Pale Moon (64bit)26.0.0

Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser for Microsoft Windows, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!

Pale Moon offers you a browsing experience in a browser completely built from source with carefully selected features and optimizations to maximize the browser's speed*, stability and user experience, while maintaining compatibility with the thousands of Firefox extensions you have come to love and rely on.

This browser, even though close to Firefox in the way it works, offers a different set of features than its sibling. A few carefully selected features have been disabled that are not in high demand, and that do not interfere with the way web pages are displayed or function; all to maximize the efficiency of the browser. Please see the page with technical details to learn exactly what the browser supports, and what it doesn't support. For example, if you need accessibility features or parental controls, then please visit the Firefox homepage and get the official, non-optimized version of the browser.

Pale Moon will continue to provide appropriately sized grouped navigation buttons, bookmark toolbars enabled by default, tabs next to the default page content (easy to switch) and at least no functional status bar and more freedom of customization, to name a few things.

Pale Moon is and will always be open source and completely free to download and use!

Key Features:
  • Optimized for modern processors
  • Based on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP) containing our own optimized layout and rendering engine (Goanna)
  • Safe: forked from mature Mozilla code and regularly updated with the latest security patches
  • Secure: Additional security features and security-aware development
  • 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 (skins)
  • Smooth and speedy page drawing and script processing
  • Superior gradients and fonts
  • Will continue to support NPAPI plugins like Silverlight, Flash and Java
  • Support for a growing number of Pale Moon exclusive extensions
  • Extensive and growing support for existing web standards

What's New

Version 26.0.0

This is a new milestone release! It's been in the works for a good number of months, and has many hundreds of notable changes, fixes, and improvements that can't possibly all be listed here.

These release notes for this version are a concise summary, lifting out the most prominent and important changes. You may find slightly more detailed release notes on the forum.

General release notes:
  • Pale Moon is now building on the new Goanna engine instead of Gecko. Although close relatives in terms of web technology, they are not the same under the hood and any reports of bugs with the layout/rendering engine should be as detailed as possible to allow us to pinpoint the cause of the bugs and fix them (just stating "it works in Firefox" really doesn't help us!). If you wish to report issues, please either use the issue tracker on GitHub or report a detailed description and steps to reproduce on the forum.
  • We've had to reduce the number of supported languages for our language packs. With the need to move to our own full localization and lacking translators to support and maintain less common languages in use around the world, we've reduced our number of offered languages to a little over 30. The languages still supported should more than cover the common languages spoken around the globe. You will need to update your language packs!
  • Although we've given this release extensive testing, it is still possible you run into some website compatibility issues (usually because of websites doing useragent sniffing) and e.g. some sites displaying a mobile version if they do not recognize or incorrectly recognize the new browser engine. Please always try contacting the webmasters first before posting support requests at our address, since this is usually not something we can provide solutions for, ourselves, and we end up having to redirect you anyway.
Fixes/changes:
  • The layout parser/renderer has received many updates with this change over to Goanna, improving web compatibility and standards compliance in many areas.
  • The browser user interface has received updates, making it more compatible with Windows 10 in many respects and more in line with the general styles of the operating system version it is run on in terms of the shapes of controls and color setting.
  • Updated graphics/media support: Pale Moon now supports the WebP image format, properly scales EXIF rotated JPEGs, has updated support for different WebGL texture formats, improved scaling of vector images, updated libpng, libjpeg-turbo, libvpx, and misc other upstream libraries/modules, and more!
  • Library changes:
    • The library now has a scope bar (pops up when searching) with the option to select what you want to search in (either bookmarks or history) and the option to save your searches.
    • By default, there will be a history menu drop-down in the browser's user interface next to the bookmarks one.
    • Added "Containing folder" and "Containing folder path" columns so you can see exactly where a bookmark is located at a glance when searching (after enabling the columns).
  • Added support for Ruby annotations. If you need this functionality, set the about:config preference browser.ruby.enabled to true, and restart the browser.
  • Added conservative image decoding: it will now only decode images that are (almost) in view, greatly improving overall memory use and initial loading of graphics-heavy pages.
  • Aligned 3D CSS transforms and perspective with the spec.
  • JavaScript improvements: added basic support for ES6 Promises, added element.matches(), updated property assignments, added Bin/Oct literals in Number(), improved performance of TypeOf calls, improved GC memory shrinking, improved memory allocations, improved RegEx performance and compatibility, and more!
  • Added CSS media queries to determine the OS the browser is running on, allowing theme designers to make specific changes based on OS at run-time.
  • Added a control preference for onunload= events as dom.disable_beforeunload. This allows you to completely disable events fired when leaving a page.
  • Changed the memory allocator to the (faster) system allocator on modern operating systems.
  • Improved the handling of very large numbers of tabs.
  • Added Ecosia as a "green" search engine alternative for the environmentally aware surfer.
  • Autoplay of media now has a separate control preference for scripted content as media.autoplay.allowscripted, to block script-initiated autoplay of media.
Security updates:
  • Added support for 128-bit Camellia-GCM ciphers in addition to the existing CBC ciphers to offer a more internationally diverse choice of secure encryption ciphers than just AES.
  • Added an advanced, active XSS (cross-site scripting) filter. Pale Moon will now check for XSS attacks and block XSS content in the resulting pages. This is brand-new technology and feedback on this filter specifically (e.g. bugs, false positives, etc.) should be posted in the dedicated thread on the forum for this feature. Please also see that thread for details on how to use and control this filter.
  • Distrusted several root certificates in accordance with security best practice.
  • Aligned cookie acceptance with RFC 6265 ยง4.1.1. We still make an exception for allowing spaces and double quotes in cookie values, but this will be made more strict in the future for full spec compliance. If you are a web designer and use cookies, please verify that you are RFC compliant in terms of both cookie names and cookie values, or the browser may reject them.
  • Removed several hazardous modules like the maintenance service and the identity module.
  • Ported all security updates from Mozilla that are applicable/relevant to our code base (up to and including all security issues made known to us until now). Considering v26 has been kept updated over its long development until release, the list of fixes/CVEs would be too exhaustive to list in these release notes individually.

User Reviews

Security Levels

To avoid any potential harm to your device and ensure the security of your data and privacy, our team checks every time a new installation file is uploaded to our servers or linked to a remote server and periodically reviews the file to confirm or update its status. Based on this checking, we set the following security levels for any downloadable files.

Clean

It is highly likely that this software program is clean.

We scanned files and URLs associated with this software program in more than 60 of the world's leading antivirus services; no possible threats were found. And there is no third-party softwarebundled.

Warning

This program is advertising supported and may offer to install third-party programs that are not required. These may include a toolbar, changing your homepage, default search engine, or installing other party programs. These could be false positives, and our users are advised to be careful when installing and using this software.

Disabled

This software is no longer available for download. It is highly likely that this software program is malicious or has security issues or other reasons.

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