The Pale Moon team is working on Pale Moon 27 currently, the next version of the popular web browser that shares code with Firefox.
As you may know, the Pale Moon team uses a different versioning scheme than Mozilla as it ups the integer part (characteristic) of the version only when major versions are released, and otherwise only the fractional-part (mantissa).
So, an upgrade from Pale Moon 26.x to 27.0 is a major update in many regards, while the same cannot be said for Firefox version upgrades as the integer-part increases on a regular basis regardless of what the update brings along with it.
Pale Moon 27
Pale Moon 27 is currently available as a beta release. Anyone interested can download it from the WIP page for 32-bit or 64-bit versions of windows or Linux.
The team plans to release Pale Moon 27 in November if development progresses along nicely.
A new forum post on the official Pale Moon forum by Moonchild, the head of the Pale Moon team, lists some of the upcoming changes of the new browser version.
Most changes are positive, and there are only a few changes that can be seen as negative but only for a limited number of users.
Pale Moon 27 will drop support for Windows XP and Server 2003.
The new engine and platform simply isn’t geared to handle the ancient NT5 kernel and APIs any longer. What was previously still possible with a special compatibility build, can’t be done anymore.
The Atom hardware version, one option for XP users to continue using Pale Moon, won’t be made available as well anymore. This means that Pale Moon 27 won’t run on Windows XP or Server 2003 systems.
Another change that is affecting some users is that Pale Moon 27 will only be available in English initially. The team notes that previous translations and language packs won’t work, but that localization will be made available at a later point in time.
Also, some complete themes of Firefox that worked in the past may not be compatible with the new version of Pale Moon 27.
Probably the biggest change of them all is that Pale Moon won’t support Jetpack or add-on SDK extensions any longer.
Pale Moon 26.x supported these extensions.
Pale Moon 27.0 positive changes
As far as positive changes are concerned, there are quite a few:
- Pale Moon 27 will offer better JavaScript support in regards to ECMAScript 6 standard compatibility.
- The rendering engine Goanna is upgraded to version 3.0 introducing support for DirectX 11, Direct2D 1.1 and layout and rendering improvements that go along with that.
- Pale Moon 27 will ship with improved font features such as support for WOFF2 and better handling of complex font delivery systems.
- The new version of Pale Moon will support media source extensions (MSE) which improves compatibility with sites using HTML5 video and audio sites. It won’t support encrypted media extensions (EME) on the other hand which means that sites that rely on it cannot stream content to Pale Moon using HTML5 video or audio.
Now You: What’s your take on the upcoming Pale Moon 27.0?