Advanced preferences: Network

This preferences tab provides advanced Pale Moon settings for network connections.

Connection

This allows you to configure how Pale Moon connects to the internet. Clicking the button will open an advanced connection settings dialog:

  • Configure Proxies to Access the Internet:
    One of five possible options:
    • No proxy: All connections are made directly to the server.
    • Auto-detect proxy settings: Pale Moon will attempt to determine the required connectivity settings for proxies automatically (either through a system proxy or direct connections).
    • Use system proxy settings: Use whatever proxy is set up in the operating system for Internet connectivity.
    • Manual proxy configuration: You enter proxy addresses and ports yourself. Please see the documentation or instructions given to you (usually by IT staff) what to enter in which location if you need this option.
    • Automatic proxy configuration URL: Enter the URL here of the proxy configuration file (.pac) you need to use. Please also see the relevant instructions or documentation given to you for this option.

DNS

DNS stands for "Domain Name System" which is what translates domain names (e.g. example.com) and host names (e.g. www.example.com) to internet addresses (e.g. 10.162.78.212 or [2345:0425:2CA1:0000:0000:0567:5673:23b5]). You can best compare this with a phone book for the Internet.

Prefetch DNS lookups: By default, Pale Moon will look up addresses for linked elements ahead of time.
This speeds up navigation as there will be no delay for DNS lookups when users navigate to a new host or domain from the visited page. Please note that this only deals with DNS (i.e.: looking up the addresses of websites in the domain name system) and Pale Moon will not pre-emptively connect to the servers in question; it will just have the addresses for them ready in case the user decides to navigate to them.
For some people, this may still be seen as a privacy issue (e.g. when the DNS server operated within an organization is tightly monitored for "unwanted traffic") as it will regularly fire DNS lookups for hosts or domains the user doesn't actually visit, so this may possibly be a concern for you and you may wish to revert to our previous behavior. Uncheck this option in that case.

Captive Portals

Detect restricted network access:
If checked, the browser will send requests to a known publicly-hosted URL to test if the local network is intercepting the request and serving a response other than the expected one as a result. If so, this is an indicator of a captive portal (gated network) which is common for public WiFi and similar networks which instead of the public response will send a response indicating a captive portal site, on which one may have to agree to terms and conditions of use of the WiFi, make payment for internet access, or similar.
By default this is disabled in Pale Moon for 2 reasons:
  1. It causes a lot of extra network traffic to one of our servers if enabled which is unnecessary for typical, fixed-location, desktop use.
  2. It would potentially be a privacy concern as it would effectively "ping" the server every time the browser is enabled or switches network.

Note: previous versions of Pale Moon listed cache preferences in this tab. If you are looking for help on this, go here.
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