Pale Moon 26.0 has been released

Pale Moon 26.0 has been released. The new version of the web browser is the first in which the switch to Goanna, the new rendering engine that is closely related to Gecko but not the same, is completed.

When it comes to Firefox-based browsers, it is probably Pale Moon that is the most popular in terms of users but also news coverage around the web. While you could argue that SeaMonkey is more popular, it is more than just a browser and at least somewhat pushed by the fact that it is offered on Mozilla's official website.

Pale Moon 26.0 ships with the Goanna rendering engine. While most users may not notice any changes whatsoever after updating to version 26.0 of the web browser, some may notice issues. This is to be expected considering that switching rendering engines is quite the major undertaking in the browser world.

The Pale Moon team asks users of the browser to report any issues that they may experience, for instance on sites that worked just fine in previous versions of the browser but not in Pale Moon 26.0, to report these issues so that they can be investigated and hopefully corrected.

Another change, this one understandable but not as pleasant for some users of the browser, saw the reduction of supported languages to "a little over 30". The Pale Moon project started to do full translations in-house and due to a lack of translators for less-common languages, cannot offer translations for these languages right now.

Pale Moon 26.0 changes

Lets take a closer look at some of the other changes and fixes in version 26 of Pale Moon.

One interesting feature that the team added to the new version is called conservative image decoding. Basically, what it does is implement lazy image loading decoding images only when they are in view. This should improve memory use on pages with images below the fold, and the load performance of image-heavy web pages.

• Support for the WebP image format was added to Pale Moon. Other graphics-related improvements include properly scaled EXIF rotated JPEG images, support for different WebGL texture formats, improved scaling of vector images and more.
• A second control of autoplaying media has been added. This one takes care of scripted content, and is enabled by default (meaning scripted media is allowed to play automatically). You can disable this by loading about:config, searching for media.autoplay.allowscripted and setting the preference to false by double-clicking on its name.
• Improved the handling of "very large" numbers of tabs.
• Added CSS queries that theme designers can make use of to determine the operating system the browser is run on to make OS-specific changes to the theme.
• The browser user interface has been updated making it more in line with the operating system it is run on.

Several security updates went into Pale Moon 26.0 as well. The team added an active XSS filter which checks for cross-site scripting attacks and blocks these attacks automatically.

Pale Moon users can control the feature in the options under security.

Support for 128-bit Camellia-GCM ciphers has been added, and several root certificates have been distrusted.

Additional information about the feature is available on the Pale Moon forum.

You can check out all changes in Pale Moon 26.0 on the release notes page.