Speed-optimized version of Firefox designed for the best possible performance
Pale Moon is a customised version of Firefox, which has been carefully optimised for speed and efficiency.
The program has been made more lightweight, for instance, by stripping out little-used components like the accessibility features, and the parental controls. The crash report has also been stripped out, as it's designed to work with server-side technology that isn't available on palemoon.org. And Pale Moon also drops support for Internet Explorer's ActiveX and ActiveX scripting technology, which also offers a security benefit as it means the browser can't be infected by malicious ActiveX controls.
Other optimisations are more technical. In particular, Firefox is compiled with the most conservative of settings, to ensure that it'll run on even ancient CPUs. Pale Moon, though, is optimised to take full advantage of modern processors, and this can give it a huge advantage over Firefox in some areas.
So how much faster can the browser be? That's a tricky question, as performance varies greatly depending on what's being tested.
The browser does have one potential down side, in that it may be incompatible with some extensions. If they've assumed that the browser's program name is firefox.exe, say, or they're using components that Pale Moon has stripped out, like the Parental Controls, then you'll probably find they don't work.
This is rare, though - more extensions install and run just fine. Trying out Pale Moon also gets you access to useful extras, like the Language Packs (you can now run the program in more than 70 languages), a portable edition, and a 64-bit version. And as you can install and run both Pale Moon and Firefox together on the same system, the program is really easy to evaluate. So if any of this sounds right for you, then give Pale Moon a try, and see how much faster it might be on your system.
Pale Moon 20.1 is a minor upgrade:
- Update of the libpixman graphics library to improve performance for SSE2 CPUs
- Change to the "Clear download history" setting for use with the panel-based download manager (classic UI unaffected)
- Lots of fixes and general improvements
Final Verdict: Proving that open source leads to great development, Pale Moon takes the already decent Firefox web browser and makes it even better and a faster.
Freeware
Get an early peek at the next stable release of Chrome without putting your system too much at risk
Freeware
Upgrade your Android’s built-in browser to something infinitely more superior
Freeware
A synchronization tool for Google’s online storage service
Freeware
Mobile synchronization tool for Google’s online storage service
Freeware
Everything you need to run Java applications and websites on your computer
Freeware
Everything you need to run Java applications and websites on your computer
Freeware
Fast and feature laden FTP client to meet your file transfer needs
Freeware
The latest dev build of Chrome is based on the latest Chromium core
Freeware
Get an early look at the next version of Opera without affecting your stable installation
Freeware
The latest stable Chrome includes a web site loading optimization and other improvements