Developer(s) M.C. Straver Development status Active | Initial release October 2009 (2009-10) Written in C/C++, CSS, XUL | |
 | ||
Stable release 27.2.0 (March 18, 2017; 2 days ago (2017-03-18)) [±] Operating system | ||
Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customizability, as expressed by its motto "Your browser, Your way". There are official releases for both Microsoft Windows and Linux, an unofficial build for macOS, and contributed builds for various platforms.
Contents
Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox with key differences, including add-ons and user interface. In particular, Pale Moon will continue to support the long-standing XUL and XPCOM add-on infrastructure that Firefox has deprecated and will remove entirely in version 57. Pale Moon has also retained the fully customizable user interface of the Firefox version 4–28 era, while updating other parts of the browser with newer Firefox code.
Features
Pale Moon has diverged from Firefox in a number of ways:
Performance
Pale Moon is built with a number of compiler optimizations designed to improve browser performance. In 2013 Pale Moon performed more slowly than Firefox in the ClubCompy Real-World Benchmark, scoring 8,168 and 9,344 out of 50,000 possible points, respectively, though the TechRepublic reporter cautioned that the benchmark was not necessarily indicative of real-world browser performance. In a 2016 browser comparison test by Ghacks, Pale Moon had the smallest memory footprint after opening 10 different websites in separate tabs. However, in the same report Pale Moon scored the worst in the Mozilla Kraken, Google Octane, 32-bit RoboHornet and second-to-worst 64-bit RoboHornet benchmarks and hung during the JetStream JavaScript benchmark.
Platform support
Pale Moon does not support older processors without the SSE2 instruction set. Version 26.5 was the final version to support Windows XP.
History
M.C. Straver is the project founder and lead developer. Straver's first official release of Pale Moon was in 2009, which was a rebuild of Firefox 3.5.2 with tweaked compiler settings. Eventually the scope of the project grew, and version 24 became a true fork of Firefox 24 ESR. Starting with version 25, Pale Moon uses a completely independent versioning scheme.
Pale Moon 27.0, released in November 2016, was a major rebase of the core browser code to Firefox 38 ESR, which added HTTP/2, DirectX 11, MSE/DASH, and JavaScript ES6 capabilities. Add-on support remains almost entirely unchanged, with a slight reduction of Jetpack compatibility.
Pale Moon for Android is a distinct development effort that is no longer maintained. First released in 2014, Straver announced the following year that it would likely be abandoned due to lack of community involvement. The final release was 25.9.6.
License
Pale Moon's source code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 except for parts relating to branding. Similarly, to ensure quality redistribution of officially branded Pale Moon binaries is only permissible under specific circumstances. The project's name and logo are trademarked and copyrighted by Straver and cannot be used without the author's prior permission.
Market share
According to StatCounter, Pale Moon has a 0.02% share of the desktop web browser market for February 2017.