Pale Moon 25.4 is out

Pale Moon 25.4 has just been published. The new version of the web browser is already available via the browser's automatic update feature and the official website.

The release is a major update that introduces several important fixes and changes to Pale Moon. Apart from that, it is patching several security issues making it a mandatory update for all users of the browser.

As far as major improvements are concerned, there are a few that need to be mentioned.

The SQLite version was update in this release which improves database performance for select operations by up to 50%.

Pale Moon, just like Firefox, uses databases to store history and bookmark information among others and operations that run on these databases benefit from the upgrade.

Another performance related change affects the unloading of idle plugins from memory. The new preference dom.ipc.plugins.unloadTimeoutSecs defines the idle time before plugins are unloaded. It is set to 60 seconds by default which you can reduce further. Please note that very low values may cause slow downs.

Another change affects text selection on Windows. If you double click on text, only the actual word is copied but not the space afterwards. This was different before and if you want to restore the previous handling set the preference layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word to true.

This is similar to how Firefox handles this and the same controls are provided to change it in Mozilla's browser as well.

 

Security and Privacy

Several interesting privacy and security related features landed in Pale Moon 25.4. Several trusted root certificates were updated in the release while CNNIC was distrusted (following Google and Mozilla on this which did the same).

The Page Info window highlights the protocol used on HTTPS websites now (e.g. TLS 1.2).

Other changes affecting secure site information include adding encryption with less than 128 bits or RC4 ciphers as weak, and certificate viewer improvements.

So-called mixed-mode connections are now represented by a new mixed-mode state for HTTPS connections that highlights these connections with a mixed-mode padlock and improved tooltips.

Other changes

Most telemetry code has been removed. Telemetry is used by Mozilla to collect various information about the browser. Since this is not used by Pale Moon, it has been removed from the browser.

The developers have removed other Mozilla-specific features like the plugin-check link in the addons manager and parameters for search.

A full list of changes is provided on the official website.