How does this differ from Pale Moon? Are the developers/maintainers now working on 2 different browsers?
Basilisk exists "to demonstrate and make use of the [UXP] platform," according to Basilisk's Github site. Moonchild and/or Tobin (can't remember the exact posts) said here in the forum that it will continue to exist, essentially as a perpetual beta, because it will continue to be used to demonstrate the capabilities of the platform.
Pale Moon will continue to exist, and is currently in the process of being ported to UXP. That will eventually be released as Pale Moon version 28. Once this version of Pale Moon has been released, Basilisk will continue to exist as a separate browser. And Pale Moon will also continue to exist as a separate browser.
> by adesh » Fri, 06 Apr 2018, 17:23 Okay. You know what Pale Moon is, right? It is a browser built from some old (how old? scour forum) Mozilla platform code which does not have latest shinies built-in. Note that old does not mean useless and insecure, you know that. It's because Moonchild makes sure important security fixes released by Mozilla are ported timely. Also, Pale Moon has many extra modifications done on top of Mozilla codebase, most notable of which is its classic UI.
Now, Basilisk. Well, Basilisk is also a browser, just like Pale Moon (and Firefox), built from relatively newer (something around FF 52) Mozilla codebase. Again, this is built after making some substantial modifications to the codebase - e.g. after removing devilish pieces of code and putting in some necessary optimizations. However, Moonchild decided not to change the "look and feel" of this browser, so it is very similar to Firefox in look and feel (and feature set too). That means most of the changes are made under the hood.
That sounds suspicious. If it's an optimization, it should be contributed upstream to benefit all the users of Gecko/Firefox.
Or are these optimizations to XUL-only codepaths that are not present/executed in Firefox anymore?
"We already have CSS table layouts... Why is this suddenly needed? why would sites switch to it? It makes no sense. It wasn't important enough to implement in any browser for the past 6 years so there's no real reason why websites would suddenly want to swap to it." (on the CSS Grid spec)
It doesn't bode well for support for other, newer standards, like variable fonts.
Their approach to development is to implement things when there's enough user demand e.g CSS Masking, which someone from the community is working in.