Pale Moon 15.3 released!

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Moonchild
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Pale Moon 15.3 released!

Unread post by Moonchild » 2012-11-13, 12:46

This is an important update that sees a number of under-the-hood changes. The are no functional changes in this update.

Changes:
  • The compiler has been changed to a newer version (Visual Studio 2012). This has a few consequences:
    • Better handling of the browser overall
      Things like smooth scrolling, the user interface and page loading should be noticeably smoother on the vast majority of computers.
    • Automatic vectorization
      If your hardware supports it, more advanced processor instructions are used, up to and including SSE4.1, depending on the specific source code optimized.
    • Support for multiple cores
      Automatic parallelization of the code has been used
      Note: this is still done extremely conservatively at this time, but will be expanded upon in future releases to have more parts of the browser use multiple cores.
    • The 64-bit version of Pale Moon will no longer support Windows XP.
      People who are running Windows XP x64 will have to switch to the 32-bit version at this time. The 64-bit run-time libraries no longer support the necessary Windows API calls for Windows XP and are restricted to running on Windows version 6.* (i.e.: Vista (6.0), Windows 7 (6.1) and Windows 8 (6.2)). More information and a FAQ about this in this post.
  • Incremental garbage collection for Javascript.
    Incremental garbage collection for Javascript spreads out the processor intensive "cleanup cycles" to reclaim previously used memory in multiple chunks to reduce pauses/stutter in the browser. Note: this is still a work in progress so not all pauses are eliminated, but they should be significantly reduced.
Bugfixes:
  • Minimize intermediate surface size in Azure to mitigate performance regression bug #778367
  • Fix SVG clip paths in Azure bug #797231
  • Fix drawing artifacts in Azure bug #797314
  • Fix fuzzy equal function bug #770524
  • Some fixes to solve some compatibility issues with the new browser binaries and the Windows Aero user interface. bug #758280 bug #783338
Considering the change of compiler is like touching every line of code, there may possibly be some teething problems in this version, but beta testing has brought no real issues to light, including the released public beta which has been well-received without major issues.
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