Why settle for a basic build of your Firefox browser on Windows Operating Systems when you can have one that performs 25% faster? Mozilla does not provide optimized browser packages for Windows, while many Linux ("from scratch") users get the advantage of a browser built specifically for their system. 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 out of your browser.

Of course, getting a faster browser is not just about optimizing the compilation process (building a program from its source code), but also about carefully choosing features and how to choose the best setup. This means that this browser, however extremely close to Firefox, does not have all the functions that Firefox has. 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 speed and efficiency of the browser. Please see the page with technical details to learn exactly what the browser supports, and what it doesn't support. In short, if you need accessibility features or parental controls, then please visit the firefox homepage and get the official, non-optimized build.

Features

  • Highly optimized for current processors
  • 100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.
  • Uses slightly less memory because of disabled redundant and optional code
  • Significant speed increases for page drawing and script processing
  • Support for SVG and Canvas
  • Support for Firefox extensions, themes and personas

What's New

This is a minor security and stability update.

Changes/fixes:

  • Made the nonce length for http digest auth configurable.
  • Fixed various potential issues with font loading, parsing and handling.
  • Cleaned up error reporting for workers and normalized error messages.
  • Security issues addressed: CVE-2024-4772 DiD, CVE-2024-4771, CVE-2024-4769 and CVE-2024-4770.
  • We've switched back to an older toolchain (17.3) for compiling 32-bit Windows binaries (again) to hopefully address some of the intermittent stability issues people continued to have on later Microsoft compiler versions when running on older hardware.
  • Implemented support for single-use meta tag. This implementation allows use of it without specifying a second meta tag to actually load the linked document which was originally intended for this tag (to hint to a browser it should pre-load the document for fast painting).
  • Implemented CSP v3 keywords script-src-elem, script-src-attr, style-src-elem and style-src-attr.
  • Enabled the use of html5's by default. While this is not yet a complete implementation, use of it in the wild dictated we enable this early. The implementation should functionally suffice for usage seen so far.
  • Added support for Emoji 15.1.
  • Implemented webkitURL legacy window alias for URL for web compatibility.
  • Implemented CSS shorthands margin-block, margin-inline, padding-block and padding-inline.
  • Added support for querying CPU capabilities (SSE2/AVX/AVX2) to the Navigator interface. For privacy reasons this is not exposed to the web, but can be used by extensions.

Changes/fixes:

  • Fixed broken mousewheel scrolling if building with --disable-npapi.
  • Fixed a minor issue with XUL tree display in some circumstances.
  • Dev: Aligned canvas Path2D.addPath with the updated spec. It now supports DOMMatrix as opposed to SVGMatrix.
  • Removed Stylo (Gecko Rust style system) leftovers from the source tree.
  • Fixed a few potential emoji display issues.
  • Fixed some issues with workers.
  • Fixed an issue with ctrl+c copying in devtools.
  • Fixed crashes when run under WINE because of its lack of support for IDXGIKeyedMutex.
  • Fixed a crash when dealing with a specific (unmaintained) extension.
  • Added .xrm-ms files to the executable warning list on Windows.
  • Added sanity checks on http/2 header sizes.
  • Fixed a potential issue in the JavaScript JIT compiler.
  • Pulled a few fixes from upstream for the OpenType Sanitizer.
  • Added a fix to avoid a potential issue when assigning a media data buffer.
  • Security issues addressed: CVE-2024-3863, CVE-2024-3302, CVE-2024-3857 DiD, CVE-2024-3859 and CVE-2024-3861 DiD.