I recently ran into a problem at work in which I could no longer use Firefox or Chrome as my default browser. I was instead instructed to us the aging kludge known as Internet Explorer 6. Normally, I have no problems following the due process at work, but in today’s society where the vast majority of work is done either on or in conjunction with the internet I have a slight issue with an older browser being the only allowable tool (especially one that horribly fails the Acid 2 test). Furthermore, many companies are no longer supporting IE6 and others are actively pushing modern browsers. My search for a new browser ended when I found the Pale Moon Project.
In a nutshell, the Pale Moon Project is a custom build of Firefox from source that is optimized for 32-bit Windows environments. The biggest changes between the two projects are Pale Moon does not support ActiveX or ActiveX scripting, any accessibility features and parental controls nor does it support Intel Processors pre Pentium IV or the AMD Athlon Thunderbird. There are builds for Athlon XP/MP processors, but they aren’t updated on the same schedule as the main Pale Moon project. Furthermore, Pale Moon is only built for stable release builds of Firefox and may skip some incremental releases if they aren’t deemed significant enough. If you want a full rundown of the technical specs (including some performance tests purporting to a 1.25x increase in javascript speed) be sure to read the project’s technical page.
I’ve been running Pale Moon for the last few weeks and I haven’t noticed any problems with it. It loaded all of my plugins and also correctly located my existing Firefox profile. The browser starts faster than Firefox did and websites seem to load a bit faster, but your mileage may vary. If you’re a on a Windows machine and are unable to use Firefox, I’d suggest giving Pale Moon a try. If you have an alternative you think is better, let me know about it in the comments.
What about this browser makes it slip through the cracks on NMCI? Is it just that they don’t know about it yet? Or is there some clever work around that it implements?
NMCI uses McAfee Host Intrusion detection and blocks Firefox and Chrome (and its update service googleupdate) by executable name in the firewall policy. To get around this, you can either rename the executable (a direct violation) or simply use a different browser (which is technically a gray area).