Pale Moon: Technical Details

• Features
• Supported Processors
• Differences with Mozilla products
• How Pale Moon is tested
• The Geek Corner
  

Features/disabled features

• Specifically optimized for current processors.This browser will not run on particularly old systems.
• Increased stability: experience fewer crashes.
  
• Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Canvas.
• Support for many Firefox Extensions (add-ons) as a compatibility feature.
• Support for a growing number of Pale Moon specific Extensions.
• Offering low-level API access to extension developers to truly extend browser features.
  
• Support for Personas ("lightweight" themes).
• Support for Complete Themes.
  
• CSS Downloadable Font support (including WOFF and WOFF2).
• Extended HTML5, CSS3 and advanced DOM support.
  
• Speedy scripting and page rendering.
• Optimized, secure networking.
  
• Graphical tab switching with quick-search (user-selectable).
  
• More customization options for navigation controls and the tab strip than other modern browsers.
• Enhanced security indicators (padlock/styling).
• More options for recovery (safe mode dialog).
  

• Accessibility features. Most people don't have a need for specialized accessibility features for custom input or display devices. This cuts down on the input complexity, and increases speed, but will, obviously, not be suitable for people who need these features.
• Parental controls. Pale Moon aims to be a fast browser for general use, not a "secured family browser". The design impact of operating system integrated parental controls as introduced in Mozilla code is significant, and has had serious implications for building the browser. As such, parental controls have been disabled. Extensions-based parental controls are, of course, a just-as viable alternative (and may in many cases work better!).
  
• WebRTC. Apart from opening up a whole can of worms security/privacy-wise, "Web Real Time Chat" (comparable with Skype video calls and the likes) is not considered useful or desired functionality for Pale Moon (both according to the developers and the users of the browser at large). This is best left to dedicated programs or at most a browser plug-in.
  
• Maintenance service. Pale Moon does not use a Windows maintenance service and does not update silently in the background.
• Integrated PDF reader. You are always recommended to use a separate, up-to-date document reader for PDF files (as an external program, not as a browser plugin) for your own security, and to have documents displayed in their fully intended format instead of a stripped-down display in an in-browser reader.
• Tab Groups. The Tab Group (aka Panorama) feature has never properly matured and has not seen many people using it. In addition, the feature is generally slow to use, not intuitive, and puts a rather hefty load on the browser when included. For people who still prefer to use this feature even though it has been completely removed from the browser, an add-on is available to replace the removed code.
  
• A few miscellaneous things like the crashreporter and telemetry data gathering have been completely removed since they require server-side components that are not in place at palemoon.org, as well as the latter severely impacting user privacy.
  

Supported processors

How different is this browser from Mozilla products?

1. Pale Moon is based on a derivative of the Gecko rendering engine (Goanna). This means that the core rendering functions for Pale Moon and Firefox (and rebuilds) will be a relatively close match and that functionality in the Gecko core code, will, as a ballpark estimate, also exist in Pale Moon. Where specific core functions have been changed, it has been done carefully and with due consideration to provide better performance and efficiency while not endangering the security of the browser, and to focus on better standards compatibility and/or more sane behavior.
2. Pale Moon comes with a number of different default configuration settings than Firefox and may behave differently when certain advanced configuration preferences are changed.
   Note that "internet speed boosters" and general "tweak guides" written for Firefox can actually harm Pale Moon's speed as the configuration defaults are made with in-depth knowledge of the browser back-end and "a higher number" or "bigger buffer" isn't always better. You are strongly advised to always use defaults as supplied in Pale Moon.
3. Changes were made to the user interface and feature set, to incorporate functionality and visual elements in different locations than what was chosen by the Mozilla team, as well as retaining or re-introducing useful elements that were removed in Firefox, and either removing or disabling (by default) components that would not be used by the average user. In addition, some other user interface changes were made to provide an as consistent and intuitive interface as possible while still staying close to what Firefox's goals have always been. This means the "Australis" interface will never be used in Pale Moon.
   
4. Pale Moon offers more configurability for features, like additional tab preferences, preferences for image loading or tab positions, and full control over smooth scrolling, to name a few.
5. Pale Moon uses a different "Sync" client and its own server to synchronize data between different instances of the browser. This is not compatible with Firefox Sync as used in Firefox 29 or later. Mozilla's change to "Firefox Accounts" is a different and less secure approach to synchronizing data and focuses more on future commercial endeavours of the Mozilla Corporation and, after careful consideration, has been rejected for use in Pale Moon (for quite the list of reasons, to be fair).
   

How Pale Moon has been tested

• Graphics heavy art sites
• Various "web applications"
  
• Static HTML sites with many elements
• DHTML/CSS sites
• SSL/heavy authentication sites
• Flash-heavy sites
• Social media sites

The Geek Corner

• Build environment (Windows):
  
• • Hardware: Asus AMD FX, main workstation, 16GB RAM
    
  • Software: Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8 SDK
    
  • Compiler: MS Visual Studio 2013 CE (MSVC CL 12)
• Optimizations: SSE2 architecture, global speed-preference flags, intrinsic functions where possible, auto-vectorization, auto-parallelization. Some small variations of these could be possible depending on specific release builds. Many of the builds (and all recent ones) use identical-code folding to further increase speed and reduce size of the program at the expense of compile time.