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 32 running on macOS Sonoma | |
| Developer(s) | M.C. Straver[1] Moonchild Productions[2] |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 4 October 2009 |
| Stable release | 33.2.0[3]  / 18 June 2024 |
| Repository | https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon |
| 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 10.7 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 |
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
editPale 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]
Unified XUL Platform (UXP)
editPale 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]
Supported platforms
editWindows 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] macOS on Intel and ARM processors is supported.[23] FreeBSD is 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
editPale 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]
Notable forks
editMyPal 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 codebase.[40]
New Moon is another fork of Pale Moon which supports Windows XP.[39]
