Pale Moon
Open-source web browser
 | |
 Pale Moon 32 running on macOS Sonoma | |
| Developer(s) | M.C. Straver[1] Moonchild Productions[2] |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 4 October 2009; 14 years ago (2009-10-04) |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon |
| Written in | C, C++, JavaScript, XML User Interface Language |
| Engines | Goanna, SpiderMonkey |
| Operating system | Windows 7 or later FreeBSD 13.0 or later OS X 10.7 or later Linux Contributed builds for various platforms[4] |
| Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARM64[5] |
| Available in | 37 languages[6] |
| Website | www |
Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customization; its motto is "Your browser, Your way".[8] There are official releases for Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux,[8] as well as contributed builds for various platforms.[4]
Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subsequently diverged. The main differences are the user interface, add-on support, and running in single-process mode. Pale Moon retains the highly customizable user interface of the Firefox version 4–28 era.[9] It also continues to support some types of add-ons and plugins that are no longer supported by Firefox,[10][11] including NPAPI plugins such as Adobe Flash Player,[12][13] as well as legacy Firefox extensions.[14]
Overview
Pale Moon has diverged from Firefox in a number of ways:
- Uses the pre-Australis user interface ("Strata") as carried by Firefox during versions 4-28[15]
- Supports "legacy" extensions built with XUL and XPCOM,[16][17] which are no longer supported by Firefox.[11]
- Supports "Complete Themes", add-ons which can customize the entire UI of the browser.[18] Firefox no longer supports this and retains limited options for UI customization.[11]
- Supports NPAPI plugins indiscriminately,[9] all of which are no longer supported by Firefox[19][20]
- Replaces the Gecko browser engine with Goanna, a fork of it.[21][22]
- Always runs in single-process mode,[15] whereas Firefox became a multi-process program[23][24]
- Defaults to a customizable start page in cooperation with start.me.[25]
- Defaults to DuckDuckGo as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo!.[26]
- Uses the IP-API service instead of Google's for geolocation[27]
Unified XUL Platform (UXP)
Pale Moon is built upon the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), a cross-platform, multimedia application base with ancestry in Mozilla code.[28] It includes the Goanna layout and rendering engine,[21] a fork of Mozilla's Gecko engine. Moonchild Productions develops UXP alongside Pale Moon.[29]
UXP is a fork of the Firefox 52 ESR platform,[30] created in 2017 to address the imminent death of XUL/XPCOM technology in the Firefox codebase.[31][11][32]
License
Pale Moon's source code is available under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, with exceptions for image assets relating to the branding. To ensure quality, redistribution of officially branded Pale Moon binaries is only permissible under the project's proprietary redistribution license. The binary redistribution license prohibits altering the application binary, charging a fee, bundling other software, or collecting personal data.[7] The name and logo are trademarked and cannot be used without prior permission. Unofficial builds of Pale Moon use either unbranded assets from the source code or custom artwork.[33]
Platforms
Moonchild Productions offers Pale Moon for modern iterations of the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.[34] An SSE2-capable processor is required to run the official Pale Moon releases, regardless of operating system choice.[5] For Windows, the only requirement is Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 or newer.[35] On Linux, specific versions of GTK 2 or 3, GLib, Pango, and libstdc++ are required.[36] Moonchild Productions also provides a portable version of Pale Moon for Windows.[37]
Additional "contributed" builds of Pale Moon are produced by community members and may or may not carry the official Pale Moon branding, depending on their level of association and collaboration with Moonchild Productions. These third-party builds range from simple compiler optimizations to support for additional operating systems.[38]
- Debian and Ubuntu repositories for Pale Moon are maintained by Steve Pusser[39] and endorsed by Moonchild Productions.[40] These repositories provide the latest Pale Moon updates only for recent Debian and Ubuntu major releases.[41]
Platforms no longer supported
Official support for Windows XP ended with Pale Moon 25.0.0.[42] Two speciality builds continued to support XP for some time: PM4XP, which was discontinued after release 25.7.0,[43][44] and a special build intended for devices with Intel Atom processors, which was discontinued with the release of Pale Moon 27.0.0.[45][46]
Pale Moon 27.9.4 was the last release to officially support Windows Vista[47][48] as well as the final community-contributed release for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.[49]
Pale Moon for Android was a distinct development effort that is no longer maintained. First released in 2014,[50] it was announced the following year that this Pale Moon variant would likely be abandoned due to lack of community involvement.[51] The final release was 25.9.6.[52]
