| Pale Moon | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Pale Moon 32 running onmacOS Sonoma | |
| Developers | M.C. Straver[1] Moonchild Productions[2] |
| Initial release | 4 October 2009; 16 years ago (2009-10-04) |
| Stable release | |
| Written in | C,C++,Cascading Style Sheets,JavaScript,XML User Interface Language |
| Engines | Goanna,SpiderMonkey |
| Operating system | Windows 7 SP1 or later FreeBSD 13.0 or later OS X Lion or later Linux Contributed builds for various platforms[4] |
| Platform | IA-32,x86-64,ARM64[5] |
| Available in | 37 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) | |
| Type | Web browser News aggregator |
| License |
|
| Website | www |
| Repository | repo |
Pale Moon is afree and open-sourceweb browser licensed under theMPL-2.0 with an emphasis on customization. There are official releases forMicrosoft Windows,FreeBSD,macOS, andLinux.
Pale Moon originated as afork ofFirefox, but has subsequently diverged. The main differences are theuser 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.
Its motto is "Your browser, Your way."
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 asGoanna.[9] The browser has its own set of extensions[10] and supports legacy Firefox add-ons built withXUL andXPCOM,[11][12] which Firefox dropped support for in 2017 with version 57.[13] NPAPI plugins, such asAdobe Flash Player, 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 isDuckDuckGo 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 notelemetry or data collection.[10][9]
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 ofFirefox Quantum.[18][19] UXP is a fork of the Firefox 52ESR 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'sGecko engine.[21] Moonchild Productions develops UXP independently alongside Pale Moon.[22]
Windows 7 SP1 and above are supported, along with any modernLinux distribution as long as the processors supportAVX (64-bit) orSSE2 (32-bit)[23] and there is at least 1 GB of RAM.[10]OS X Lion and above onApple–Intel architecture andmacOS Big Sur and above onApple silicon processors are supported.[24]FreeBSD 13.0 and above are also supported.
Previously,Windows XP andVista were supported, but are no longer supported from versions 27[25][26] and 28[27][28] onward, respectively.
AnAndroid build was developed in 2014[29] but was cancelled by the developer due to lack of community involvement a year later.[30]
Pale Moon was created and is primarily maintained by one developer, M.C. Straver.[31] 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][32] In 2017, the Pale Moon team began the Unified XUL Platform due to upcoming changes in the Mozilla codebase. TheBasilisk 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.[33] The breach took place between April and June, and the affected server was taken down on July 9 when it was discovered.[34][35]
In 2022, a change in direction for Pale Moon was announced to improve website and add-on capability.[36] 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.[37] 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 and taking the entire palemoon.org domain off-line.[38] Version 31 was issued in response to fix these issues.[39]
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