Pale Moon

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For other uses, see Pale Moon (disambiguation).

Pale Moon
Pale Moon browser icon.png
W10-PaleMoon26-Wikipedia.jpg
Developer(s)M.C. Straver[1]
Moonchild Productions[2]
Initial releaseOctober 4, 2009; 12 years ago (2009-10-04)
Stable release29.4.5 (23 March 2022; 0 days ago (2022-03-23)[3])
Repositoryhttps://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon
Written inC, C++, JavaScript
EnginesGoanna, SpiderMonkey
Operating systemWindows 7 or later, Linux (contributed builds for various platforms[4])
PlatformIA-32, x86-64[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
  • Source code: MPL-2.0
  • Binaries: Proprietary freeware, or MPL-2.0 if branding is removed[7]
Websitewww.palemoon.org Edit this on Wikidata

Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customizability; its motto is "Your browser, Your way".[8] There are official releases for Microsoft Windows and Linux,[8] as well as contributed builds for various platforms.[4]

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 highly customizable user interface of the Firefox version 4–28 era.[9] It also continues to support some types of add-ons and plugins that are no longer supported by Firefox,[10][11] including NPAPI plugins such as Flash Player.[12][13] Since version 29.2.0, Pale Moon discontinued support for extensions intended for Firefox,[14] though this restriction will eventually be removed.[15]

Overview[]

Pale Moon 8 running on Windows XP (no longer supported)
Unbranded logo

Pale Moon has diverged from Firefox in a number of ways:

  • Uses the pre-Australis user interface ("Strata") as carried by Firefox during versions 4-28[9]
  • Supports extensions built with XUL and XPCOM,[9] which are no longer supported by Firefox[11]
  • Supports "Complete Themes", add-ons which can customize the entire UI of the browser.[16] Firefox no longer supports this and retains limited options for UI customization.[11]
  • Supports NPAPI plugins indiscriminately,[9] all of which are no longer supported by Firefox[17][18][19]
  • Replaces the Gecko browser engine with the Goanna fork
  • Always runs in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process program[20][21]
  • Defaults to a customizable start page in cooperation with start.me[22]
  • Defaults to DuckDuckGo as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo!
  • Uses the IP-API service instead of Google's for geolocation[23]

License[]

Pale Moon's source code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 except for parts relating to branding. To ensure quality, redistribution of officially branded Pale Moon binaries is only permissible under specific circumstances.[7] The name and logo are trademarked by the project founder and cannot be used without his prior permission.[24]

Old platforms[]

Official support for Windows XP ended with Pale Moon 25.0.0.[25] Two speciality builds continued to support XP for some time: PM4XP, which was discontinued after release 25.7.0,[26][27] and a special build intended for devices with Intel Atom processors, which was discontinued with the release of Pale Moon 27.0.0.[28][29]

Pale Moon 27.9.4 was the last release to officially support Windows Vista[30][31] as well as the final community-contributed release for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.[32]

The official releases do not support older processors without the SSE2 instruction set.[5]

Goanna Runtime Environment[]

Pale Moon is built with the Goanna Runtime Environment (GRE),[33] a cross-platform, multimedia application base with ancestry in Mozilla code. It includes the namesake Goanna[34] layout and rendering engine, a fork of Mozilla's Gecko engine. Moonchild Productions develops the GRE alongside Pale Moon.[35]

UXP[]

The GRE is an evolution of the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), the previous application platform upon which Pale Moon was built. UXP itself is a fork of the Firefox 52 ESR platform,[36] created in 2017 to address the imminent death of XUL/XPCOM technology in the Firefox codebase.[37][11] With the release of Pale Moon 30, Moonchild Productions has discontinued UXP in favor of the GRE,[38] citing a lack of necessary community involvement.[39]

Basilisk[]

The Basilisk web browser is Pale Moon's discontinued sibling. First released in 2017, it was intended as a development vessel for the then-new UXP platform.[40] Basilisk includes additional features not found in Pale Moon and carries the Firefox 29-56 era interface ("Australis").

Releases are available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.[41] An unofficial version for macOS was maintained up to June 11, 2020, but was eventually discontinued on March 10, 2021.[42]

Basilisk's support for add-ons and NPAPI plugins is largely similar to that of Pale Moon's, though notable differences exist. Basilisk's user interface and version number closely resembles Firefox 52 ESR, which can improve compatibility when attempting to install add-ons intended for Firefox. For some time, Basilisk included experimental support for Firefox WebExtensions, which Pale Moon has never supported, but this was removed in February 2019.[43] Additionally, unlike Pale Moon, Basilisk has technological support for Widevine DRM[44][45] and WebRTC.[46] Both are currently non-functional, however, due to a lack of licensing from Google-controlled parties.[47]