History
Origins
M.C. Straver is the project founder and lead developer.[1] Straver's first official release of Pale Moon, in 2009, was a rebuild of Firefox 3.5.2 with minor tweaks. Eventually the scope of the project grew, and version 24 became a true fork of Firefox 24 ESR.[31][53] Starting with version 25, Pale Moon began using its own versioning scheme.[54]
Diverging from Firefox
Pale Moon 27 (codenamed "Tycho") was a major re-fork of the core browser code to Firefox 38 Extended Support Release, which added HTTP/2, DirectX 11, MSE/DASH, and JavaScript ES6 capabilities.[55] Add-on support remained almost entirely unchanged, with a slight reduction of Jetpack compatibility.[9][56]
In 2017, the Pale Moon team began the Unified XUL Platform project, seeking to fork Firefox's platform code one final time, before Mozilla fully removed the XUL/XPCOM technology. A new browser, Basilisk, was created as a "reference application" for developing UXP. Like Pale Moon, Basilisk is a fork of Firefox with substantial divergence from Mozilla's browser.[57] The first incarnation of UXP (codenamed "Möbius") was based on Firefox 53-55, but complications arose with building non-Firefox-based applications on the new platform, such as Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. In early 2018, UXP development was restarted with Firefox 52 ESR as the new basis, ultimately resulting in Pale Moon 28 later that year.[31]
Data breach incident
On 10 July 2019, a data breach was reported involving the Pale Moon archive server. This breach was discovered on the previous day, though it is unknown when it actually occurred. It is estimated to have occurred somewhere between April and June 2019. The archived releases of Pale Moon 27.6.2 and older were infected with malware. Basilisk and then-current Pale Moon releases were not affected. Straver expressed his distrust in the archive server host to provide adequate security and quickly switched to a new host.[58][59]
Attempt and revert of change in goal
On 10 March 2021, it was announced that macOS support would be discontinued, owing to a lack of consistency from community developers for the Mac platform.[60] An effort was made to clean the Pale Moon and UXP codebases of all macOS-specific code.[61][62]
In April of 2021, Straver announced that the next release of Pale Moon, version 29.2.0, would no longer allow the installation of extensions intended for Firefox.[63] The decision was a significant departure from Pale Moon's previous, decade-long support for Firefox addons. In the preceding years, Moonchild Productions and collaborators had made efforts to raise and cultivate a unique ecosystem of addons for Pale Moon, ultimately desiring to break away from Firefox addons altogether.[64] Pale Moon 29.2.0, serving as the culmination of this goal, was released on 27 April 2021, amid long-standing misgivings from developers and users alike.
In September of 2021, after controversy over third-party forks of Pale Moon and UXP,[65] the publishing of Pale Moon and UXP source code was changed to a cathedral-style of tarballs upon release of binaries, instead of a publicly-available repository.[66] Additionally, preview (unstable) releases were no longer distributed.[67]
On 17 March 2022, Pale Moon 30 was released alongside the new Goanna Runtime Environment (GRE), and the source code to both Pale Moon and its platform was made readily available once again.[68] In the following weeks, a core developer left the project, related infrastructure like the add-ons service was taken down, and version 30 was recalled.[69] In April of 2022, macOS support was restored as part of an effort to return to certain aspects of the pre-Pale Moon 30 status quo.[70] On 10 May 2022, Pale Moon 31 was released, featuring restored support for traditional Firefox addons.[14] After the ill-fated Pale Moon 30 milestone, Straver described Pale Moon 31 as "putting us back on course after various deviations."[71]
Notable forks
Pale Moon has inspired a multitude of contributed and third-party forks, many of which seek to provide Pale Moon on platforms not officially supported by Moonchild Productions.
- New Moon, by Roytam, maintains support for Windows XP and Vista.[72] Roytam additionally develops the Serpent browser, a fork of Basilisk that also continues to support XP and Vista.[73]
- Arctic Fox, by wicknix, is a Pale Moon 27 fork which supports Mac OS X 10.6, PowerPC Linux, and Windows XP.[74]
- Mypal, by Feodor, maintained support for Windows XP. After a licensing dispute between Feodor and the Pale Moon team, Mypal switched to a Firefox 68 base.[65][75][76][77][78]
- White Star, by dbsoft, was a Pale Moon fork for macOS, coinciding with the removal of macOS-specific code from the official Pale Moon and UXP codebases. dbsoft has collaborated with Moonchild Productions to restore official macOS support for Pale Moon,[70] which was completed in version 32.1.0. The White Star branding is now relegated to experimental Mac and FreeBSD features the developer might wish other users to test before integrating them to Pale Moon.[79]
See also
Free and open-source software portal
Internet portal
References
- ^ a b M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 13 March 2017. Retrieved 19 April 2018.
