Privacy settings

History

These settings control how Pale Moon saves information about your web browsing.

Remember history

When it is set to Remember history:

• Pale Moon will keep a list of the pages you've visited.
• A list of files you download will be kept in the Library window.
• The text you enter into form fields or the search bar will be remembered so you can use those entries again.
• Pale Moon will accept cookies from sites until they expire.

Click on:

• clear your recent history to open the Clear Recent History window, which allows you to quickly erase some or all of your history.
• remove individual cookies to display the Cookies window which will allow you to quickly delete cookies for one, multiple, or all websites you have visited.

Never remember history

When it is set to Never remember history:

• Pale Moon will not keep a record of your browsing history.
• The files you download will not be listed or remembered in the Library window.
  Note that the files themselves will remain saved on your disk even when exiting the browser.
  
• The text you enter into form fields or the search bar will not be remembered.
• Pale Moon will accept cookies from sites and delete them when you close the browser.

Using Never remember history is equivalent to always being in Private Browsing mode.

Click on clear all current history to open the Clear Recent History window, which allows you to quickly erase some or all of your stored browsing and download history.

Use custom settings for history

Wheit is set to Use custom settings for history, the following settings will be available:

• Always use private browsing mode:
  If selected, Pale Moon will not remember any new history the next time it starts. Your already-saved history will be retained.
  
• Remember my browsing and download history:
  If selected, Pale Moon will keep a list of the pages you've visited and the files you've downloaded.
• Remember search and form history:
  If selected, the text you enter into form fields or the search bar will be remembered so you can use those entries again at a later time.
• Accept cookies from sites:
  If selected, Pale Moon will accept cookies from sites. Click Exceptions… to control whether some sites are not allowed to set cookies.
  Additional settings to control which cookies are accepted and how they are treated:
  
  • Accept third-party cookies:
    
  • Always: Pale Moon will always accept cookies from http://site2.com when you are visiting http://site1.com. Requests for local storage from site2 are allowed. (default)
    
  • From Visited: When you are visiting http://site1.com, Pale Moon will only accept cookies from http://site2.com if you have previously visited it directly; otherwise, Pale Moon will not accept them. Requests for local storage from site2 are still honored to minimize interoperability issues on the web.
    
  • Never: Pale Moon will never accept cookies from http://site2.com when you are visiting http://site1.com. Requests for local storage from site2 are also denied.
  • Keep until:
    
  • They expire: If selected, Pale Moon will allow the sites you visit to specify how long Pale Moon should keep their cookies. (default)
    
  • I close Pale Moon: If selected, your session cookies will be deleted when you close Pale Moon.
    Click Show Cookies… to display the Cookies window for easy removal of one or more stored cookies.
• Clear history when Pale Moon closes:
  When checked, certain saved items will be deleted when you close Pale Moon. Click Settings… to control which items are deleted.

Location Bar

The Location Bar (Address Bar) is the field where you enter a site's web address (URL). The Location Bar suggests results as you type in a search based on the following:

• History: If selected, sites you've previously visited will appear on your results list.
• Bookmarks: Sites you've bookmarked will appear on your results list.
• History and Bookmarks: Suggestions from both categories will be shown. (default)
  
• Nothing: Neither your browsing history nor your bookmarks will be used to make search suggestions.

Tracking tab

This tab contains several options to reduce tracking of browsers and users.
Most major websites track their visitors' behavior and then sell or provide that information to other companies. This information can be used to show ads, products or services specifically targeted to you.

Data Privacy

Pale Moon has a Global Privacy Control feature that lets you tell every website you visit, their advertisers, and content providers that you don't want your browsing behavior to be shared or sold. For more details see this dedicated page.

Honoring this setting is legally mandated in a fairly large number of territories - individual websites are legally required to respect it. The setting is an official way of letting your wishes be known to visited websites but note that it does not block or remove tracking, only prohibits the site owner from sharing or selling the collected data without your explicit consent.

Turning on this feature will not affect your ability to log in to websites nor cause Pale Moon to forget your private information, such as the contents of shopping carts, location information or login information.

Fingerprinting

Visited websites can use a number of techniques for so-called "fingerprinting" of the browser. Generally this involves gathering data about the browser, and what it supports, through public web APIs that the browser supports for interaction with web pages.

To mitigate some of this fingerprinting, Pale Moon has pioneered and offers a poisoning option to poison data gathered from reading in rendered images from DOM Canvases, a common technique to fingerprint the specific combination of graphics hardware and operating system. What this does is it injects human-imperceptible noise into the canvas image when it is being read into data objects, effectively giving a unique fingerprint for each visit which is very effective at making tracking very hard or impossible based on this common technique. What's more, it makes it hard for the trackers to know which tracked fingerprints are legitimate and which are bogus.

Scripting

Enable Performance Observers: Performance Observers are a web API that is primarily aimed at providing webmasters with fine-grained timing data for individual web requests. This can be abused to track users by giving detailed browser behavior data if allowed on the open web, as it is primarily a web application developer feature to be used in the development of web applications, not for regular (production) use of these "apps". The specification defines the necessary Performance Timeline primitives that enable web developers to access, instrument, and retrieve various performance metrics from the full lifecycle of a web application. Basically they can set up custom timing events inside their scripts to (very) accurately measure scripting events. It has no real place on the production side of the web and is regularly abused to gather advanced metrics of user behavior in heavily-scripted web apps.
Unfortunately some websites refuse to work without this API so you can enable Performance Observers here.

Enable Performance Navigation Timing: This extends the Performance Timeline with accurate timing of web requests (standard HTTP or JS Fetch) in addition to script events, which can be abused to gather more detailed metrics of your network connection, network neighbourhood, and specific routing.