Google's search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete - or even survive,
The point is that they forked an older version of Gecko and have been maintaining it with a small team ever since - and it still works reasonably well.
Is its security great? At least in the past they made great efforts to keep up with CVEs, but they don’t pump it full of money and talented individuals - so I’m doubtful that the security is great. Is it actively exploited? I doubt anybody would bother.
Am I endorsing Pale Moon? No, but it’s still an impressive effort even if I disagree with a lot of their choices.
If Palemoon can still run the bulk of the web on a forked version of the old firefox engine, I doubt you’d notice anything breaking in the short term.
Palemoon’s last update was a month ago
Here’s a version from 11 years ago though
https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/releases/tag/24.5.1_beta4
The point is that they forked an older version of Gecko and have been maintaining it with a small team ever since - and it still works reasonably well.
Is its security great? At least in the past they made great efforts to keep up with CVEs, but they don’t pump it full of money and talented individuals - so I’m doubtful that the security is great. Is it actively exploited? I doubt anybody would bother.
Am I endorsing Pale Moon? No, but it’s still an impressive effort even if I disagree with a lot of their choices.