Pale Moon 6: Runs Faster Than Firefox 6, Fixes Bugs and New Features

If you are not content with Mozilla’s recent Firefox releases, then you should try Pale Moon 6, which released today. The browser is based on Firefox – looks almost identical, works in exactly the same way, supports most extensions and add-ons – but has been carefully optimised to deliver better performance and security.

Pale Moon is a custom-built and speed optimized Firefox browser. The Pale Moon project is the work of a single individual, using contributed Open Source code to create a full-featured, speed optimized browser based on the popular Firefox browser. Having seen the advantages on other systems (e.g. Linux) with regards to programs being compiled specifically for the capabilities of the machine it is installed on, it became obviously clear that Windows users were at a disadvantage: Mozilla only releases windows executables with maximum compatibility in mind, meaning that Firefox is made to run on as many different systems as possible, sacrificing efficiency and speed in the process to be compatible with, by current standards, absolutely ancient hardware. Mozilla does not provide optimized browser packages for Windows, meaning you may be losing speed and efficiency when you use your browser; and truth be told, most people use their browsers all the time. That needs to change, so, here is the Pale Moon project: Custom-built and optimized Firefox browsers for Windows Operating Systems. Make sure to get the most speed and efficiency out of your browser.

Pale Moon 6.0 builds upon the release version of Firefox 6.0. Development on the 4.x and 5.x versions will be completely discontinued, since the differences between 4.x/5.x and 6.0 are very small. Full details can be found in the Release notes. In addition to Pale Moon 6, the other main development branch for Pale Moon is 3.6.x, actively maintained for users of older systems and recommended if you are running Windows XP versions. 

The new release of Pale Moon was based on Firefox 6. Of course the necessary bugfixes and changes as part of the new code base, with a number of additional changes. How much better? As ever, it’s difficult to come up with a single meaningful figure.  Pale Moon is compiled to make better use of modern CPUs, which gives it potential performance advantages in every area, but benchmarking shows a range of results.

SunSpider 0.91, for instance, gives Pale Moon 6 a performance lead over Firefox 6 in just about every area, peaking at around a 10% gain.  Some tests showed no significant speed advantages, though, so overall Pale Moon scored around 5% faster in our tests. It was a similar story with Mozilla’s Dromaeo benchmark; Pale Moon led the way in every test, but the margin was small, giving the browser around a 2.5% performance advantage over Firefox 6 on our test system. It was a similar story with Mozilla’s Dromaeo benchmark; Pale Moon led the way in every test, but the margin was small, giving the browser around a 2.5% performance advantage over Firefox 6 on our test system.

Pale Moon 6 won’t revolutionise your online experience, then, but it’s still managing to squeeze just a little extra performance from the Firefox codebase, add-ons will no longer automatically update by default the moment they are checked and found to have a newer release, giving the user the choice to accept or reject the update, read release notes, etc. Update of the status bar add-on to v2.2, fixing compatibility issues and extending some configurability. Link right-click menu has "Open in new tab" on top now, like Firefox. If you are having trouble retraining yourself for this behavior, please download a menu editing Firefox add-on to customize your menus. This change was made based on user feedback. Added ak, ast, br, bs, en-ZA, gd, lg, mai, nso, and son language packs.

In addition, later versions of Pale Moon aim to provide more freedom of choice than Mozilla about how people want to browse the web, and which feedback users want to see; efficiency, after all, should not stop at the engine of a browser, but extend to all parts of it, including the user interface. Specifically, Firefox 4 has redesigned the user interface after the visions of the Mozilla Firefox product directors and user experience team; unfortunately also removing essential functions and making a few less logical design choices. Users will find a slightly more conservative approach to changes in the user interface in the Pale Moon browser, which, although very close to Firefox, is (now more obviously so than before) a different product. However, these differences in layout do not prevent anyone from configuring their browser interface to exactly the way they want it to look and work (including like Mozilla Firefox's default layout if they so wish).