In December of 2021, Basilisk was discontinued, and an open offer was made by Moonchild Productions to transfer ownership of the project to any legitimate and reasonable developer who would be able to maintain it.[48] It is currently unclear if Basilisk development will be continued by any group or individual. The final official Basilisk release was 2022.01.27.[49]

History[]

Origins[]

M.C. Straver is the project founder and lead developer.[1] 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.[37] Starting with version 25, Pale Moon began using its own versioning scheme.[50]

Diverging from Firefox[]

Pale Moon 27 (codenamed "Tycho") was a major re-fork of the core browser code to Firefox 38 Extended Support Release, which added HTTP/2, DirectX 11, MSE/DASH, and JavaScript ES6 capabilities.[51] Add-on support remained almost entirely unchanged, with a slight reduction of Jetpack compatibility.[9][52]

In 2017, the Pale Moon team began the Unified XUL Platform project, seeking to fork Firefox's platform code one final time, before Mozilla fully removed the XUL/XPCOM technology. A new browser, Basilisk, was created as a "reference application" for developing UXP.[53][54] Like Pale Moon, Basilisk is a fork of Firefox with substantial divergence from Mozilla's browser.[55] The first incarnation of UXP (codenamed "Möbius") was based on Firefox 53-55, but complications arose with building non-Firefox-based applications on the new platform, such as Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. In early 2018, UXP development was restarted with Firefox 52 ESR as the new basis, ultimately resulting in Pale Moon 28 later that year.[37]

Data breach incident[]

On 10 July 2019, a data breach was reported involving the Pale Moon archive server. This breach was discovered on the previous day, though it is unknown when it actually occurred. It is estimated to have occurred somewhere between April and June 2019. The archived releases of Pale Moon Pale Moon 27.6.2 and older were infected with malware. Basilisk and then-current Pale Moon releases were not affected. Straver expressed his distrust in the archive server host to provide adequate security and quickly switched to a new host.[56]

New Era[]

In September of 2021, after controversy over third-party forks of Pale Moon and UXP,[57] the publishing of Pale Moon and UXP source code was changed to a cathedral-style of tarballs upon release of binaries, instead of a publicly-available repository.[58] Additionally, preview (unstable) releases were no longer distributed.[59]

In December of 2021, it was announced that Basilisk would be discontinued. Straver made an open offer to any interested, legitimate developer to transfer full ownership of the Basilisk project.[48]

On 17 March 2022, Pale Moon 30 was released alongside the new Goanna Runtime Environment, and the source code to both Pale Moon and its platform was made readily available once again.[60] Two days later, a core developer unexpectedly departed from the Pale Moon project, sabotaging the Pale Moon website and certain browser services in the process.[61][62] Pale Moon 30, which depended upon on the damaged project infrastructure, was recalled on 21 March 2022 and re-scheduled for a new release after the necessary services had been restored.[63] An extra update to Pale Moon 29.4 was released for the interim period.[64]

Discontinued Platforms[]

Pale Moon for Android was a distinct development effort that is no longer maintained.[65] First released in 2014,[66] Straver announced the following year that it would likely be abandoned due to lack of community involvement.[67] The final release was 25.9.6.[68]

Unofficial builds existed for macOS.[69]

On 10 March 2021, all Apple Macintosh support was dropped due to lack of consistency from community developers for the Mac platform.[70]

Benchmarks[]

In 2013, Pale Moon was a bit slower than Firefox in the ClubCompy Real-World Benchmark, with the browsers respectively scoring 8,168 and 9,344 points out of a possible 50,000.[71] In a 2016 browser comparison test by Ghacks, Pale Moon version 25 had the smallest memory footprint after opening 10 different websites in separate tabs.[72] However, in the same report Pale Moon scored bottom in the Mozilla Kraken, Google Octane, 32-bit RoboHornet tests and second-to-last in the 64-bit RoboHornet benchmarks. Whilst other browsers hung during some tests, Pale Moon only hung during the JetStream JavaScript benchmark.[72]

Current (UXP) versions[which?] of Pale Moon score comparatively to other browsers in benchmarks, showing, for example, no significant difference on the Sunspider benchmark compared to Firefox Quantum.[citation needed]

Straver has remarked that the role of benchmark tests is questionable, stating that they "can't be used to draw hard (or regularly even any) conclusions. Plain and simple: they are an indication, nothing more. They serve well if you compare closely related siblings (e.g. Firefox and Iceweasel) or different builds of the exact same browser, to get a relative performance difference between the two on the limited subset of what is actually tested, but that's about as far as it goes."[73]

The questionable role of benchmarking has been corroborated by leading technology experts[74][75] when, for example, Google announced it was retiring its Octane benchmark in 2017,[76] and Mozilla indicating that they "believe these benchmarks are not representative of modern JS code" when introducing WarpBuilder in November 2020, admitting that their new technology "is currently slower than Ion on certain synthetic JS benchmarks such as Octane and Kraken".[77]

Notable Forks[]

Pale Moon has inspired a multitude of contributed and third-party forks, many of which seek to provide Pale Moon on platforms not officially supported by Moonchild Productions.

