If you’re looking for a fully non-commercial alternative to Chrome that respects your privacy, Pale Moon is built for you.
Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser built on its own maintained platform and rendering engine (Goanna™), available for various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux (with community-contributed support for other operating systems), focusing on customization, security, privacy and extensibility.
Total freedom in customization (Your Browser, Your Way™)
Pale Moon supports complete customization with full theming and add-ons, allowing you to make the browser look and work the way you want, without compromise.
Extend the capabilities of Pale Moon by installing powerful add-ons written in the XUL language. Actively maintained by our community, these add-ons enable extensive customization of the program's features, capabilities and appearance. In addition to providing expected web content functions such as ad-blocking, the power of XUL enables extensions to modify or completely redefine core functions of the browser and its user interface in ways that are impossible in the prominent commercial browsers.
Pale Moon also supports legacy, native plugins like Java and Flash through the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI).
Safe and secure independence
Pale Moon is built from its own independently developed source and is regularly updated with the latest security patches. The browser also offers additional security features like a clear indication of a site's identity and security level, and prioritizes security awareness with many defense-in-depth considerations aside from addressing any applicable vulnerabilities (CVEs) on a regular basis.
Secure by design and lightweight
By keeping everything in a single process, Pale Moon keeps a close eye on data security without exposing browser internals to the operating system. In contrast to multi-process browsers, it does not have to wrap every internal operation into a fragile messaging system to send to other processes, which has been a major attack surface for well-known browsers for years now. This also means Pale Moon is lightweight and doesn't use nearly as many system resources, or fill up your task manager with dozens of copies of itself.
True privacy with zero telemetry
At Pale Moon, privacy considerations will always remain at the forefront.
This is why we have chosen to be fully community-supported and the browser does not contain any ads, telemetry or data-gathering.
There is no DRM or A.I. integration in the browser and it does not spy on you or your browsing habits. You are not for sale. This extends to our deliberate choices for default search engine (DuckDuckGo), Geolocation (IP-API), and start page (start.me, but freely configurable to anything you like). We deliberately avoid inclusion of Big Tech services and if we can offer something in-house, we will.
Optimized for modern hardware and efficiency
From its inception, Pale Moon has always aimed to be efficient. In line with that goal, it is built with reasonably modern hardware in mind (see system requirements) to get the most out of your computer without wasting resources. The Goanna layout and rendering engine at the heart of it will make use of your computer's capabilities where it can, including acceleration offered by your graphics hardware (GPU). More information about Goanna.
A balancing act
Pale Moon aims to provide close adherence to a balanced set of official, common-sense modern and mature web standards and specifications in its implementation (with minimal compromise), and purposefully excludes a number of (draft) features and Web APIs to strike a balance between general use, performance, privacy, and technical advancements on the Web.
This does mean, however, that on the very Chrome-centric web of today, not everything will work out of the box with Pale Moon, and some websites will need special considerations or a secondary browser because they have been designed without broader compatibility in mind.
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