Advanced preferences: General

This preferences tab provides advanced Pale Moon settings not categorized elsewhere.

Accessibility

This holds a single accessibility option:

  • Search for text when I start typing: This will make the browser launch a text search in the web page you have open by starting to type. Please note that this is an option specifically for accessibility use of the browser. It is recommended to leave this option disabled and use "/" to start a quick search or "Ctrl+F" to start a full search to avoid unexpected or ambiguous browser behavior.

Browsing

This section holds a few general-browsing options:
  • Use autoscrolling: This enables the use of "autoscrolling" mode, which is generally triggered by clicking the mouse wheel. This mode allows you to drag a special indicator to determine automatic (hands-free) scrolling speed to set a reading speed for long articles.
  • Check my spelling as I type: This enables the built-in spellchecking engine for text input when you type.

Hardware Acceleration

  • Use hardware acceleration when available: This enables various ways for the browser to use accelerated hardware to display, compose, scroll and animate web pages (using your GPU when possible) which can dramatically speed up the display of web pages. If disabled, these tasks are performed by your CPU. Disabling this may be required for some combinations of hardware, system software and video drivers that may have issues with the way Pale Moon tries tohandle page compositing and rendering.

Compatibility

This section allows you to set how Pale Moon behaves on websites.

User Agent mode: This allows you to control the type of user agent (identification) Pale Moon sends to visited websites:
  • Native: This will send Pale Moon's native string to websites, which indicates only its own rendering engine (Goanna/xx.xx) and application name (PaleMoon/xx.xx)
  • Gecko compatibility: The same as Native, but adds a Gecko engine slice to the user agent string to indicate its common ancestry and general expected behavior to be roughly in line with Gecko-based browsers.
  • Firefox compatibility: This changes the user agent string to be more "like Firefox" in that it uses the application version for its engine revision (rv:xx.xx) and including both a Gecko/x and Firefox/xx.xx slice in the user agent.

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.
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