Pale Moon 25 available now, introduces major changes

Pale Moon is a popular web browser that is probably best described as a spin-off of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. It has seen a rise in popularity recently as it did not implement the new Firefox Australis design but that is not the only reason why it is popular.

The author of the program has made available a 64-bit version of Pale Moon for instance for Windows while Mozilla has not been making available 64-bit versions of Firefox Stable for Windows (This will change in the coming months though).

Pale Moon 25 is the latest version of the browser. It has not been released officially yet but a release is imminent. This moves the browser from version 24.x which launched initially in 2013 to version 25.

Along with the move come several important changes that may impact users of the browser. For one, Pale Moon won't support Windows XP anymore.

I have contacted the author of Pale Moon to get more information on this and will update the article as soon as I get a reply. It is likely that this won't have an effect on XP users immediately as the browser will likely still run on the system.

Clarification: Pale Moon 25 won't support Windows XP anymore which means that XP users won't be able to run the app on their system anymore. There are alternative builds available that can be used, and the ATOM build may also be an option as it continues to use XP.

Pale Moon 25 will use a new synchronization system on a new server. This means that users who have been using synchronization in the browser will need to create a new account when they update to version 25 to continue syncing data.  This works similar to how Mozilla's new Firefox Sync is set up and used.

The author notes that the old sync server will be disabled in a short period of time after the release of Pale Moon 25 to free up infrastructure and reduce costs.

Another sync related change is that add-ons are not synced anymore by default. You can check add-ons however in the sync settings so that they are synchronized across devices.

Several compatibility changes have found their way into Pale Moon 25 as well:

1. Firefox Compatibility mode is disabled by default. This means that Pale Moon won't use a Firefox indicator in its UserAgent string anymore. Users may experience issues on some sites because of that. There is however an option to override the user agent on a per-site basis so that this should not be much of an issue after all.
2. Pale Moon will retain Firefox compatibility with Firefox 24.x extensions regardless of the browser's own version. This was done by disconnecting Firefox's compatibility mode by default.
3. The browser's Global Unique Identifier has changed, and extensions with Pale Moon's or Firefox's GUID can be installed natively now.
4. The WebAPP runtime is not build anymore.
5. Mozilla Corporation service tools are not build anymore.

Support for VP9 and Opus audio has been added to WebM support of the browser which improves media playback support of Pale Moon.