Pale Moon 27.9.0 is out
The Pale Moon team released an update for the stable version of the web browser yesterday that brings the version to 27.9.0. The new version is available through the web browser's automatic update functionality and as a standalone download.
Pale Moon 27.9.0 is the last major development release of the 27.9.x branch. The development team plans to provide security and stability updates for the browser for the foreseeable future but will focus development resources on the upcoming Pale Moon 28.
The latest version of the web browser is mostly a stability release that fixes several issues that some users of Pale Moon experienced in previous releases of the web browser.
Pale Moon 27.9
The team announced plans some time ago to migrate users from using the old Pale Moon sync server to the new sync server. Pale Moon 27.9.0 changes the sync server preference to the new server address.
We will be retiring the old pmsync.palemoon.net Sync server address shortly to remove the need for us to maintain a security certificate for it; this preference migration should automatically put everyone on the correct server address (pmsync.palemoon.org) when upgrading.
You can check which server address sync is set to use in the following way:
- Load about:config using Pale Moon's address bar.
- Confirm that you will be careful.
- Search for services.sync.serverURL and services.sync.statusURL
- Check the value of both preferences.
Pale Moon 27.9.0 comes with another beneficial feature for users who have set the browser to restore the previous browsing session on start. The change speeds up startup and prevents the homepage from being loaded when restoring sessions. Let us know in the comments if you see a noticeable improvement in this version over previous versions of the browser.
The new Pale Moon version fixes "a number of spec compliance issues" in the media subsystem, adds a "trailing slash to referrers" which fixes web compatibility issues, improves memory allocation on Windows, and enables the use of "Skia for canvas on Linux and OSX".
Pale Moon users who use Emoji functionality will notice that the team switched the embedded font from using EmojiOne (which is no longer free) to Twemoji and extended support to Unicode 10 emoji.
I suggest you check out the full release notes to read about all other fixes and improvements in the new browser release.
Now You: What's your impression of the new Pale Moon release?
Ha! My left scroll button is there!
PM 27.9.0 seems to be working okay for me in Windows 7. I haven’t updated it my Linux Mint virtual machine yet.
I *have* noticed that the left tab-bar scroll button in Tab Mix Plus’s “Scrollable with buttons on both sides” setting often (always?) isn’t there at browser startup and I have to apply “Scrollable without buttons” and then re-apply “Scrollable with buttons on both sides” to get it back. However, this has happened with certain earlier versions of PM as well, and it was just an annoyance, not a major issue. I have to admit that I haven’t noticed whether the right tab-bar scroll button is also missing.
Icons added to pinned tabs by the Expose Noisy Tabs and Play/Pause extensions can also sometimes result in a wide space between the rightmost pinned tab and the leftmost unpinned tab. I’m pretty sure this was already happening in the previous version of Pale Moon, however.
I’m using the versions of Tab Mix Plus, Expose Noisy Tabs, and Play/Pause hosted at Pale Moon’s extension site and I don’t know how actively they’re maintained. (I simply don’t use Firefox ESR often enough to know whether there are similar problems there. It’s going to be moot in a couple of weeks anyway, when Firefox ESR’s base jumps to Quantum.)
I might just disable Play/Pause, which I rarely end up using, to see if that helps. And after that, I’ll try to be a good citizen and report the problem…
I think my biggest technical problem with Pale Moon is that I have a slow memory leak. If I leave the browser up with a large number of visited tabs (~100+) for maybe a couple days, I can run into slowdowns, hangs, extremely slow browser exits (while the browser tries to cache everything?), and sometimes browser crashes at exit. I suppose this could be because of my large collection of active extensions, although my “Addons Memory Usage – Intikia MoD” extension isn’t revealing any obvious culprits. I have a friend who uses a lot of the same extensions, but his computers have 16GB and 32GB RAM, whereas I just have 8GB, and he only runs into this problem if he leaves Pale Moon up for *weeks.*
At any rate, I have to remember to restart Pale Moon at least once a day. I have a toolbar button for that, thanks to Pale Moon’s “Restart Browser” extension. It works great — provided I use it *before* I run into serious problems.
Aw, heck. I just disabled eight or so of the extensions I use least (including Play/Pause). Maybe that will help. But I’m posting this before I restart Pale Moon.
PM 27.9.0 seems to be working okay for me in Windows 7. I haven’t updated it my Linux Mint VM yet.
I *have* noticed that the left tab bar scrolling button in Tab Mix Plus’s “Scrollable with buttons on both sides” setting often isn’t there at browser startup and I have to apply “Scrollable without buttons” and then re-apply “Scrollable with buttons on both sides” to get it back. However, this has happened with certain earlier versions of PM as well, and it was just an annoyance, not a major issue.
Icons added to pinned tabs by the Expose Noisy Tabs and Play/Pause extensions can also sometimes result in a wide space between the rightmost pinned tab and the leftmost unpinned tab. I’m pretty sure this was already happening in the previous version of Pale Moon, however.
I’m using the version of Tab Mix Plus, Expose Noisy Tabs, and Play/Pause hosted at Pale Moon’s extension site and I don’t know how actively they’re developed or maintained. (I simply don’t use Firefox ESR often enough to know whether there are similar problems there. It’s probably going to be moot in a couple of weeks anyway, when Firefox ESR’s base jumps to Quantum.)
