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

Pale Moon: Release notes

12.0

A new release built on the Firefox 12 code base. This is mostly a maintenance release.
Of special interest is that Pale Moon, unlike Mozilla Firefox in its version 12, does not move to a silent install method.

Fixes and changes in all versions:
  • A number of security and stability fixes imported from Firefox 12
  • Update to the status bar code and a finalization of the integration of this functionality
  • Localization of the status bar preferences and messages into 3 additional common languages: German, French and Spanish. This will automatically follow your locale setting
  • Update to the HTML5 media controls
  • Some under-the-hood changes that will further improve performance of Pale Moon on some systems
Pale Moon Portable:
  • An update to the launcher and script. More information on the Pale Moon Portable page. It is recommended for everyone using the portable to make a fresh install (with a copy over of your profile files if desired) and not use an in-place upgrade.
  • A fix for backups not being properly created and stored
This version marks the start of a different release schedule for Pale Moon.

Instead of following the rapid release schedule of Mozilla, the browser will use version 12, a properly matured build with essential functionality, as a base to make incremental updates upon.

The reasons for this are multiple, not in the least it will allow Pale Moon to implement things that have been on the "to-do" list for a while but which have been pushed back because of lack of time "keeping up" with the (too) fast releases of new versions by Mozilla. The rapid releases often little more than maintenance updates and one or two new features (sometimes even just partially implemented), but requiring a full development/testing cycle for Pale Moon because of the lumped-together patches. Another reason is that from this point on, Firefox will receive a few user interface overhauls to go off on the "Web OS"/"Metro"/"Desktop integration" tangent that goes against Pale Moon's goals of being and remaining a web browser.

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 11 (discontinued)

11.0.1

A small maintenance release to address a few annoyances in the original new release of v11.0:
  • Tone down the rather too aggressive network settings that were introduced in Firefox 11:
    1. Maximum concurrent connections opened by Pale Moon lowered to 48 (was 256) to make sure it doesn't easily saturate the networking layer of Windows, to prevent residential NAT gateways from being overloaded and to lower strain on wireless networks
    2. Maximum concurrent connections to a single server lowered to 6 (was 15). In tandem with pipelining this is still plenty, and it actually promotes the proper intended use of pipelining
  • Fix the installer to properly check for the minimum required operating system version: Windows XP for both x86 and x64 versions
  • Switch off OpenGL as preferred engine for WebGL again to fix compatibility problems
  • Switch off DirectWrite font rendering again to fix compatibility issues with certain graphics cards
  • Properly implement the removal/blocking of status bar add-ons when upgrading/installing
In addition, Pale Moon 11 will:
  • Save open session information less often (once a minute)
  • No longer store form data and other entered information in the browser session store when pages are viewed over SSL, to increase security - the data entered in secure pages is no longer committed to disk.

11.0

A new major release building on the Firefox 11.0 code base. This sees many, many bugfixes and a good number of performance improvements that would be too extensive to list in detail.

In summary

All versions:
  • Integration of the Status Bar functionality. You can now access the status bar configuration directly from the Tools or Options menu, and it is no longer a separate add-on[note]
  • Implementation of the SPDY protocol to improve load times on websites that support it
  • Improvements to the rendering engine, and specific improvements to the hardware acceleration of font rendering and WebGL
  • Implementation of more advanced HTML5 (including IndexedDB improvements and support for more HTML5 elements) and CSS features (including CSS 3D transforms)
  • Add-on compatibility: add-ons now default to being compatible
  • Cosmetic updates to the Pale Moon icon and some included artwork
  • The (limited feature) web developer tools as added to Firefox 11.0 have mostly been disabled since they are not intended to be present in future builds of Pale Moon. Web developers are encouraged to make their own choices about which development tools they wish to use at the Mozilla Add-ons repository (Web development section)
Pale Moon Portable:
  • The automatic backup method has been simplified and the resulting backups will take (a lot) less space. Bookmarks and passwords are backed up, but history no longer gets backed up which saves many MB on your stick or other portable medium
  • Additional compression further reduces space requirements for the 32-bit portable

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 9 (discontinued)

9.2

This update implements security fixes from Firefox up to 10.0.2 in terms of security and stability.
  • Fix for a critical vulnerability in the libpng graphics library
  • Update to the add-ons blocklist and its handling
  • New 64-bit application icon (32-bit icon update in the next version)
  • Minor updates to cache handling settings

9.1

This update implements relevant fixes from Firefox 10 in terms of security and stability. Additional new functionality found in Firefox 10 has not been implemented.
In addition, the following fixes:
  • Update to the status bar component to fix pop-up status and links, as well as a few other small issues
  • Update to the add-on compatibility assistant to no longer display the status bar core add-on as selectable
  • Update to a few default settings based on usage metrics
  • Removed some commercial search engines (e.g. Amazon) and added DuckDuckGo/SSL

9.0.1

An update incorporating the Firefox 9.0.1 code base.
In addition, the following changes:
  • Under the hood changes and improvements to the way memory is handled by the Javascript engine
  • WebGL has been changed to use ANGLE by default instead of using native OpenGL to give better performance on a number of systems that would otherwise suffer from high CPU usage and lower frame rates
  • Change in compiler: from this point on, Visual Studio 2010 will be used for all "next gen" builds
  • Build environment changed to cater to the ever-growing XUL dll size without having to compromize on what modules to optimize. (Prevent running into the 3GB address space limit)
  • DNS prefetching disabled by default to prevent router hangups
  • Changes to timings for UI script execution and content script execution to prevent unnecessary dialog popups about unresponsive scripts
  • Some image decoding tweaks
  • Eye candy: animated preferences dialogs (resize when switching category)

9.0

Development version (unreleased).
This version was not considered acceptable for release due to performance regressions.

