I had a look at pale moon out of curiosity. Here's what a new install looks like: https://imgur.com/a/f5FqOsO
I am running a mac and find the interface to look crude and "cross platform", if that makes sense. Performance is very jerky, and font rendering isn't great - although that's perhaps subjective. Icons seem low resolution everywhere and in general it has the vibe of an outdated QT program. I was able to install a legacy version of ublock origin but it doesn't seem possible to use 1password, which is a dealbreaker for me.
I like the idea but I wouldn't be able to use pale moon day to day.
That's because they've kept the UI from before Australis was rolled out in Firefox 29. The Australis UI revamp back then was very controversial; it's funny to see how the complaints of Firefox "becoming more like Chrome" goes way back...
Under-the-hood is an engine that is pretty modern though (at least for a vast majority of the websites I regularly use, and plenty are "Web 2.0"). It's not as updated in terms of web compatibility as Mozilla's Gecko, and I'm not going to hold my breath for that, even though I love this browser very much and have contributed code to the Pale Moon / UXP project. Trying to "catch up" in the WHATWG's "Living Standard" is just going to be an endless uphill battle because of Chrome doing implementations first before doing consultations with real stakeholders like website authors in writing the spec to see if the features they want to push to the rest of the web are really necessary and beneficial. It's amazing we're still able to make advancements on this front like getting Google's WebComponents supported or dynamic module imports.
I have a lot of problems with Chrome, especially recently but I really don’t like the firefox UX. I can’t remember exactly now but I gave it another try about a year ago and there were so many annoying inconsistencies. Profile UX is basically not even there. Do they still do their own custom janky scrolling? Devtools is clunky and slow. There were definitely more problems too.
I’m very happy with Brave with all its silly ads/crypto/news things turned off.
I am running a mac and find the interface to look crude and "cross platform", if that makes sense. Performance is very jerky, and font rendering isn't great - although that's perhaps subjective. Icons seem low resolution everywhere and in general it has the vibe of an outdated QT program. I was able to install a legacy version of ublock origin but it doesn't seem possible to use 1password, which is a dealbreaker for me.
I like the idea but I wouldn't be able to use pale moon day to day.