- ^ M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 9 April 2020. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
- ^ "Release Notes". Retrieved 26 March 2024.
- ^ a b "Contributed builds of Pale Moon". Pale Moon. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
- ^ a b "Pale Moon - Technical Details". www.palemoon.org.
- ^ "Pale Moon language packs". Moonchild Productions. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
- ^ a b "Pale Moon redistribution", Official website, retrieved 10 February 2017
- ^ a b "The Pale Moon Project homepage". Pale Moon. Retrieved 25 March 2023.
- ^ a b c "Pale Moon future roadmap". Pale Moon. Retrieved 9 February 2017.
- ^ Needham, Kev (21 August 2015). "The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons". Mozilla Add-ons Blog. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015. Retrieved 7 September 2015.
- ^ a b c d Villalobos, Jorge (16 February 2017). "The Road to Firefox 57 – Compatibility Milestones". Mozilla Add-ons Blog. Archived from the original on 17 February 2017. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
- ^ Straver (Moonchild), Mark (30 October 2019). "Re: Will Flash player be supported after 2020?". Pale Moon. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
- ^ "Pale Moon future roadmap". Pale Moon. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, gaming, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes.
- ^ a b "Pale Moon - Release Notes". Archived from the original on 11 May 2022. Retrieved 17 May 2022.
v31.0.0 (2022-05-10) ... We're once again accepting the installation of legacy Firefox extensions alongside our own Pale Moon exclusive extensions.
- ^ a b Proven, Liam (4 November 2021). "Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson". The Register.
- ^ "Avoid The Hack: 6 Best Privacy Browser Picks for Windows". Security Boulevard. 1 June 2023. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ Sanchez-Rola, Iskander; Santos, Igor; Balzarotti, Davide (16 August 2017), "Extension Breakdown: Security Analysis of Browsers Extension Resources Control Policies", USENIX Security Symposium (26): 680–682, ISBN 978-1-931971-40-9
- ^ "Pale Moon - Add-ons - Themes". addons.palemoon.org.
- ^ Brinkmann, Martin (3 February 2017), "Firefox 52: how to keep on using plugins", Ghacks, retrieved 13 August 2022
- ^ "NPAPI Plugins in Firefox". 8 October 2015. Archived from the original on 19 February 2022. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
- ^ a b Brinkmann, Martin (22 June 2015). "Pale Moon to switch from Gecko to Goanna rendering engine - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ Peers, Nick (26 January 2016). "Pale Moon adopts new Goanna browser engine, fine-tunes interface". BetaNews. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ "Multiprocess Firefox". Mozilla. Archived from the original on 4 September 2015. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
- ^ "Multi-process, or: the drawbacks nobody ever talks about". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
- ^ Robijn, Arjen (11 February 2015). "Browser Pale Moon Integrates New Personal Start Page" (Press release). Amsterdam: PRWeb.
- ^ Brinkmann, Martin (11 August 2016). "Pale Moon to remove Google Search completely - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ "Pale Moon 24.3.0 released! - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 9 April 2017.
- ^ Richardson, John (2018). Introductory XUL (7th ed.). Lulu.com. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-304-60870-3.
- ^ Abdul, Shan (13 November 2023). "7 Lightweight Windows Browsers Tested for RAM Usage: Which Is the Best?". MUO. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ "UXP vs goanna - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org.
- ^ a b c "History of the Pale Moon project". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
- ^ Meiert, Jens (7 April 2020). The Web Development Glossary. Frontend Dogma.
- ^ "Pale Moon branding information". Official website.
- ^ Siyal, Gaurav (8 February 2022). "The 7 Best Lightweight Web Browsers for Linux". MUO. Retrieved 3 September 2022.
- ^ "Download Pale Moon for Windows". Archived from the original on 30 April 2022. Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Download Pale Moon for Linux". Archived from the original on 13 April 2022. Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Portable versions". Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Contributed 3rd Party Builds". Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10, 17.04, 18.04 Debian 8, 9 Pale Moon repositories". 8 March 2016. Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Pale Moon for Linux". Retrieved 6 May 2022.
