
General Information and Project History General Information The Pale Moon project is the work of a single individual, using contributed Open Source code to create a full-featured, speed optimized version of 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 (backwards compatible to the first Pentium processors from 1993). Pale Moon is a middle road, cutting away support for ancient systems to achieve a significant speed and efficiency increase, but not trying to squeeze the last few percent more out of it by limiting the range of systems it will run on even more. It aims to not waste computer resources and power on inefficient programs, while at the same time serving a wide range of systems that are currently in use around the world. As one person already remarked: optimizing for just the very latest systems and limiting to that would be rather pointless, as those systems have enough horse power to not make the few percent extra even noticed. Pale Moon may run behind regular Firefox releases one or more versions, as this is still a project run in my free time, and I like to test the browser on at least a few systems before releasing it to the public. I also find that some Firefox updates don't warrant the time and effort to make a "point release" of Pale Moon to keep on the bleeding edge of Firefox development. Pale Moon will be updated only for select and relevant updates of the Firefox source code. This also means that Pale Moon will not be built based on beta, release candidate, milestone, or other development releases of the firefox source code. Only relevant "Release" source code will be used to ensure stability. Project History This project started off as merely fiddling with the build process on Windows, seeing first off if I could manage to make my own Windows build of this program and then seeing how my own builds compared to official ones. Finding the difference significant, the resulting browsers (simply "my own firefox builds") were given to a number of friends to use, with very positive results. This was back in the time when firefox was still in its 1.5.x stage. I have since built Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey specifically for different systems, and eventually, with Firefox 3.5.2, settling on what I found was an optimal compromise between speed, features and useability of the browser. At that point in time, the Pale Moon Project was given shape, releasing the highly optimized browser to the public from Oct 4th, 2009. Since its release, it has become rather popular, with no less than 15,000 visits to the home page just in the first month of release. Feedback has been positive, and as a result of several requests from people, a second build version was created of Pale Moon, to cater specifically to the capabilities of Athlon XP and Athlon MP processors, still extremely popular processors for currently used systems. [<-back] Firefox, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Corporation. Site and contents © 2009-2010 Moonchild Productions - All rights reserved

The Pale Moon Project - Customly optimized and built Firefox browsers for Windows Operating Systems

General Information and Project History

General Information

The Pale Moon project is the work of a single individual, using contributed Open Source code to create a full-featured, speed optimized version of 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 (backwards compatible to the first Pentium processors from 1993).

Pale Moon is a middle road, cutting away support for ancient systems to achieve a significant speed and efficiency increase, but not trying to squeeze the last few percent more out of it by limiting the range of systems it will run on even more. It aims to not waste computer resources and power on inefficient programs, while at the same time serving a wide range of systems that are currently in use around the world. As one person already remarked: optimizing for just the very latest systems and limiting to that would be rather pointless, as those systems have enough horse power to not make the few percent extra even noticed.

Pale Moon may run behind regular Firefox releases one or more versions, as this is still a project run in my free time, and I like to test the browser on at least a few systems before releasing it to the public. I also find that some Firefox updates don't warrant the time and effort to make a "point release" of Pale Moon to keep on the bleeding edge of Firefox development. Pale Moon will be updated only for select and relevant updates of the Firefox source code.
This also means that Pale Moon will not be built based on beta, release candidate, milestone, or other development releases of the firefox source code. Only relevant "Release" source code will be used to ensure stability.

Project History

This project started off as merely fiddling with the build process on Windows, seeing first off if I could manage to make my own Windows build of this program and then seeing how my own builds compared to official ones. Finding the difference significant, the resulting browsers (simply "my own firefox builds") were given to a number of friends to use, with very positive results.
This was back in the time when firefox was still in its 1.5.x stage.

I have since built Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey specifically for different systems, and eventually, with Firefox 3.5.2, settling on what I found was an optimal compromise between speed, features and useability of the browser. At that point in time, the Pale Moon Project was given shape, releasing the highly optimized browser to the public from Oct 4th, 2009.

Since its release, it has become rather popular, with no less than 15,000 visits to the home page just in the first month of release. Feedback has been positive, and as a result of several requests from people, a second build version was created of Pale Moon, to cater specifically to the capabilities of Athlon XP and Athlon MP processors, still extremely popular processors for currently used systems.

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