Firefox vs Pale Moon browser – Which one is better?

Mozilla Firefox employs the usage of an open source code to provide you with all the features, it currently has and to enhance your browsing experience. Since the source code is available easily, there are many other browsers that use the same code, with little variations to focus on something or the other. In other words, these browsers are customized for a certain feature. Pale Moon browser too, like WaterFox or CyberFox, employs Firefox code to provide you with a better speed and private searches.

If I were to describe Pale Moon browser in a sentence, it would be, “Pale Moon browser is a stripped-down version of Firefox, that leaves out certain features, to focus on speed of browsing”.  Instead of default Google search that most browsers use, Pale Moon employs DuckDuckGo search engine, so that your searches are not stored anywhere.

Let’s take a look at Pale Moon in a little more details.

Features of Pale Moon

The makers of Pale Moon browser have left out some parts of the original Firefox code to remove extra features that people seldom use. Likewise, they’ve customized the code a little to add small improvements to the browser over Firefox. It supports almost all Firefox extensions and themes. As such, it does not come preloaded with any extensions and/or themes.

Default Page of Pale Moon & How to Change it

The default theme of Pale Moon browser is a Moon on a blurry, blue colored background. The default page of Pale Moon is http://start.palemoon.org that provides you with a number of options to start with. Examples of those options areTwitter, Google Plus, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn. In other words, it provides you with popular sites hyperlinked to the start page so that you can navigate using a single click instead of typing in entire URL in the address bar.

However, you need not keep the same page as the default each time you open the browser. You can change it to anything else just like in Firefox. The Options menu is available under the top-left main Pale Moon button. In the Options dialog, the first tab allows you to set up a different default page or to load the pages that were open when you closed the browser last time.

You can also change the theme of Pale Moon using the Firefox method for changing themes.

User Interface of Pale Moon and Firefox

The user interface of Pale Moon matches that of Firefox – until Firefox 29. From Firefox 29 onwards, Firefox looks more like Google Chrome. Tab styles have changed in the latest May 2014 version of Firefox. The main menu and settings option has been moved to the top-right. The icon is three bold lines. The “Favorites” button moves out of the address bar and gets placed on the solid bar next to the address bar. In previous versions of Firefox, the favorite button was present inside the address box. I suppose the next release of Pale Moon browser will follow suit and look more like Firefox 29.

Features Disabled In Pale Moon Browser

There are many apps that contain too many features that just add up to the resources being consumed. For example, when you buy Windows, you get a Narrator or a Magnifier. How many of you ever used it? Few I guess.

Similarly, Firefox too comes with Accessibility, Parental Controls and few more features. These features are disabled in Pale Moon browser to reduce resource consumption and to increase the speed of browsing. It means you won’t be able to set up parental controls on the browser. You’ll have to provide them with an alternate browser like JumpTo, which takes care of parental controls. Using DNS blocking will block websites on Pale Moon also.

Firefox vs Pale Moon browser

Click on the image below to see the larger version of the detailed feature comparison chart between Mozilla Firefox and Pale Moon web browsers. It compares the efatures offered by Firefox ESR, Firefox 28, Firefox Australis and Pale Moon.

Conclusion

Pale Moon browser is built upon Firefox by removing unnecessary features and by tweaking certain parts of Mozilla code for better speed. If you are looking for a full featured browser, Pale Moon might not be suitable but if you want speed over anything else, go for this alternative browser.

You can download it from its home page. It is available in 32-bit as well as 64-bit versions.