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 8 (discontinued)

8.0

A major update building on the Firefox 8.0 code base, with improvements that were planned for the (unreleased) version 7.0.2.
This version sees the following improvements in addition to those inherent to Firefox 8:
  • Improved cache handling: this will make the browser handle system resources more efficiently on most systems
  • Improved networking: communication with web servers should be noticeably faster and smoother
  • Fix for a rare image decoding bug (garbage, possible crashes)
It should be noted that the shift in focus of development has been towards the back-end of the browser (background resource handling and background networking), considering the rendering and scripting speed is not the bottleneck for current versions of the browser. Inherently, this may result in less of a clear difference in benchmark scores when comparing to its vulpine sibling or previous versions of Pale Moon because of rebalancing of code priority when building. Maximum benchmark scores are nice, of course, but the main goal of Pale Moon remains to be as efficient as possible when taken as a whole, including those parts that aren't measured in limited benchmark tests.

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 7 (discontinued)

7.0.1

This update fixes a very important speed regression issue for Pale Moon 7.0. It impacts mostly the page content layout engine and DOM handling, which will be on par again with what they should be for Pale Moon in this point release. Bug: 20111001-CCBug
Benchmarking scores will see a significant jump from 7.0 to 7.0.1 as a result, as well.
There are no other functional or UI changes for this release.

7.0

A new release building on the Firefox 7.0.1 code base. This version sees a large number of performance increases, as well as lower resource use than the previous version.

Additional changes:
  • Introduction of the Tab Groups (panorama) button in the user interface for easy access (Next to the All Tabs button)
  • Several additional performance improvements on individual browser components
  • A change of the Application Menu button color to blue shades instead of a "foxy orange"

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 6 (discontinued)

6.0.2

A security update seeing the following changes:
  • Removed trust exceptions for certain certificates (bug 683449)
  • Resolved an issue with gov.uk websites (bug 669792)
  • Revoked permissions for the root certificate for DigiNotar in the built-in certificate store (bug 682927)
In addition, there has been some work done on the x64 build method to prepare for performance fixes in a future release.

6.0

New release based on Firefox 6.0!
Of course the necessary bugfixes and changes as part of the new code base, with a number of additional changes:
  • Add-ons will no longer automatically update by default the moment they are checked and found to have a newer release, giving the user the choice to accept or reject the update, read release notes, etc.
  • Update of the status bar add-on to v2.2, fixing compatibility issues and extending some configurability
  • Link right-click menu has "Open in new tab" on top now, like Firefox. If you are having trouble retraining yourself for this behavior, please download a menu editing Firefox add-on to customize your menus. This change was made based on user feedback
  • Added ak, ast, br, bs, en-ZA, gd, lg, mai, nso, and son language packs

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 5 (discontinued)

5.0

New release based on Firefox 5.0!
Of course a large number of bugfixes were applied as part of development on the Mozilla trunk, compared to 4.x

Changes/fixes:
  • Performance issues fixed on some systems
  • Instability problems fixed on some systems
  • Updated artwork for the new about box
  • Cosmetic changes: more occurrences of "palemoon" in the UI should now read "pale moon"
  • Zulu language added for the language packs

Pale Moon: Release notes for version 4 (discontinued)

4.0.7

Fixes:
  • Windows 7 jumplists fixed
  • Fix for errors in the error console when closing tabs in certain situations
  • Potential fix for printing problems (no text printed) Still an issue

4.0.6

Update of the source base to Firefox 4.0.1, fixing a large number of bugs.

Additional updates:
  • Performance fix: Switched back globally to fast floating point model, with a patch to prevent rounding errors in javascript
  • Compensated for a number of internal compiler errors causing build issues and potential browser stability problems on some systems

4.0.5

A number of fixes and a cosmetic update:
  • Performance fix: Javascript performance improved
  • Crash fix: Prevent crashes in optimized builds of JS due to 20110410-CCBug
  • Updater fix: Internal updater should function again from this version onward
  • Add-ons window shows the proper add-ons page when loading it
  • Shell integration fixed for Vista and 7: The browser should no longer complain that it's not the default program when it, in fact, is. See bug 20110408-SHBug
  • Main Pale Moon program icon updated with a higher-res version of the logo image

4.0.3

Some stability bugfixes and improvements:
  • Fix for a potential crash of the browser due to 20110406-PRBug
  • Fix for the internal manual updater when a language pack is installed
  • DirectWrite now default OFF (gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled=false) to provide better compatibility with problematic (integrated) graphics processors. If it worked for you for 4.0, feel free to switch it back on (set to true)
  • Improvements to GUI/chrome speed
If you use a language pack, you will have to update it to the latest version for it to work.

4.0

This is a brand new release!

Built on Gecko 2.0, the browser has the following new features:
  • Hardware acceleration of browser windows using Direct3D
  • Direct2D rendering on operating systems and hardware that support it
  • DirectWrite font rendering on systems that support it
  • WebGL 3D graphics, either using native OpenGL (default) or DirectX (via ANGLE)
  • HTML5 support
  • New Jaegermonkey javascript engine
  • Blazingly fast DOM handling
Of course, the well known features from version 3.x are still present, as well:
  • Graphical tab previews (on a nice glass pane if you have Windows 7) with search
  • Dynamic/downloadable fonts (including WOFF)
  • Support for personas and Firefox themes
  • Support for Firefox 4 compatible add-ons
  • Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plug-ins)
  • Able to use existing Firefox profiles, bookmarks and settings (either using the migration tool or using Sync)
Since this is a new release, it may be a little less stable than the tried-and-tested 3.x releases, but no major issues have been found thus far.

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Pale Moon's distribution is subject to the following redistribution policy