Note that out of these, the PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org ) is the only real "hard" fork of Firefox. The others are all "soft" forks of Mozilla Firefox in that they all just customise some existing settings as defaults or customise the UI or integrate their own extensions of Firefox and rebrand it.

The PaleMoon team however forked even Mozilla Gecko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) ), the browser engine that is at the heart of Firefox to create the Goanna browser engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(software) ) that now powers the PaleMoon browser and the Unified XUL Platform (a framework that can be used to create multi-platform desktop applications with web technologies).

Another "hard" fork of Firefox Gecko is the Servo browsing engine ( https://servo.org/ ) though no browser application has been built on it yet.

It's really unfortunate that the Pale Moon team are also totally unlikable, which is probably among the reasons why usage has dropped off since it was in vogue in the early-mid 2010s. This[0] issue in a WIP repo for OpenBSD always reminds me of the line in The Big Lebowski "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole". It's fascinatingly hostile for little cause and a non-trivial amount of reputational damage. All in the name the vitally important cause of er... making sure there's not an implementation of Pale Moon that doesn't fully fit their license in a WIP repo.

I suspect that they don't attract the best contributors, given how hard they seem to be to work with.

[0]: https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86

> It's really unfortunate that the Pale Moon team are also totally unlikable, which is probably among the reasons why usage has dropped off since it was in vogue in the early-mid 2010s.

I'm not sure that's the reason. Regardless of feelings users may have toward developers, they'll still use the best tool for the job. I used Pale Moon on an older computer because none of the modern browsers performed well, including FF. I was well aware of some of the drama.

(Likewise, I raged against Microsoft for years before I made the switch to Linux. So many other examples)

When Mozilla went Quantum, it's performance was so good, it was able to replace Pale Moon. I wrote a thing about this here in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367536

I'm thinking that over the last 4 years (since 2019), many users have upgraded their hardware and the need for Pale Moon - as a lighter browser alternative - has simply diminished.

Yeah, some of the devs and mods scared people away, say "Tobin", it got better but there's still a few left.

I'm not trying to cause trouble, but it's also worth noting the PaleMoon people have stirred a fair amount of controversy in their time.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318820 (they later described this incident as "resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free software development practices")

- https://www.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/pexate/pale_moon_...

- https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=16504

That is just completely opposed to the spirit of FOSS. A really sad way to treat contributors like Feodor, but a very effective way of ensuring I'll never use that fork

Luckily the guy behind nearly all of the drama (Tobin) was kicked off the team a year or two ago. It's beeen smooth sailing since.

The maintainer came out swinging and backed the guy that opened the issue. Doesn’t sound like one person is the bad apple

True enough. It was sort of a LoTR Wormtongue and King Theoden situation. While Tobin was around Moonchild made some terrible choices. It's much better now.

That is good to hear, but still, as another responder pointed out, the primary maintainer didn't handle things much better - although if he had, funnily enough, at least one of the incidents would've been resolved with a lot less reputational damage

Also, I find it slightly amusing how often they bring up the legal aspect of these licenses. They're not wrong, of course, but are they really going to hire lawyers to go after someone like Feodor? At most maybe they'll get it removed from Github and other platforms that care to respond to such requests?

> You think trademark law is a joke?

Personally, yes :)

Also, completely unrelated, but I recognize you from various FOSS IRC channels :) Hello!

Pale Moon is also inherently less secure due to Goanna sticking to single process mode.

Multiprocess would have fewer libwebp bugs?

And inherently a far less ram using browser. I do 500 tabs in under 3GB. By also not implementing all the useless attack surfaces like DRM, Integrated PDF reader, WebRTC, and friends it avoids many of the exploits which make modern browsers like FF and Chrome insecure. Overall it probably balances out. Especially since PM users are likely to have JS execution disabled by default (like I do).

It's pointless to say things like "500 tabs under 3GB" without knowing what's loaded in these tabs.

Well, it's not Facebook, Twitter, Discord or the like. I'll to you that. It's mostly actual websites written in HTML (like HN). But even with no websites loaded if you tried to open 500 blank Chrome tabs you'd run out of RAM. That's just the nature of per-tab many process browsers.

And 500 is just my actively loaded tabs. I have another 500 suspended.

Can you think of any realistic tab set that would result in Chrome or Firefox using as little memory?

I'm not the one that should prove anything here.

My point is that if you cannot create a single tab set that beats what GP mentioned in your preferred browser then his browser still uses less memory.

That said, none of this is scientific so I will leave it here.

Another hard fork is Basilisk (https://www.basilisk-browser.org/), which was originally developed by the folks behind Pale Moon but is now independent.

it's hard to call servo a fork. its more like a ground up rewrite of a browser

It's just incorrect to call it a fork. That Mozilla started it doesn't make it a fork of Firefox.

You are right. Perhaps the right word is port - a rewrite of Gecko with Rust, instead of C++?

I don't think it's a port either. It's a new engine. I don't think it uses anything from Gecko.

Gotta admit, being able to actually customize the UI/theme like the old days is awfully tempting. God I miss "Night Launch".

Thanks for this list. I uncovered a couple of Desktop FF Forks I didn't know existed : Pulse Browser and Mercury (not including Floorp, this submission). A couple of months ago it was Mullvad.

I'm really happy to see developers taking an active interest in modifying/forking FF. I was beginning to believe that interest in FF was dying out and so I'm finding this submission, as well as this list - extremely exciting!

Been using Librewolf for a while simply because it has good defaults

also: basilisk, mypal, k-meleon