Software Update: Pale Moon 4.0

Pale Moon has been updated to version 4.0. This web browser uses the source code of Mozilla Firefox, but is optimized for modern hardware. The Windows version of Mozilla Firefox is developed with the greatest possible compatibility in mind. Partly due to concessions to older hardware, the browser is not as fast as it could be, according to Pale Moon creator Moonchild Productions.

Pale Moon is functionally almost identical to Mozilla Firefox, but does not support older processors. Some things have also been omitted, including Accessibility features and Parental controls. The result is a browser that could be up to 25 percent better to perform. More information about the program can here are being found. The program uses its own profile folder and does not share it with Firefox, making it possible to use the two side by side. Pale Moon 4.0 is based on the Mozilla Firefox 4.0 source code and has all the extras that we also know from the Pale Moon 3.6 series. However, the developer indicated that the stability is not yet at that level.

Built on Gecko 2.0, the browser has the following new features:

• Hardware acceleration of browser windows using Direct3D
• Direct2D rendering on operating systems and hardware that support it
• DirectWrite font rendering on systems that support it
• WebGL 3D graphics, either using native OpenGL (default) or DirectX (via ANGLE)
• HTML5 support
• New Jaegermonkey javascript engine
• Blazingly fast DOM handling

Of course, the well known features from version 3.x are still present, as well:

• Graphical tab previews (on a nice glass pane if you have Windows 7) with search
• Dynamic/downloadable fonts (including WOFF)
• Support for personas and Firefox themes
• Support for Firefox 4 compatible add-ons
• Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plugins)
• Able to use existing Firefox profiles, bookmarks and settings (either using the migration tool or using Sync)

Since this is a new release, it may be a little less stable than the tried-and-tested 3.x releases, but no major issues have been found thus far.