Pale Moon, a Web Browser with a Retro Vibe
Pale Moon is an excellent Firefox-like browser, reminiscent of “old firefox,” a la “stratus”, a pre-australis GUI style. In fact Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox; the two deviated from one another a dozen years ago, and Pale Moon has more closely kept the feel of Firefox from that time than Firefox itself has done.
The add-on eco-system is not quite as healthy when it comes to Pale Moon but it does offer extensions and provides an add-on database from which to download them. Unfortunately, some of the extensions listed on the website do not work, but in addition to those there are some that can be downloaded from other sources. For instance, uBlock Origin is listed at palemoon.org but must be installed from github. Pentadactyl registers an error (as of Pale Moon 31.1.1) when attempting to install it from Pale Moon’s website but can be installed from a file if compiled from source. Nonetheless Pale Moon has a fairly stout offering of extensions, especially compared to other alternative browsers when considering Pale Moon is not merely a clone, using the same extensions as Firefox or Chrome.
Pale Moon has some definite advantages and has a feel that has not necessarily aged poorly. It retains the menu button in the tab bar, which Firefox had in days of yore. Furthermore there is an option to move the tab bar below the nav bar; for some people this is greatly preferred and yet none of the major browsers offer this feature any more.
According to the Pale Moon website, the browser is focused on “efficiency and customization”.
The “main features” listed on palemoon.org are:
- Optimized for modern processors
- Based on our own optimized layout and rendering engine, “Goanna”!
- Safe: forked from mature Mozilla platform code and regularly updated with the latest security patches
- Secure: Additional security features and security-aware development
- Extensible with a growing number of maintained XUL browser extensions
- Supported by our user community, and fully non-profit
- Privacy-aware: zero ads; no telemetry, spyware or data gathering
- Familiar, efficient, fully customizable interface
- Support for full themes: total freedom for any element’s design
- Support for easily-created lightweight themes (toolbar skins)
- Smooth and speedy page drawing and script processing
- Superior gradients and fonts compared to other rendering engines
- Will continue to support NPAPI plugins like Silverlight, Adobe Flash and Java
- Extensive and growing support for existing web standards
I have found myself using the software several times over the years but it had never been my singular, primary browser. According to wikipedia, Pale Moon has “diverged” from Firefox in the following ways:
- Uses the pre-Australis user interface “Strata” as carried by Firefox during versions 4–28
- Supports extensions built with XUL and XPCOM, which are no longer supported by Firefox
- Supports “Complete Themes”, add-ons which can customize the entire UI of the browser. Firefox no longer supports this and retains limited options for UI customization.
- Supports NPAPI plugins indiscriminately, all of which are no longer supported by Firefox
- Replaces the Gecko browser engine with the Goanna fork
- Always runs in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process program
- Defaults to a customizable start page in cooperation with start.me
- Defaults to DuckDuckGo as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo!
- Uses the IP-API service instead of Google’s for geolocation
Wikipedia goes on to say:
M.C. Straver is the project founder and lead developer. Straver’s first official release of Pale Moon, in 2009, was a rebuild of Firefox 3.5.2 with minor tweaks. Eventually the scope of the project grew, and version 24 became a true fork of Firefox 24 ESR. Starting with version 25, Pale Moon began using its own versioning scheme.
In April of 2021, Straver announced that the next release of Pale Moon, version 29.2.0, would no longer allow the installation of extensions intended for Firefox. The decision was a significant departure from Pale Moon’s previous, decade-long support for Firefox addons.
Pale Moon is available for Windows and Linux.
