| Pale Moon - a faster, more stable web browser than Firefox |
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2016 06:20:36 GMT |
| Software |
About 2 weeks ago I finally got tired of Firefox 32 being overall slower than it should be, and too often completely crashing my entire system, which forces me to reboot, and go out of my way to avoid certain websites or pages while using one of my main Linux systems. (A rather pathetic single-core 1.5 GHz laptop with 2 GB of RAM, running Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004.)
Unfortunately, when I updated to the latest Firefox in the hope that it might be better than Firefox 32, I found it seems to no longer be possible to change Firefox's horrible new search interface back to the far nicer old search interface, which lets you change the default search engine with two clicks.
Pale Moon's source code is available on GitHub. (I actually didn't try compiling it from source yet, but someday I probably will.)
Even on my 1.5 GHz laptop with 2 GB of RAM, Pale Moon is refreshingly faster and more difficult to crash than Firefox 32 and any later version of Firefox I briefly tried. Pale Moon has my preferred search interface, and other defaults I prefer, right out of the box.
Pale Moon is even compatible with my favorite Firefox add-ons - NoScript, Stylish, Web Developer, NoSquint, and even the add-on I modified myself.
Overall, Pale Moon crashes much less often and less severely for me than Firefox. Usually the worst thing that happens is, Pale Moon sometimes suddenly closes, but I can get all my tabs back just by reopening Pale Moon. And I can usually avoid that kind of crash by avoiding opening tons of tabs.
So, I just thought I'd recommend Pale Moon, since so far, it seems really great, fast, and much better than Firefox has been lately.
I also have read good things about SeaMonkey, but haven't tried it recently, mostly because I don't need any of its features besides a web browser, and conserving RAM is important if you're running Puppy Linux on a computer with too little RAM. I guess 2 GB of RAM is tolerable, but 4 GB or more is much better.
That was the final straw for me, so I finally tried Pale Moon (version 25.8.1), a free (as in freedom), libre, open source web browser forked from Firefox.
In the past couple weeks of using Pale Moon on my 1.5 GHz laptop with 2 GB of RAM, I only crashed my entire system once, probably only because I was recklessly trying to test Pale Moon's limits by opening way more tabs than I ordinarily would have dared to with Firefox.
Addition, Jan. 12, 2016, 3:57 AM EST. I also tried - or tried to try - GNU IceCat, but, it wouldn't launch for me at all while running Lucid Puppy Linux 5.2.8 version 004, since apparently I don't have "GLIBC_2.17". But I'll certainly try GNU IceCat again if I ever switch to a newer Puppy Linux.