An in depth review of all the old style Firefox browsers (Palemoon vs Basilisk vs Seamonkey)

There is a sea of Firefox browsers, all with varying degrees of quality and usability, I will attempt to review the three most popular "old" ones against modern Firefox.

Performance

I am a simple man, so is the test, a wikipedia page open and a Youtube video running in the background, with Ublock installed. Ublock tends to bong out on Youtube, trying to stop all the spyware.

Firefox, Palemoon and Basilisk all use about 10% cpu and around 850MB of ram to accomplish this task, but Seamonkey accomplished it with 10% cpu and only 580MB of ram.

The biggest surprise though, came in that all browsers except Firefox, seemed to immediately garbage collect when I paused the video, shrinking their ram use by about 30-60MB.

A disclaimer here is that Firefox resource use is a guesstimate, as it insists on polluting the entire process tree with webworkers and other weird processes.

Searching the web

They all provide Duckduckgo as standard, with Ecosia, Mojeek and Wikipedia as pre-installed and they all provide the ability to add more, as well as some predictive search ability.

How fat are they?

Last I checked, Firefox is around 1GB when fully installed, which is just crazy. Palemoon takes up 150MB, Basilisk 115MB and Seamonkey 160MB, they are very comparable in size, the minor size differences most likely being the feature set they provide.

In general, any of them are better for smaller systems than Firefox or Chromium.

Add-on's

Palemoon provides a link to Ublock, Basilisk you have to find it yourself and Seamonkey provides an installer in the UI. The former two may require a more skilled user to install.

They come with Widevine/proprietary video codec, so you can play Youtube, Netflix and so on, Youtube works fine, but Netflix insists on being "helpful" by blocking access, because your browser is somehow "incompatible", I guess maybe just don't use Netflix. 😂

They have their own stores for add-ons, which are all web based, Seamonkey providing the far better experience and the most add-ons at ~700, Basilisk providing ~200 and Palemoon providing a small amount.

More popular add-ons like Tampermonkey will not be in any of them, but with their toolsets and usecase, maybe this isn't too necessary either. I browsed the add-ons and I did not find anything I really wanted/needed.

Seamonkey does come with Mail, RSS, Newsgroups and HTML editor included, reminiscent of Mozilla suite, which can be a welcome addition for some.

They all have dev tools, so you won't be missing those either.

Compatibility with modern standards

On suggestion from Clseibold, I used html5test.opensuse.org to get some numbers, current Firefox scores 508 out of 571, Basilisk gets a 495, Palemoon a 455 and Seamonkey a 433.

Where it seems Palemoon and Seamonkey are "struggling", is because they don't have Geolocation, camera, microphone and several other hardware control actions turned on by default. On top of them not having webrtc and other p2p technologies enabled, which I know they support.

This leads me to conclude that they are all scoring high 400's, closely following Firefox, so they should be very limited compatibility issues.

Summary

They all three perform very similarly and offer similar feature sets, with Seamonkey providing just a little bit extra and being a little more lenient on the ram.

My choice is definitely going to be Seamonkey, it just provides more, for less.

That doesn't mean Palemoon and Basilisk is something you should not choose though, as they are simpler and cleaner, which can be a plus to some. They are both offsprings of the same codebase, Basilisk focused on a modern "material" UI and Palemoon being more true to the old Firefox, both great options if you need "just a browser".

If you find inaccuracies or just have a topic you feel I haven't covered, please reach out, so we can make a more full review.

Created 2025-02-21 - Updated 2025-02-21