Pale Moon is a custom-built, speed-optimized browser based on the open-source code of the Firefox browser. It focuses on delivering an efficient, full-featured browsing experience with strong performance and a classic design.
After observing the benefits of other systems (e.g., Linux), where programs are compiled specifically for a machine’s capabilities, it became clear that Windows users were at a disadvantage.
Mozilla prioritizes maximum compatibility for its Windows executables. This means Firefox is designed to run on the widest possible range of systems, often sacrificing efficiency and speed to support even what is, by current standards, legacy hardware.
Mozilla doesn’t provide optimized browser packages for Windows. This means you might experience reduced speed and effectiveness when using your browser.
To address this, the Pale Moon project offers custom-built and optimized Firefox-based browsers for Windows. Experience maximum speed and efficiency from your browser!
Pale Moon Main options
- Highly optimized for modern processors
- 100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.
- Support for Firefox extensions (add-ons), themes, and personas
- Able to make use of the present Firefox profiles, bookmarks, and settings with this migration tool
- Use barely less memory due to disabled redundant and optionally available code
- Significant speed will increase for web page drawing and script processing
- Support for HTML5 and WebGL (v4)
- Stability: expertise in fewer browser crashes.
- Support for SVG and Canvas, and downloadable fonts, together with WOFF
- Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plugin execution)
Users will notice a slightly more conservative approach to user interface changes in the Pale Moon browser. It, although very close to Firefox, is (now more obviously so than before) a different product. However, these structural variations do not prevent anyone from configuring their browser interface to look and work exactly as they want, including using Mozilla Firefox’s default layout if desired.
What’s New in Pale Moon version 34.1.0 (2026-03-03) :
New features:
- Re-landed Xoroshiro128++ JavaScript PRNG to make it more robust while keeping high performance.
- This was previously backed out due to intermittent issues and crashes.
- Implemented JavaScript SubmitEvent support for HTML forms.
- Implemented JavaScript requestSubmit() for HTML forms.
- Implemented JavaScript toSorted().
- Implemented JavaScript toReversed().
- Implemented top-level await support for JavaScript modules. See implementation notes.
- Implemented pointer and hover CSS media queries.
- Enabled hardware-accelerated decoding for VP9 videos (where possible).
Changes/fixes:
- Re-landed our expat library update, with fixes for large attribute parsing.
- Updated the JPEG-XL library to 0.11.2 to pick up security and performance fixes, and applied a spot-fix for big-endian hardware.
- Updated libtheora to 1.2.0.
- Updated libvpx to 1.16.0 with various fixes to retain compatibility with older MacOS and PowerPC platforms.
- Starting with this version, Pale Moon allows unencrypted WebSocket connections to localhost addresses, even when the calling document is served over an encrypted connection.
- Fixed an issue in the new Cascade Layers implementation, causing problems with UI elements and extensions.
- Fixed several issues with the new ICU library implementation in UXP:
- Fixed an issue where unexpected Unicode spaces were returned in date strings instead of standard space characters, causing problems with web scripting.
- Fixed an issue with plural forms for Shuar, Welsh, and several Slavic languages.
- Fixed an issue with letter dots in Lithuanian.
- Fixed an issue with word-wrapping in Tibetan.
- Fixed an intermittent browser crash related to removing cached image data, and improved image data cache handling as a whole.
- Further improved compatibility with Mac on PowerPC hardware.
- Restored support for building on 32-bit MacOS 10.6.
- Applied miscellaneous fixes for building on MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
- Fixed run-time issues on FreeBSD 15.*.
- Fixed an issue with applying image filters on big-endian hardware.
- Fixed an issue preventing bundled fonts from working properly on targets other than Windows or Linux-GTK.
- Enabled PerformanceObservers by default. See implementation notes.
- Security issues addressed: CVE-2026-2806 (DiD), CVE-2026-2758, CVE-2026-2804, CVE-2026-2787 (DiD), CVE-2026-2757, CVE-2026-2773, CVE-2026-2779 (DiD), CVE-2026-2775, and several others that do not have a CVE designation.
Official Homepage – https://www.palemoon.org
Minimum System Requirements:
- Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11
- Windows Server 2008 R2 or later
- A processor with SSE2 instruction support
- 1 GB of RAM
- At least 200 MB of free (uncompressed) disk space
