The release of the Pale Moon 32 web browser has been published, which forked from the Firefox code base to provide higher performance, maintain a classic interface, minimize memory consumption, and offer additional customization options. Pale Moon builds are available for Windows and Linux (x86_64). The project's code is distributed under the MPLv2 license (Mozilla Public License).
The project adheres to a classic interface arrangement, avoiding the transitions to the Australis and Photon interfaces integrated into Firefox 29 and 57, while providing extensive customization capabilities. Among the removed components are DRM, Social API, WebRTC, PDF viewer, Crash Reporter, statistics gathering code, parental control tools, and accessibility features. Compared to Firefox, the browser has restored support for XUL technology and retains the ability to use both complete and lightweight themes.
In the new version:
- Work has been carried out to resolve compatibility issues. Full coverage of ECMAScript specifications released from 2016 to 2020 has been implemented, except for support for BigInt.
- Support for animation and progressive decoding (displaying as it loads) has been added to the JPEG-XL image format implementation. The JPEG-XL and Highway libraries have been updated.
- The regular expression engine has been extended. Named captures have been introduced in regular expressions, escape sequences for Unicode character classes have been implemented (for example, \p{Math} for mathematical symbols), and the implementation of the 'lookbehind' and 'lookaround' modes has been redesigned.
- The CSS properties offset-* have been renamed to inset-* in accordance with specification requirements. Issues with inheritance and filling around elements in CSS have been addressed. The code has been cleaned up, implementing unused CSS properties with prefixes.
- The issue of memory exhaustion while processing animated images with very high resolution has been resolved.
- Support for alternative builders has been added for builds in Unix-like systems.
- Work on creating official builds for macOS and FreeBSD is nearing completion (beta builds are already available).
Source: opennet.ru