  • New Moon, by roytam1, is forked from Pale Moon 27 and maintains supports for Windows XP.[78] roytam1 additionally develops the Serpent browser, a fork of Basilisk and the UXP platform that continues to support XP and Vista.[79]
  • Arctic Fox, by wicknix, is another Pale Moon 27 fork which supports Mac OS X 10.6 and Windows XP.[80]
  • Mypal, by Feodor2, maintained support for Windows XP and kept general parity with the latest Pale Moon 28 and 29 releases.[81] Mypal was abandoned in 2021 after significant licensing controversy between its developer and the Pale Moon team over another one of Feodor2's products, Centuary. The event generated great controversy among Pale Moon contributors, users, and speculators,[57][82] ultimately resulting in reduced availability of the Pale Moon source code for some time.[83]
  • White Star, by dbsoft, is a Pale Moon 29 fork for macOS. dbsoft has cited the removal of macOS code from UXP/GRE as a possible end to White Star.[84]

See also[]

  • Waterfox
  • K-Meleon

References[]

  1. ^ a b 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. ^ "Pale Moon – Release Notes". Pale Moon. Retrieved 23 March 2022.
  4. ^ a b "Contributed builds of Pale Moon". Pale Moon. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
  5. ^ a b "Pale Moon - Technical Details". www.palemoon.org.
  6. ^ "Pale Moon language packs". Moonchild Productions. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
  7. ^ a b "Pale Moon redistribution", Official website, retrieved 10 February 2017
  8. ^ a b "The Pale Moon Project homepage". Pale Moon. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  9. ^ a b c d e "Pale Moon future roadmap". Pale Moon. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  10. ^ Needham, Kev (21 August 2015). "The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons". Mozilla Add-ons Blog. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015. Retrieved 7 September 2015.
  11. ^ a b c d Villalobos, Jorge (16 February 2017). "The Road to Firefox 57 – Compatibility Milestones". Mozilla Add-ons Blog. Archived from the original on 17 February 2017. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
  12. ^ Straver (Moonchild), Mark (30 October 2019). "Re: Will Flash player be supported after 2020?". Pale Moon. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
  13. ^ "Pale Moon future roadmap". Pale Moon. Retrieved 18 July 2020. Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, gaming, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes.
  14. ^ "Upcoming 29.2.0 extension support notice". 22 April 2021. Archived from the original on 19 February 2022. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  15. ^ "Re: Please please restore the pale moon guid". 21 March 2022. Archived from the original on 21 March 2022.
  16. ^ "Pale Moon - Add-ons - Themes". addons.palemoon.org.
  17. ^ "NPAPI Plugins in Firefox". 8 October 2015. Archived from the original on 19 February 2022. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  18. ^ "End of support for Adobe Flash". Archived from the original on 19 February 2022. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  19. ^ "Firefox Release Notes". Archived from the original on 19 February 2022. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  20. ^ "Multiprocess Firefox". Mozilla. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
  21. ^ "Multi-process, or: the drawbacks nobody ever talks about". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
  22. ^ Robijn, Arjen (11 February 2015). "Browser Pale Moon Integrates New Personal Start Page" (Press release). Amsterdam: PRWeb.
  23. ^ "Pale Moon 24.3.0 released! - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
  24. ^ "Pale Moon branding information". Official website.
  25. ^ "End of Windows XP support in Pale Moon". Archived from the original on 21 April 2016.
  26. ^ "Pale Moon for Windows XP (32 and 64 bit)". 5 October 2014. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015.
  27. ^ "End of support for PM4XP". 13 July 2015. Archived from the original on 24 April 2017.
  28. ^ "Pale Moon is changing!". 24 October 2016. Archived from the original on 24 April 2017.
  29. ^ "End of Windows XP support in Pale Moon". Archived from the original on 25 November 2016.
  30. ^ "UXP and system requirements". 28 May 2017. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017.
  31. ^ "Pale Moon 28.0.0 released!". 16 August 2018. Archived from the original on 2 July 2019.
  32. ^ WinterClaws; Moonchild (M.C. Straver). "Pale Moon 27.9.4 for Snow Leopard". Pale Moon forum. Post 5 (#p146639) and 11 (#p151480). Retrieved 23 April 2020. It was a bit disheartening to hear that v28.x SL builds will no longer be made but still…" "…Pale Moon 28 does not run on Snow Leopard.
  33. ^ "MoonchildProductions/GRE". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.
  34. ^ "Goanna".
  35. ^ "Release Engineering". Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  36. ^ "UXP vs goanna".
  37. ^ a b c "History of the Pale Moon project". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  38. ^ "Pale Moon 30.0 release announcement". 17 March 2022. Archived from the original on 17 March 2022.
  39. ^ "History of the Pale Moon project". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022. UXP was abandoned as a concept with lack of collaboration and increasing difficulty attracting people actually wanting to help maintain and support a very broad multi-use multi-target platform.
