Anonymous
Would it be worth hanging out until May to see how ESR 60.0 behaves before making a decision?
As everything stands right now, I would say pretty well anything but firefox ESR as the default. Probably quantum ahead of palemoon if they were the options, just because of greater support for currently maintained addons.
But this may change as of May, when the current ESR (based on Firefox 52, from March last year) will be replaced when Firefox ESR v60.0 is released. It will based upon Firefox 60, and should bring many performance benefits along with it.
Observations :
This is all based on what it does on my eeepc. (900MHz Celeron M – 2 Gig ram).
2 gig is plenty of ram for these purposes, but the single core, not so much, so I would happily trade a little more RAM to lower CPU usage. (This is an example of a cpu bound system such as mroot was talking about).
Firefox quantum and palemoon both load the page faster than ESR, with lower CPU usage. For some reason ESR was also using a fair bit of CPU at idle. Palemoon and quantum are in the same neighborhood for cpu usage, but palemoon does have a slight edge in memory usage.
Usage : Asus eeepc – single core 900MHz Celeron M – 2 Gig ram
Immediately after booting to ice-wm desktop and manually enabling wifi and conky.
Total memory used : 45,7M
CPU at idle : ~2%
For each browser, clean reboot to ice-wm desktop, (manually turn on wifi & enable conky), and go to antixlinux.com
Firefox ESR
CPU while loading page : stuck at 100%
CPU at idle after page finishes loading : ~20%
Total memory used : 177M
Firefox Quantum
CPU while loading page : ~90%
CPU at idle after page finishes loading : ~2-5%
Total memory used : 196M
Palemoon
CPU while loading page : ~90%
CPU at idle after page finishes loading : ~2-5%
Total memory used : 162M