Pale Moon

Pale Moon forked from Firefox in 2009 and kept going in a direction Mozilla abandoned. In 2015 it stopped tracking Gecko and moved to Goanna, its own hard fork of the engine, making it one of the very few browsers that is not Blink, not WebKit, and no longer Gecko either. Development is small and deliberate, and the project openly avoids Big Tech services—the default search engine is DuckDuckGo.

What you get for that independence is customization nothing else matches. Pale Moon still supports the full XUL and XPCOM add-on model Firefox removed in 2017, so extensions can redefine core browser behaviour rather than work inside a sandboxed API. With full theming and a deep about:config on top, the interface is genuinely yours to rebuild. There is no telemetry, no sponsored content and no AI.

The cost is real. Goanna lags well behind on modern web platform features, so complex web apps, some streaming services and Chromium-only sites will break. Performance on heavy pages trails current browsers because the architecture predates the multiprocess designs everyone else adopted. Ad blocking, tracking protection and Reader View all come from add-ons rather than the browser. Pale Moon suits people who want total control and will keep a second browser around for the sites it cannot handle.