loops look like). With that in mind, I've been testing out the new Firefox Quantum and working on getting it set up in a way that can tolerable. I suspect that I'll succeed.

As much as I too might not like to admit it, I'd have to agree with the sentiment of the article that minimally-maintained browser forks are probably doomed to become a thing of the past. The web and its intricacies (both good and bad) are becoming too much for one-man-band projects like that. It's sad, because it's nice to have a viable alternative to the mainstream choices, but it might just not be meant to be anymore.

[azrielle]

You might try Otter-Browser