Wikipedia

Pale Moon

For other uses, see Pale Moon (disambiguation).

Pale Moon is a free and open-source web browser licensed under the MPL-2.0 with an emphasis on customization. Its motto is "Your browser, Your way." There are official releases for Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux.

Pale Moon
Developer(s)M.C. Straver[1]
Moonchild Productions[2]
Initial release4 October 2009; 15 years ago (2009-10-04)
Stable release
33.4.0.1[3] Edit this on Wikidata / 9 October 2024; 34 days ago (9 October 2024)
Repositoryhttps://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon
Written inC, C++, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, XML User Interface Language
EnginesGoanna, SpiderMonkey
Operating systemWindows 7 SP1 or later
FreeBSD 13.0 or later
OS X Lion or later
Linux
Contributed builds for various platforms[4]
PlatformIA-32, x86-64, ARM64[5]
Available in37 languages[6]
List of languages
Arabic (ar), Bulgarian (bg), Traditional Chinese (zh-TW), Simplified Chinese (zh-CN), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Dutch (nl), American English (en-US), British English (en-GB), Filipino (tl), Finnish (fi), French (fr), Galician (gl), Greek (el), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Icelandic (is), Japanese (ja), Korean (ko), Polish (pl), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), European Portuguese (pt-PT), Romanian (ro), Russian (ru) Argentine Spanish (es-AR), Mexican Spanish (es-M), Serbian [cyrillic] (sr), Castilian Spanish (es-ES), Slovak (sk), Slovenian (sl), Swedish (sv-SE), Thai (th), Turkish (tr), Ukrainian (uk)
TypeWeb browser
News aggregator
License
Websitewww.palemoon.org Edit this on Wikidata

Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subsequently diverged. The main differences are the user interface, add-on support, and running in single-process mode. Pale Moon retains the user interface of Firefox from versions 4 to 28 and supports legacy Firefox add-ons.

Features

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Pale Moon's default user interface is the one that was used by Firefox from versions 4 to 28, known as Strata.[8] It always runs in single process mode and uses a rendering engine known as Goanna.[9] The browser has its own set of extensions[10] and supports legacy Firefox add-ons built with XUL and XPCOM,[11][12] which Firefox dropped support for.[13] NPAPI plugins are also supported. The browser's entire user interface can be customized by complete themes and lightweight themes are also available.[14] Pale Moon's default search engine is DuckDuckGo and it uses the IP-API service instead of Google for geolocation.[15] The browser is known to be lightweight on resource usage.[16][17]

Pale Moon has no telemetry or data collection.[10][9]

Unified XUL Platform (UXP)

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Pale Moon is built upon the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), a cross-platform, multimedia application base that was forked from Mozilla code prior to the introduction of Firefox Quantum.[18][19] UXP is a fork of the Firefox 52 ESR platform that was created in 2017 due to XUL/XPCOM support being removed from the Firefox codebase.[20] It includes the Goanna layout and rendering engine, a fork of Mozilla's Gecko engine.[21] Moonchild Productions develops UXP independently alongside Pale Moon.[22]

 
Pale Moon running on Ubuntu Linux, Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7

Supported platforms

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Windows 7 SP1 and above are supported, along with any modern Linux distribution as long as the processors support SSE2 and there is at least 1 GB of RAM.[10] OS X Lion and above on Apple–Intel architecture and macOS Big Sur and above on Apple silicon processors are supported.[23] FreeBSD 13.0 and above are also supported.

Previously, Windows XP and Vista were supported, but are no longer supported from versions 27[24][25] and 28[26][27] onward, respectively.

An Android build was developed in 2014[28] but was cancelled by the developer due to lack of community involvement a year later.[29]

History

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Pale Moon was created and is primarily maintained by one developer, M.C. Straver.[30] Prior to version 26, Pale Moon used the same rendering engine as Firefox, known as Gecko. With version 26 in 2016, Pale Moon switched to using the Goanna rendering engine, a fork of Gecko.[21][31] In 2017, the Pale Moon team began the Unified XUL Platform due to upcoming changes in the Mozilla codebase. The Basilisk web browser was developed to serve as a "reference application" for development before Pale Moon switched over to using it.[19]

In 2019, hackers breached a Pale Moon archive server and infected the older installers with malware; then-current Pale Moon releases were not affected.[32] The breach took place between April and June, and the affected server was taken down on July 9 when it was discovered. [33][34]

In 2022, a change in direction for Pale Moon was announced to improve website and add-on capability.[35] This resulted in version 30, which used the Firefox GUID to improve compatibility with legacy Firefox extensions and started increased development of UXP and Goanna.[36] A few days later, version 30 had to be recalled due to one of the developers causing issues before exiting the project, such as messing up the add-ons server. Version 31 was issued in response to fix these issues.[37]

 
Pale Moon 8

Notable forks

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MyPal was formerly a fork of Pale Moon that supported Windows XP, but after issues with the lead developer of Pale Moon regarding licensing, it was rebased on Firefox Quantum.[38][39] Versions of MyPal afterwards are a fork of the Firefox 68-78 codebase.[40]

