Thursday, February 14, 2013

Like Firefox? Try Pale Moon

When it comes to internet browsers, overall, I prefer Firefox behavior over Chrome’s. But when using Firefox 18.0.2 on Windows 7 x64, I started to become increasingly angry with its memory usage. Even with only 4 tabs opened, Firefox peaked 800 MB of RAM easily, like not releasing memory at all. This was making Firefox really slow, a pain to use.

Searching around, I found Pale Moon. Basically it’s Firefox compiled specifically for Windows, letting out compatibility with older processors, all compiler optimization switches on, and also some minor changes done by the Pale Moon mantainer, which follows Firefox with some gap, waiting for the bugs to be fixed. Pale Moon seems to release memory faster, and on my tests, the RAM usage floats around 300 MB, compared to 800 MB on Firefox. On the use, it’s noticeably faster, a joy.

I’m testing a portable version of Pale Moon 15.4.1, and so far I’m very pleased. All my add-ons worked fine. I totally recommend it as an alternative to Firefox itself.

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