Pale Moon is an Open Source, Goanna-based web browser available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Android, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!
Pale Moon offers you a browsing experience in a browser completely built from its own, independently developed source that has been forked off from Firefox/Mozilla code, with carefully selected features and optimizations to improve the browsers speed, resource use, stability and user experience, while offering full customization and a growing collection of extensions and themes to make the browser truly your own.
Features:
- Optimized for modern processors
- Based on proprietary optimized layout engine (Goanna)
- Safe: forked from mature Mozilla code and regularly updated
- Secure: Additional security features and security-aware development
- Supported by our user community, and fully non-profit
- Familiar, efficient, fully customizable interface
- Support for full themes: total freedom over any elements design
- Support for easily-created lightweight themes (skins)
- Smooth and speedy page drawing and script processing
- Increased stability: experience fewer browser crashes
- Support for many Firefox extensions
- Support for a growing number of Pale Moon exclusive extensions
- Extensive and growing support for HTML5 and CSS3
- Many customization and configuration options
Pale Moon 28.0 release notes:
This is a new major milestone in Pale Moon"s release history. Pale Moon 28.0 is based on the Unified XUL Platform which has been forked off from Mozilla"s mozilla-central at a point before Rust and Quantum to continue focus on the XUL interface language and traditional browser extensions. Many thousands of things have changed since the v27 (AKA "Tycho") versions, which can"t possibly all be listed here. Instead, the most pertinent improvements in this new release are highlighted here:
Pale Moon 28.0 changelog:
- SpiderMonkey update: The JavaScript engine has received a major upgrade and now supports all landmark features from the ECMAScript standards as carried by mainstream browsers. This should put an end to the increasing JavaScript issues we"ve seen due to web frameworks not being browser-agnostic in that respect, or the browser not supporting what websites expect.
- Goanna update: The layout and rendering engine (Goanna) has been updated to its 4th generation (version 4.*) which brings with it improved compatibility with "trendy" CSS styling techniques that build on a few very specific features (e.g. CSS Grid). Goanna continues to build on tried-and-tested software fallbacks in case hardware acceleration can"t be used, and Linux remote desktop users can continue to leverage xrender for speedy remote screen updates in Pale Moon.
- DOM enhancements: Enhancements in the Document Object Model provides websites with updated APIs to perform their tasks. (e.g. Fetch, WebAnimations, WebCrypto, HTML Input Element Extensions, etc.)
- Media enhancements: Our media back-end update is, for all intents and purposes, complete. MSE media streaming (for MP4) should be compatible with all major players on the market now. MSE for WebM is still disabled by default due to some compatibility issues that need to be examined, but you may enable this in preferences to e.g. allow 4k video playback on some sites that only offer UHD in WebM format. We now also support playback of FLAC-encoded audio.
- New: WebGL2 support! Pale Moon now supports the WebGL2 standard for enhanced graphical experiences in 2D and 3D.
- Devtools have been given a refresh. Just in case you thought they weren"t extensive enough yet, some new categories have been added to inspect and manipulate all aspects of web content.
- Updates to the login manager: Login credentials can now be stored specifically with or without a user name, and selected individually. This is a behavior change from previous, and clicking a password field can now pop-up a selection list of user names for which passwords are stored (if multiple credentials are saved). Clicking the appropriate login name (or date-stamped version if no name is present) will fill in the accompanying password.
Pale Moon 28.0 continues to support:
- NPAPI plugins.
- Complete themes as well as lightweight themes.
- A fully customizable interface like before. Australis (like seen in Basilisk) is not used.
- XUL overlay, bootstrapped and (deprecated) Jetpack extensions (collectively called "legacy extensions" by Mozilla).
- Pale Moon 28.0 does not include any DRM in the browser (people needing this can use e.g. the Silverlight plugin to play protected content), even though the platform we build on supports it.
Download: Pale Moon (32-bit) | Portable 32-bit | ~30.0 MB (Freeware)
Download: Pale Moon (64-bit) | Portable 64-bit
Links: Pale Moon Homepage | Add-ons | Themes | Extensions