  40. ^ "Basilisk EoL/potential takeover announcement". 24 December 2021. Archived from the original on 15 February 2022. Basilisk was, first and foremost, released as development software to facilitate development of the (then in its early stages) platform code we build our applications on.
  41. ^ M.C. Straver. "Basilisk: requirements". www.basilisk-browser.org. Retrieved 22 November 2017.
  42. ^ "Basilisk on Mac OSX? - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org.
  43. ^ "Basilisk update 2019.02.11". Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  44. ^ "Add support for Widevine 4.9 & 4.10". GitHub. Archived from the original on 27 September 2020. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  45. ^ https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/962 #962 - Add support for Widevine 4.9 & 4.10 - UXP - Pale Moon repositories
  46. ^ "webrtc and telemetry". Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  47. ^ "A change of direction for Pale Moon in 2022 - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  48. ^ a b "Basilisk EoL/potential takeover announcement". 24 December 2021. Archived from the original on 15 February 2022.
  49. ^ "Basilisk updated to the definitive version 2022.01.27". 27 January 2022. Archived from the original on 30 March 2022.
  50. ^ "What is Pale Moon's versioning scheme like?".
  51. ^ "The Future of Pale Moon". palemoon.org.
  52. ^ "Jetpack Style Extensions". Retrieved 10 February 2017.
  53. ^ "First Basilisk version released!". 17 November 2017. Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.
  54. ^ M.C. Straver (20 April 2018). "Basilisk's nature (a small clarification)".
  55. ^ M.C. Straver. "Basilisk features". www.basilisk-browser.org. Retrieved 18 November 2017.
  56. ^ "Moonchild" (M.C. Straver) (10 July 2019). "Data breach post-mortem". Pale Moon forum. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  57. ^ a b "UXP and allied Project Contributors.. Your rights are being violated along with the MPL. - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 26 October 2021.
  58. ^ "UXP and allied Project Contributors.. Your rights are being violated along with the MPL. - Page 7". Pale Moon forums.
  59. ^ Moonchild (5 September 2021). "Unstable channel discontinued". Pale Moon forum.
  60. ^ "MoonchildProductions/GRE". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.
  61. ^ "Outage post-mortem, and apologies". 21 March 2022. Archived from the original on 22 March 2022.
  62. ^ "[TOBIN] I'm done". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.
  63. ^ Moonchild (22 March 2022). "Current situation for Pale Moon". Pale Moon forum.
  64. ^ "Pale Moon 29.4.5 released". 23 March 2022. Archived from the original on 23 March 2022.
  65. ^ "Pale Moon for Android". Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  66. ^ "Pale Moon for Android 24.7.1". 3 August 2014.
  67. ^ "I may have to let Pale Moon for Android go. :(". 16 April 2015.
  68. ^ "Pale Moon for Android updated to 25.9.6!". Retrieved 9 February 2017.
  69. ^ "Moonchild" (M.C. Straver) (15 March 2017). "Current Mac development status". Pale Moon forum. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
  70. ^ "End of Macintosh support - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
  71. ^ Nawrocki, Matt. "Review: Pale Moon web browser for Windows". TechRepublic. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
  72. ^ a b Brinkmann, Martin (3 January 2016). "32-bit vs 64-bit browsers: which version has the edge?". GHacks. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
  73. ^ "Moonchild" (M.C. Straver) (9 April 2012). "What's the deal with browser benchmarks?". Pale Moon forum. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  74. ^ "Google deprecates Octane JavaScript benchmark, because everyone is basically cheating". Ars Technica. 13 April 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  75. ^ Meurer, Benedikt (16 December 2016). "The truth about traditional JavaScript benchmarks". Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  76. ^ "Retiring Octane". V8. 12 April 2017. Archived from the original on 12 April 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  77. ^ "Warp: Improved JS performance in Firefox 83". 14 November 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  78. ^ "roytam1/palemoon27". Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  79. ^ "RT's Free Soft". Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  80. ^ "wicknix/Arctic-Fox". Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  81. ^ "Feodor2/Mypal README". Archived from the original on 23 July 2021.
  82. ^ igorel93 (31 August 2021). "Pale Moon developers (ab)use Mozilla Public License to shut down a fork supporting older Windows". r/palemoon. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
  83. ^ "History of the Pale Moon project". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022. The hard decision was made to stop publishing source code repositories and having public and transparent development progress, and return to a much earlier state of releasing the browser alongside source code snapshots in release state only.
  84. ^ "DBSoft.org - White Star". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022.

External links[]

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