Pale Moon 33.4.1

★ Winner of Best Browser in 2017.

Overview

Pale Moon is a free program designed to further optimize the Mozilla Firefox web browser for web browsing speeds. The web browser is tweaked to allow for improved speeds within Windows. The speed is expected to be 25 percent better than with using the regular version of Mozilla Firefox browser.

The optimization has been performed to get the best out of the latest generation of powerful processors. This includes features like multi-threading and multiple cores that can take on some of the tasks at hand.

The software comes with a Pale Moon sync feature which can sync information between different Pale Moon installations on different computers, different platforms or devices. The syncing can include bookmarks, tabs, browsing history, passwords, form history, add-ons and some preferences. The Pale Moon sync is free, but comes without guarantee by the developer.

A Pale Moon Migration Tool can transfer a Firefox profile between Firefox and Pale Moon. It will usually work with profiles stored in the default location with Firefox or Pale Moon. It will not work when the profile is not in the default location or if it is a portable version. Microsoft Windows Vista is not supported with this migration tool.

There is also a Pale Moon Backup Profile tool that can take a backup of the web browser profile to ensure that it is not lost in a hard drive failure. This again will work when the profile remains in the default location and does not work with portable Firefox versions.

Installation

The installation proceeded fine as long as the Firefox profile was in the expected location. There was no malware or spyware added to the system.

Pale Moon requires Windows Vista, 7 or 8. If you are still running XP, then you'll need the specialized netbook/atom version of Pale Moon.

Interface

Pale Moon comes with a different start screen that presents many large icons for different popular web sites. There is also a way to switch the home screen to a lighter version that will load faster which is a nice touch.

The Pale Moon browser interface looks basically the same as Firefox. Any user of Firefox will feel right at home here with no adjustment needed.

Pros

• Optimized web browsing experience
• Faster on some systems
• Migration profile tool
• Backup profile tool
• Cross-platform support with multiple apps available
• Free

Developer's note

There is no current data on speed comparison since Pale Moon and Firefox have grown apart considerably, and direct comparisons are no longer relevant. On top of that, both browsers have improved their overall performance and the gap has likely been closed considerably insofar as can be measured in current tests (which are severely limited). Subjective speed is and remains considerably higher though. Pale Moon focuses much more on stability and customizability these days. - Moonchild

Cons

• None.

Alternatives

Chrome, Firefox.

Conclusion

Pale Moon is a useful optimizer for users of Firefox which provides an alternate version of Firefox with some performance tweaks. There is also a profile migration and profile backup tool which is handy.