...these fully-endorsed third-party builds of Pale Moon for Linux: Pale Moon repositories for Debian and Ubuntu -- maintained by Steve Pusser
- ^ "palemoon from home:stevenpusser project". Retrieved 6 May 2022.
- ^ "End of Windows XP support in Pale Moon". Archived from the original on 21 April 2016.
- ^ "Pale Moon for Windows XP (32 and 64 bit)". 5 October 2014. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015.
- ^ "End of support for PM4XP". 13 July 2015. Archived from the original on 24 April 2017.
- ^ "Pale Moon is changing!". 24 October 2016. Archived from the original on 24 April 2017.
- ^ "End of Windows XP support in Pale Moon". Archived from the original on 25 November 2016.
- ^ "UXP and system requirements". 28 May 2017. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017.
- ^ "Pale Moon 28.0.0 released!". 16 August 2018. Archived from the original on 2 July 2019.
- ^ WinterClaws; Moonchild (M.C. Straver). "Pale Moon 27.9.4 for Snow Leopard". Pale Moon forum. Post 5 (#p146639) and 11 (#p151480). Retrieved 23 April 2020.
It was a bit disheartening to hear that v28.x SL builds will no longer be made but still…" "…Pale Moon 28 does not run on Snow Leopard.
- ^ Kondrat, Tomek (22 July 2014). "Pale Moon Browser Ported to Android". XDA Developers. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ "I may have to let Pale Moon for Android go. :(". 16 April 2015.
- ^ "Pale Moon for Android updated to 25.9.6!". Retrieved 9 February 2017.
- ^ Ganguly, Suparna (24 March 2022). "5 Lesser-Known Open Source Web Browsers for Linux in 2022". Linux Journal. Slashdot Media, LLC. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
- ^ "What is Pale Moon's versioning scheme like? - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org.
- ^ "The Future of Pale Moon". palemoon.org.
- ^ "Jetpack Style Extensions". Retrieved 10 February 2017.
- ^ Larabel, Michael (17 November 2017). "Pale Moon Project Rolls Out The Basilisk Browser Project". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 31 March 2024.
- ^ "Moonchild" (M.C. Straver) (10 July 2019). "Data breach post-mortem". Pale Moon forum. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
- ^ Gatlan, Sergiu (10 July 2019). "Hackers Infect Pale Moon Archive Server With a Malware Dropper". Bleeping Computer. Bleeping Computer LLC. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
- ^ "End of Macintosh support - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 24 March 2021.
- ^ "#1865 Remove support for MacOS". 22 March 2021. Archived from the original on 6 May 2022.
- ^ "#1751 Remove support for MacOS". 22 March 2021.
- ^ "Upcoming 29.2.0 extension support notice". 22 April 2021. Archived from the original on 16 May 2022.
- ^ "Time for this temporary firefox compat to go, I think". 24 September 2017. Archived from the original on 17 May 2022.
- ^ a b "UXP and allied Project Contributors.. Your rights are being violated along with the MPL. - Pale Moon forum". forum.palemoon.org. Retrieved 26 October 2021.
- ^ "UXP and allied Project Contributors.. Your rights are being violated along with the MPL. - Page 7". Pale Moon forums.
- ^ Moonchild (5 September 2021). "Unstable channel discontinued". Pale Moon forum.
- ^ "MoonchildProductions/GRE". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.
- ^ "Pale Moon 31 is out now - gHacks Tech News". 10 May 2022.
- ^ a b "#1829 Restore Mac OS X code and buildability". 31 March 2022. Archived from the original on 6 May 2022.
- ^ "Pale Moon 31 released!". 10 May 2022. Archived from the original on 17 May 2022.
- ^ "roytam1/palemoon27". GitHub. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
- ^ "RT's Free Soft". Retrieved 20 March 2022.
- ^ "wicknix/Arctic-Fox". GitHub. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
- ^ igorel93 (31 August 2021). "Pale Moon developers (ab)use Mozilla Public License to shut down a fork supporting older Windows". r/palemoon. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "History of the Pale Moon project". Archived from the original on 20 March 2022. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
The hard decision was made to stop publishing source code repositories and having public and transparent development progress, and return to a much earlier state of releasing the browser alongside source code snapshots in release state only.
- ^ "Feodor2/Mypal68". GitHub. 7 April 2022.
- ^ Pardo, Lisandro (20 July 2022). "MyPal: Un navegador para Windows XP en 2022". NeoTeo. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
- ^ "Pale Moon 32.1.0 - DBSoft Forums". Retrieved 30 March 2022.
External links
- Official website
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