browser features and capabilities

Over the years, many browsers have been developed in the world. Some of them are gaining popularity, while others disappear before they are born. But there are also those that are not well known to the IT community, not to mention ordinary users, but, nevertheless, have been afloat for many years.

One such browser is Pale Moon, which can be called a fork of Mozilla Firefox. It is open source, distributed by Moonchild Productions, and available for both Windows and Linux. Under the cut – general details, as well as detailed information about the new version. By the way, if you work with this browser, tell us what your impressions are. Interested in both advantages and disadvantages.

Why was it created

The developers claim that Pale Moon is designed to work on weak devices, where the same Firefox will either not work at all, or it will, but it will be extremely slow. Therefore, the browser code is optimized, the developers have added several improvements to achieve relatively fast work. At the same time, the browser has extended support for modern processors. The developers claim that the browser is about 15-25% faster than Firefox, depending on the platform it is running on.

Due to the fact that Pale Moon is based on Firefox, most of the classic extensions are compatible with it. An interesting point – unlike Firefox, the developers plan to keep the browser compatible with plugins that use NPAPI. Also, extensions that use XUL and binary XPCOM components will work.

In the browser, unlike Firefox, there is no ActiveX, parental control, Accessibility features, PDF.js component, WebRTC. No inspector, scanning files after downloading. As for the engine, this is Goanna, a fork of the Gecko engine.

The developers decided to stick to the classic organization of the interface. This is also different from Firefox, which uses Australis starting from version 29. Customization is supported – several tools are provided for this.

Here is what the developers themselves say about their browser:

It is secure because it is based on the Mozilla platform code base, which is regularly updated with the latest security patches.

Supported by a fairly large community, the project is non-commercial.

The personal data of users and the users themselves are protected. No ads, no telemetry, no spyware or other data-gathering tools.

Support for Silverlight, Flash and Java.

Support for most existing web standards.

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When was the latest version released

Total

a few days ago

so the project is definitely developing, and quite actively.

From innovations

it is worth highlighting the following points:

The developers decided to return support for old unmodified add-ons to Firefox. Previously, Pale Moon had its own browser ID, but now the project team has decided to use the Firefox ID. This is done to ensure the most complete compatibility with old add-ons that are left without support. It is worth noting that earlier add-ons for Firefox had to be adapted so that they could function under the control of the new browser. As mentioned above, both Pale Moon-specific XUL add-ons and Firefox-specific XUL add-ons are supported.

But support for the UXP platform (Unified XUL Platform). She previously developed a fork of Firefox components from the Mozilla Central repository, freed from bindings to Rust code and not including the developments of the Quantum project. Instead of this platform, the project team decided to use the GRE (Goanna Runtime Environment) environment, which is based on more current Gecko engine code. Its peculiarity is that the authors have cleared the code from unsupported components and platforms.

A new GPC (Global Privacy Control) mechanism has appeared. It became a replacement for “DNT” (Do Not Track). Its advantage is that it allows you to inform sites about the prohibition of the sale of personal data and their use to track preferences and track user movements.