Pale Moon is an open-source web browser for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Originating as a fork of Firefox but has subsequently diverged, Pale Moon features a highly customizable interface and a range of add-ons that Firefox no longer supports, for example, NPAPI plugins.
Although it ranks far behind industry leaders like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and its UI looks dated, Pale Moon has a lot to offer users. The new v32 of the web browser has just been released, so let’s check what’s new.
Pale Moon 32 Web Browser Highlights
The primary focus of this release is web compatibility. Pale Moon 32 includes regular expressions named capture groups and regular expression unicode property escapes. Furthermore, the regular expression lookaround/lookbehind option has been re-implemented, and this time it does not cause browser crashes.
Another significant feature of this release is the introduction of progressive decoding for JPEG XL and support for JPEG XL animations. It is a modern image format optimized for web environments intended to outperform WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF in terms of compression. It is a competitor to AVIF, which provides comparable compression quality but fewer features overall. In addition, JPEG XL and Highway libraries have also been updated to the recent stable version.
On the compatibility side, Pale Moon 32 now offers full coverage of the ECMAScript 2016-2020 JavaScript specifications. In addition, security is also addressed, and various security issues such as CVE-2023-23598, CVE-2023-23599, and others are solved.
Finally, the Pale Moon team is very close to the final stable releases of the browser for macOS and FreeBSD, which will broaden its user base. The relevant releases are now in beta testing, and those interested can get them here.
You can refer to the release notes for more about all novelties in Pale Moon 32.
I really like Pale Moon and would use it IF…it allowed all the addons found with Firefox. I am currently using Waterfox G3 and am generally satisfied, more so than using Firefox which I believe lost its way long ago!