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 28.17.0 changes/fixes:
- Changed the way dates and times are formatted in the UI to properly adhere to the user"s regional settings in the O.S.
- Re-enabled the DOM Filesystem API for web compatibility.
- Moved the global user-agent override to the networking component. See implementation notes.
- Worked around crashes and run-time issues with module scripts. See implementation notes.
- Fixed a website layout issue with table-styled elements potentially overlapping when placed inside a flexbox.
- Fixed some code logic issues with websockets.
- Fixed a regression when waking the computer from standby causing high CPU usage in some uncommon situations.
- Updated the list of prohibited ports the browser can use. See implementation notes.
- Updated root certificates.
- Windows: Changed the way downloaded files without an extension are handled. See implementation notes.
- Mac-beta: Improved version detection of MacOS including Big Sur.
- Security issues addressed: CVE-2020-26978 and CVE-2020-35112.
- Unified XUL Platform Mozilla Security Patch Summary: 2 fixed, 1 deferred to the next release, 16 not applicable.
Implementation notes:
- The global user-agent override was moved to the networking component where it is actually implemented. The new preference name is network.http.useragent.global_override. Please note that using a blanket override is normally (very) counterproductive and does not, in fact, help much with privacy. It would also override the compatibility modes (Native/Gecko/Firefox) in Pale Moon. As such, the browser will now warn you if the user-agent is globally overridden (in preferences) and allow you to easily reset that override and re-enable the various compatibility modes.
- Module scripting caused some persistent and very hard to track browser crashes that we"ve narrowed down to a specific optimization in the JavaScript JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler (IonMonkey). This optimization is now disabled by default but if you need that little extra performance (usually only noticed in very optimized code or some benchmarks) then you can re-enable it, trading in stability, by setting the new preference javascript.options.ion.inlining to true.
- Prohibited ports: Pale Moon maintains a blacklist of ports the browser may normally not connect to on servers, to mitigate abusive web scripting employing your browser as an attack bot on servers (e.g. by connecting to mail servers or what not), NAT slipstreaming, and similar security issues. To more thoroughly prevent known abusable ports on servers, this list was extended with a number of additional default ports for various non-http protocols.
- Downloaded files without a file extension: When a file without an extension is downloaded, we will now open the download folder where you may choose to take any specific action manually, instead of trying to execute it as a program or through an associated program.
Download: Pale Moon (32-bit) | Portable 32-bit | ~40.0 MB (Freeware)
Download: Pale Moon (64-bit) | Portable 64-bit
Links: Pale Moon Homepage | Add-ons | Themes | Extensions