Well, aside from compatibility with certain web proposals and specs, a complete lack of tolerance for WebDRM/EME, and a couple basic things like that, I couldn't really tell you; because 99% of my web browsing could be in Lynx for all the garbage I don't download (ECMAScript, many images, ads, etc). Most of the development they do is for users with different use-cases than mine who want to do more things in their browser that aren't text and hypertext links.

The biggest upside, to me, is that what it offers customizability in the UI, that the settings actually feel like they mean something (when I turn something off, it stays turned off) and that addons/tools like Eclipsed Moon and Pale Moon Commander are made to actually protect my privacy. Oh, and there's the other big thing, that it's not taking money from Google or making money for Google. So, y'know, offering a Web Minus Alphabet is a good thing.

Oh. And it still runs in a single process on my 32-bit computer, so it doesn't seize up, cause my HDD to grind, and force a reboot every time it launches. Chrome, Electron-based programs, and e10s-Firefox all do that, and I've had some pretty spectacular crashes that required using a system restore when something I installed also tried to sideload Chrome with it. Thankfully I identified the culprit, went to a restore before the install, sent a nasty email to the people who wrote it, and went on with my life.

32 bit only cpus mostly died out in 2006 and even most and later all crappy intel atom cpus were 64 bit by about a decade ago. Unless you are running a computer museum I'm not sure what the point of this. New Firefox is actually faster than old firefox on hardware that people actually use.

If you want to really blow your mind either buy a $50 SSD or stop your antivirus "real time shields" from slowing down all filesystem access.

If you are force rebooting when you start it my best guess is that your intel atom with 2GB of ram is starving and thrashing.

The more them able ui is an artifact of sticking with older tech not specific work by Palemoon devs.

We are left with a front end for select settings in about:config and even less interesting extensions.

Underwhelming.

My dander's up over that indictment of my use-case, so this is probably going to sound like a rant, maybe even a counter attack. It's very nice of you to live in the future and dictate what my budget should be. For those of us living in the real world, in situations where we don't have a successful "upgrade budget" more than every 10 or so years, it's the way of the world. I don't care about keeping up with the bleeding edge, I just care about keeping up with what works for me on this particular hardware/software combo. I bought this machine used in 2011, when I upgraded from a WinXP machine which, although it's still working perfectly well for everything but "modern" internet use, for some stupid reason just isn't good enough anymore to connect to a server, download a couple lines of text, and render it. But it can still play video games, run software (office, graphics, audio recording and processing, etc), and give me something I can type on which doesn't waste ink or paper. It can load software to read PDFs & ePub files so I can read books. It can load VLC so I can play my DVDs. But it has trouble dealing with the Internet.

Come to think of it, I think that's going to be my daily driver again for all those reasons.

Older hardware and "tech", to me, is uniformly better in comparison to the latest and greatest nonsense that "web developers" want to push down the pike. All you want is to take more of my system resources and put them on the Internet. That's not acceptable to me in the slightest. Your "newest technology" is my newest horror and the reason I've most recently questioned the value of computers as a whole. Taking one iota of control away from the user is wrong. Giving the user a structure which can be 100% customized with emergent properties the developers might not have had the forethought to include is what all software with a UI of any kind should be looking to do. Simply put, you are not the NetHack Dev Team. You do not think of everything.

As I said, I don't use most of the features the browser includes. I don't care about them, and I know that I never will. The older I get, the more I see the value in the method Stallman uses of downloading a page, parsing it to clear out all the gunk, and then displaying it locally on a non-connected machine.

There's stuff in there I think is horrendous, like all the stuff for ECMAScript. There's stuff I like, such as the full choice of theme and function, the fact that my settings are mine - not yours, not Mozilla's, not Google's - mine. But I respect that it's got value to some people who want to turn it on. I'm not a person who's going to tell you what bleeding-edge new feature they're missing. I'm a person who can tell you that this program does a reliable and remarkably thorough job of displaying downloaded HTML in the way I desire to see it. It lacks any really good gopher or telnet support, but I cannot ask miracles.

My use-case is not the standard and I recognize that. You asked me a subjective question. I gave you a personal answer. And now you're telling me the only Internet-facing software I see being even marginally decent is 'Underwhelming'? Your seeming lack of understanding when it comes to the nature of real life is underwhelming to me. Try the software for yourself. If, after using it with an honest attempt, you prefer to be led by the nose by Google and its cronies, then by all means i cannot prevent you; nor would I want to. I'll lag back and wait to see the problems before they reach me.

Hey I sympathize with your use case. My only machine right now is a 2014/15 laptop I bought for $275 a year ago. My desktop from 2008ish gave up the ghost and the laptop I had before this one was a 32 bit machine I found in a thrift store for almost nothing. This post is as I type being composed in Emacs.

In order to deal with a constrained environment I ran i3wm instead of a complex environment. I adjusted some scripts/configuration that seemed OK on a faster machine but sucked on the underpowered one. I autostarted almost nothing in the background. I kept it to a minimum of tabs.

The problem with running an old version of Firefox as a strategy to deal with an older machine is that older builds are actually slower and the tabs are in effect javascript applications that in fact do have all the defects you ascribe to them regardless of which Firefox they are running on.

Yes in many way the modern web is moronic. We don't even disagree. I just don't think windows + palemoon is a great strategy to deal with it.