Pale Moon 30.0 out with important changes

The developers of the Pale Moon web browser have released Pale Moon 30.0 to the public for all supported operating systems. Pale Moon 30.0 is a milestone release that includes several important changes, several improve the browser's compatibility with browser extensions.

Pale Moon 30.0 can be downloaded from the project website for Windows and Linux devices. Existing users may use the built-in updating system to update the browser to the new version. A manual check for updates is available under Pale Moon > Help > Check for updates.

Pale Moon 30.0

Pale Moon 30.0 is a milestone release. It includes changes that were announced back in December 2021. Back then, the team announced that it would change the direction of the project in regards to extension compatibility.

The new release uses the Firefox GUID instead of Pale Moon's own GUID to improve compatibility with "old and unmaintained Firefox extensions".  Users of the browser get more freedom when it comes to the installation of these extensions in the browser, but the developers note that this freedom comes with the responsibility as "more issues" need to be resolved by users going forward.

The new release restores support for legacy Firefox extensions, which users may once again install in the browser. Pale Moon exclusive extensions need to be updated to target the Firefox GUID as well.

The Pale Moon website will provide downloads for the new and older versions of the browser for some time, as users may need that time to adjust to the changes.

Another important change in Pale Moon affects the use of UXP. It is no longer used in the milestone release. UXP, the Unified XUL Platform, started out as a fork of the Mozilla-Central code repository. It is now released "to the community for maintenance and coordination".

The development team plans to focus "more tightly" on Pale Moon's Goanna rendering engine, and to cut components and target platforms in the process that are unmaintainable.

Pale Moon 30.0 features several other changes of importance:

• The Global Privacy Control has been implemented. Users find the option under Preferences > Privacy.
• Default browser controls have been moved to the General tab.
• Various libraries were updated.
• Language pack structure changed. Some languages may have "a few more untranslated strings" until these are addressed in future releases.
• Several fixes for issues, e.g. memory safety issue fix, a potential crash fix.

You can check out the full changelog here.

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Pale Moon 30.0 out with important changes