I might just disable Play/Pause, which I rarely end up using, to see if that helps.
There is a lot more development being done than what is tagged in the issue tracker.. We kinda for a bit ditched our standard issue creating matching pull request tagging we normally do in favor of getting stuff done quicker without so much of the procedural overhead.
Use the actual commit log and history to see just how much is happening.
After two weeks we have more than half of Pale Moon unbusted on UXP thanks to several people working very hard.
Additionally, some changes are happening in regards to some artificial but necessary at the time restrictions on the Firefox targeted support installation.
As some may know, Pale Moon has a “dual guid” system that allows any Firefox extension to install even though really they shouldn’t. One thing in Pale Moon on UXP we have done is extend the range for Firefox targeted extensions that can be installed. We now allow anything from 2.0 (maybe 1.5) to 56 to install.. Doesn’t mean it will work but it CAN pass the install check.
Additionally, we have removed the imposed limitation of Firefox targeted jetpack (Add-on SDK) extensions and we now treat them as any other Firefox extension.. Obviously, the SDK is a deprecated technology but they are a Fact so there isn’t any reason to treat them differently.. Doesn’t mean they will function properly.
Obviously, we would like people to start forking or getting any remaining old school extension developers to add support for Pale Moon. That is why more work on our Add-ons Site is recommending today to try and make it easier for people to submit new add-ons. If all goes well the new features should land on or about May 8th. So I best be getting working on that..
There are exciting things happening and all of us even loosely connected with the project are gonna fight long and hard to keep the dream alive even as everyone else it seems moves in other directions.
Peace!
Just installed it and it runs well but didn’t check all of my sites yet, so on release day 1 there’s no rational reason to join a speculative discussion about “guaranteed next update” without using the browser. – And if one is necessary, for users of a overscripted banking or video site, it will be done. Like we know it as well from Firefox, MS, and other major updates.
>EmojiOne (which is no longer free)
Fucking garbage! Pardon my words. This whole “emoji” thing is flawed and I hope it will be replaced with something better in the nearest future. I’m already sending someone a dancing girl in red dress and they receive a fat blob with a flower in his mouth (WTF??)! Standardization – no; now it has licensing issues too!
Apparently Mozilla switched away from it too.
I think that the whole Emoji thing in its entirety is rather dumb but users want it so we added support for it. I mean, I like emoticons on forums and such but standardized potentially copywritten emoticons everyone MUST support… No thanks, they don’t even look good and the fact people are making it into a language of its own is ridiculous.
As developers, we have to try and balance what we want vs what the users want. Can’t always get it right and every decision made will leave someone unhappy but decisions have to be made regardless. This is one of them and personally, I am not that happy about it. Oh well.
On the main page I see:
Pale Moon 27.9.0 is out
by Martin Brinkmann on April 18, 2018 in Internet – 4 comments
I go to the article and it says:
There are no comments on this post yet, be the first one to share your thoughts!
What’s up?
With my two comments, main page still says:
Pale Moon 27.9.0 is out
by Martin Brinkmann on April 18, 2018 in Internet – 4 comments
Once my comment was posted, I could see the other four prior to it????
Did you perhaps mean “Pale Moon 27.9.0 is the last major development release of the 27.x branch” as 27.9 is still going to get minor security updates for awhile.
@Akane:
That may be so, but that’s because work on new features is being channeled on to the UXP build of v28.0. So yes there will be other v27.9x releases. When I said v27.9, I also mean 27.91, 27.92, and so on.
@Jody Thornton
Except what I mean is v27.9 is the last release in general (27.9.x) so any updates to it will be 27.9.1 27.9.2, and so on. (since Pale Moon follows a x.y.z system of updates)
@Akane: Oh shseesh, I wasn’t meaning to get in to semantics about it. I’m not even discussing the version numbering. All I’m saying is that the next milestone will be v28 and will be UXP-based.
@Jody Thornton
All I’m saying is the last version of 27.x is 27.9.x so the article saying that 27.9 is the last of the 27.9.x series is wrong, I know 28.0 is based on UXP I’ve been following the progress on GitHub as the porting is being done.
https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22App%3A+Pale+Moon%22
There is a difference between “last major development release” and “last version”. I don’t know where you got the “article is saying that 27.9.0 is the last version” from.
You are absolutely correct.
PM did it’s usual quick, trouble free install, looks and runs smoothly like previous versions. No issues noticed.
Guaranteed the .1 update will be out in the next day or two. Just wait for that.
Well to be fair, v27.9 does run well. Did you think its release was rushed?
I’ve gone back to running Vista for awhile on my old machine (I’ll save my Windows 8 license for my new PC in the fall). So for the meantime, I’ve switched to the build of New Moon by Roytam1 (over at MSFN). His build allows the x64 version to run on Vista, with working MP4 codecs, which Pale Moon does not.
Moreover, since v27.9 is the last Tycho build of Pale Moon, it will also be the last to run on Vista. Whereas, Roytam1 has modified a build of the sneak peak v28 to run on Vista. And he has Basilisk running on Vista as well. So it demonstrates that UXP can indeed be compatible with Vista, and that the limitations Moonchild has posted are artificial.
Here’s to New Moon
:)