Developer(s) | M.C. Straver [1] Moonchild Productions [2] |
---|---|
Initial release | 4 October 2009 |
Stable release | |
Repository | https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon |
Written in | C , C++ , JavaScript , XML User Interface Language |
Engines | Goanna, SpiderMonkey |
Operating system | Windows 7 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 |
[8] 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 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.
Pale Moon's default user interface is the one that was used by Firefox from versions 4 to 28, known as Strata. [9] It always runs in single process mode and uses a rendering engine known as Goanna. [8] 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]
Pale 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]
Windows 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 were dropped in versions 25 and 28, respectively. [24] [25]
An Android build was developed in 2014 [26] but was cancelled by the developer due to lack of community involvement a year later. [27]
Pale Moon was created and is primarily maintained by one developer, M.C. Straver. [28] 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] [29] 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 2022, a change in direction for Pale Moon was announced to improve website and add-on capability. [30] This resulted in version 30, which used the Firefox GUID to improve compatability with legacy Firefox extensions and started increased development of UXP and Goanna. [31] 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. [32]
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 occurred on 27 December 2017. [33] The archived releases of Pale Moon 27.6.2 and older were infected with malware targetting cryptocurrency users. Basilisk and then-current Pale Moon releases were not affected. [34] [35] Straver switched the Pale Moon downloads and archives to a new host in response to the incident. [36]
MyPal 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. [37] [38] Versions of MyPal afterwards are a fork of the Firefox 68 codebase. [39]
New Moon is another fork of Pale Moon which supports Windows XP. [38]
K-Meleon is a free and open-source, lightweight web browser for Microsoft Windows. It uses the native Windows API to create its user interface. Early versions of K-Meleon rendered web pages with Gecko, Mozilla's browser layout engine, which Mozilla's browser Firefox and its email client Thunderbird also use. K-Meleon became a popular Windows browser and was available as an optional default browser in Europe via BrowserChoice.eu. K-Meleon continued to use Gecko for several years after Mozilla deprecated embedding it. Current versions of K-Meleon use the Goanna layout engine, a fork of Gecko created for the browser Pale Moon.
In computing, a plug-in is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization.
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Cross Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM) is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). It features multiple language bindings and interface description language (IDL) descriptions; thus programmers can plug their custom functions into the framework and connect it with other components.
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XUL, which stands for XML User Interface Language, is a user interface markup language developed by Mozilla. XUL is an XML dialect for writing graphical user interfaces, enabling developers to write user interface elements in a manner similar to web pages.
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 or later versions, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos, and Solaris Unix. It is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
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XBL is an XML-based markup language for altering the behavior of XUL widgets. It was devised at Netscape in the late 1990s as an extension of XUL.
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Waterfox is a free and open-source web browser and fork of Firefox. It claims to be ethical and user-centric, emphasizing performance and privacy. There are official Waterfox releases for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. It was initially created to provide official 64-bit support, back when Firefox was only available for 32-bit systems.
Goanna is an open-source browser engine and part of Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla's Gecko. It is used in the Pale Moon and Basilisk browsers. It underlies the Interlink mail client, Hyperbola's IceWeasel, and other UXP-based applications. It was also unofficially ported to Windows XP for the K-Meleon browser and Mypal.
Basilisk is a free and open source web browser available for Windows, Linux, and with experiment support for macOS. Basilisk is an updated fork of Firefox designed to look and feel similar to versions before the underlying backend was changed in version 57. The web browser is described by the developers as being in a permanent development state and a "perpetual beta."