Attention to users of Pale Moon browser - Version 25

[dr_st]

I am aware that some members of this forum have been using Pale Moon (a Mozilla-based browser) and a few recently switched. I myself am a happy user of Pale Moon for the past couple of years.

Pale Moon has started as an optimized rebuild of Firefox for Windows, but with time the paths of the two browsers have been diverging. Pale Moon no longer mirrors existing Firefox releases, but instead is a hybrid which incorporates code from multiple versions of Firefox, as well as some original code, in order to provide the feature set its developers aim for.

This month, Pale Moon 25 has been released with some major changes, that may affect many of the users.

1) Pale Moon no longer presents itself as Firefox, and has a separate GUID. It still allows extensions that target the Firefox GUID to install, for compatibility. But some extensions may not work properly if they hard-code the GUID in places other than the installation routine. Most such extensions have been identified, and their developers approached to remedy the issue. However if you are upgrading from Pale Moon 24 (or earlier), some of the existing extensions may break, and a manual action will be required to correct it.

The list of currently known broken extensions as well as fixed versions for some popular ones can be found here:
http://addons.palemoon.org/firefox/incompatible/

2) Pale Moon no longer has a mandatory Firefox string in its user agent. As a result, many websites which relied on "user agent sniffing" - parsing the user agent string of the browser to determine browser and capabilities would no longer recognize it, and may offer less functionality or not work at all, even though in principle they can work just fine. Unless the websites actively change their browser capability detection scrips, this can be fixed by turning on Firefox compatibility mode in the browser, either globally or per-domain.

The Firefox compatibility option was off by default in Pale Moon 25.0.0 and 25.0.1, but is turned back on by default as of Pale Moon 25.0.2, since it was determined that the number of sites which break otherwise is too high, and their interest of changing their user agent sniffing practices is too low. Therefore, if you have updated to the latest Pale Moon as of yesterday, no further configuration changes are required from you.

For additional information on the above two points, consult the top two items in the Pale Moon FAQ, and the forum threads referenced therein:
http://www.palemoon.org/faq.shtml

3) The main build of Pale Moon no longer supports Windows XP. However, an endorsed third-party build is available, which aims to continue supporting XP until the EOL of Server 2003 next year, and receives all the same updates as the main-line version. To switch to that build on an XP system currently running Pale Moon 24 or below, it is impossible to use the built-in updated. Instead, the main installer needs to be downloaded once, and installed manually (it will automatically install over the existing version, retaining all settings). From that point on, the internal software updater will function as before.

Pale Moon 25 for Windows XP can be downloaded here:
http://binaryoutcast.com/software/projects/pm4xp/

Additional information about Windows XP end of support is available here:
http://www.palemoon.org/PM_end_of_WinXP_support.shtml

I have upgraded all my personal machines (running XP, Vista, Win7 or Win8.1) to Pale Moon 25, and after a one-time setup, everything works just as it did before. I don't use many extensions (about 10 of them), and the only one that did not work 100% "out of the box" was Adblock Plus, for which a solution exists. Another popular extension which broke is TabMixPlus, and according to the developer a workaround has been included in the latest pre-release version available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... e.141025a1

[no_man]

That explains some issues after upgrading to Version 25. Been using Pale Moon for many moons and my internet security is error-free after a full-system-scan, highly recommend this browser. Thank you for this info sir!