Pale Moon: New Web Browser Based on Mozilla Firefox and Optimized for Speed

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user but think the new version is heavy on resources and want to have a lite version of it, here is an excellent news for you.

“Pale Moon” is a web browser which is based on Mozilla Firefox. Its a customized version which has been optimized for speed and efficiency.

The developers of Pale Moon have removed some components from Firefox which most of the people don’t use and that do not interfere with the way web pages are displayed or function; all to maximize speed and efficiency of the browser.

Firefox features which have been disabled in Pale Moon:

1. ActiveX and ActiveX scripting. ActiveX is specific to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and is not natively supported by (any) Firefox builds. However, there is some (rather archaic) code that could allow the embedding of ActiveX controls in pages in Firefox browsers. If you want to use an add-on that specifically relies on this code, it will, of course, not work. This is completely unnecessary functionality; it is a security consideration more than a speed consideration.

2. Accessibility features. Most people, and certainly the people looking for speed optimized browsers, don’t have a need for accessibility features. This cuts down some on the input complexity, and increases speed, but will, obviously, not be suitable for people who need these features.

3. Parental controls. Pale Moon aims to be a fast browser for general use, not a “secured family browser”. The design impact of parental controls as introduced in Firefox 3.0 and later is significant, and has had serious implications for building the browser. As such, parental controls have been disabled.

4. A few miscellaneous things like the crashreporter, since they require server-side components that are not in place at pale moon website.

Features that comes with Pale Moon:

• Specifically optimized for current processors. It makes use of the enhanced instruction sets of newer CPUs – as a result, this browser will not run on older systems.
• Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Canvas, both vector-based types of graphics.
• Support for Firefox Extensions (add-ons) and Themes.
• Support for Personas.
• CSS Downloadable Font support (including WOFF).
• HTML5 and advanced DOM support.
• 100% Firefox Sourced! This means you get the reliability and stability of the Firefox browser code, and the wide array of Firefox options and features.
• Significant speed increases for scripting and page rendering compared to Firefox.
• Uses a little less memory than the official builds because of the disabled features (listed below)
• There have been multiple reports of certain web sites being displayed correctly in Pale Moon, that were problematic in Firefox – I have not been able to personally confirm this.

Pale Moon comes with a number of different default configuration settings than Firefox. These basic “tweaks” are done to provide you with the smoothest browsing experience. Some configuration changes were made to the user interface as well, to incorporate functionality and visual elements in better locations than what was chosen by the Mozilla team. Most of these changes are still user-configurable.

Pale Moon provides a familiar set of controls and visual feedback including grouped navigation buttons of a decent size, a bookmarks toolbar that is enabled by default, and not in the least a functional status bar.

You can download it using following link:

Download Link

Pale Moon also comes in portable version so you don’t need to install it and you can also carry it on your USB drive.