New Moon is another fork of Pale Moon which supports Windows XP.[39]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 13 March 2017. Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  2. ^ M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 9 April 2020. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
  3. ^ "Release Notes". Retrieved 9 October 2024.
  4. ^ "Contributed builds of Pale Moon". Pale Moon. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
  5. ^ "Pale Moon - Technical Details". www.palemoon.org.
  6. ^ "Pale Moon language packs". Moonchild Productions. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
  7. ^ "Pale Moon redistribution", Official website, retrieved 10 February 2017
  8. ^ Proven, Liam. "Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson". The Register. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  9. ^ a b Ganguly, Suparna (24 March 2022). "5 Lesser-Known Open Source Web Browsers for Linux in 2022 | Linux Journal". www.linuxjournal.com. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  10. ^ a b c "Review: Is Pale Moon a viable privacy browser?". Avoid the Hack (avoidthehack!). 19 September 2021. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  11. ^ Sanchez-Rola, Iskander; Santos, Igor; Balzarotti, Davide (16 August 2017), "Extension Breakdown: Security Analysis of Browsers Extension Resources Control Policies", USENIX Security Symposium (26): 680–682, ISBN 978-1-931971-40-9
  12. ^ "Avoid The Hack: 6 Best Privacy Browser Picks for Windows | Avoid the Hack (avoidthehack!)". avoidthehack!. 1 June 2023. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  13. ^ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven (21 September 2015). "Mozilla drops XUL, changes Firefox APIs; developers unhappy". ZDNET. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  14. ^ Serea, Razvan (21 September 2023). "Pale Moon 29.4.0.2". Neowin. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  15. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (11 August 2016). "Pale Moon to remove Google Search completely - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  16. ^ Abdul, Shan (13 November 2023). "7 Lightweight Windows Browsers Tested for RAM Usage: Which Is the Best?". MUO. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  17. ^ Siyal, Gaurav (8 February 2022). "The 7 Best Lightweight Web Browsers for Linux". MUO. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  18. ^ Richardson, John (2018). Introductory XUL (7th ed.). Lulu.com. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-304-60870-3.
  19. ^ a b Larabel, Michael (17 November 2017). "Pale Moon Project Rolls Out The Basilisk Browser Project". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  20. ^ Meiert, Jens (7 April 2020). The Web Development Glossary. Frontend Dogma.
  21. ^ a b Brinkmann, Martin (22 June 2015). "Pale Moon to switch from Gecko to Goanna rendering engine - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
  22. ^ Abdul, Shan (13 November 2023). "7 Lightweight Windows Browsers Tested for RAM Usage: Which Is the Best?". MUO. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
  23. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (22 March 2023). "Pale Moon 32.1.0 launches with major web compatibility improvements - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  24. ^ "End of Windows XP support in Pale Moon". 29 September 2017. Archived from the original on 29 September 2017. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
  25. ^ "Pale Moon - Release Notes". 27 November 2016. Archived from the original on 27 November 2016. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
  26. ^ "Pale Moon 28.0.0 released!". 16 August 2018. Archived from the original on 2 July 2019.
  27. ^ "Pale Moon - Release Notes". 24 August 2018. Archived from the original on 24 August 2018. Retrieved 18 June 2024.
  28. ^ Kondrat, Tomek (22 July 2014). "Pale Moon Browser Ported to Android". XDA Developers. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  29. ^ "I may have to let Pale Moon for Android go. :(". 16 April 2015.
  30. ^ Hoffman, Chris (22 February 2018). "Why You Shouldn't Use Firefox Forks Like Waterfox, Pale Moon, or Basilisk". How-To Geek. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  31. ^ Peers, Nick (26 January 2016). "Pale Moon adopts new Goanna browser engine, fine-tunes interface". BetaNews. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  32. ^ Cimpanu, Catalin (19 July 2019). "Pale Moon says hackers added malware to older browser versions". ZDNET. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  33. ^ Gatlan, Sergiu (10 July 2019). "Hackers Infect Pale Moon Archive Server With a Malware Dropper". Bleeping Computer. Bleeping Computer LLC. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  34. ^ Kovacs, Eduard (11 July 2019). "Archive Server of Pale Moon Open Source Browser Hacked". securityweek.com. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
  35. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (17 December 2021). "Pale Moon Project announces change of direction - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  36. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (18 March 2022). "Pale Moon 30.0 out with important changes - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  37. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (10 May 2022). "Pale Moon 31 is out now - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  38. ^ Pardo, Lisandro (2022). "MyPal: Un navegador para Windows XP en 2022 – NeoTeo". www.neoteo.com (in Spanish). Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  39. ^ a b Bolaji, Ola-Hassan (7 February 2023). "10 Best Browsers for Windows XP That Still Work in 2024". Windows Report. Archived from the original on 15 May 2023. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  40. ^ Proven, Liam (24 July 2023). "Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
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