Pale Moon 24.4.0 released!

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Moonchild
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Pale Moon 24.4.0 released!

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-03-10, 11:10

Pale Moon 24.4.0 is here! A major update with performance improvements, bugfixes, under-the-hood changes and security updates.

Detailed release notes:

Fixes/changes:
  • By popular request: the new page title (when using the Pale Moon App button) will now follow the operating system default alignment (in most cases), meaning it will align left on Windows Vista and Windows 7 by default instead of center. If you want to hide the title or align it differently, please see the FAQ topic about this.
  • Updated status bar code to the latest "non-australis" version and changed the licensing of this code to MPL 2.0 to bring it in line with the rest of the browser code, and making it an integral part of the source tree to streamline building (also for 3rd parties).
    This means, if you build Pale Moon from source yourself, you no longer have to manually copy over the status bar code. It's all part of the Pale Moon source tree now and will be automatically integrated when building+packaging.
  • Changed the way Pale Moon handles file and protocol associations. This will prevent interoperability issues if you have both Firefox and Pale Moon installed on the same system. A side effect is that Pale Moon will ask you (once) to make it the default browser again when you install this update, because of the new associations to be made.
    In detail: Pale Moon will now register its own handlers for html file extensions and http/ftp protocols, instead of using the same handler Firefox uses. This has been an issue for people running the soon to be released version 28 of Firefox, as it apparently locks the registry entries (preventing changes) and as a result locking the associations to Firefox (even after uninstalling!).
  • Changed the search default to DuckDuckGo.
    This will improve your privacy, prevent tracking by third parties of your searches, and will actually increase accuracy of search results by providing unbiased results (avoiding the so-called "search bubble")
  • Added DuckDuckGo logo to about:home.
  • Changed some things in the build system, back-end code and build configuration to improve overall performance of the browser.
  • Switched to the use of a more compact browser filesystem layout, improving overall start-up speed.
    In detail: With the changes to the Firefox build system, jar-packaging was no longer an optimal solution and would cause a (too) large number of individual files in the application, slowing down start-up of the browser, especially on slower/busy media. Pale Moon will now use omnijar-packaging (omni.ja) to reduce the number of I/O operations needed to run the browser. A drawback is that hacking the browser will become a little more difficult.
  • Precompiled script cache in the application, improving overall start-up speed at the expense of some disk space.
    In detail: With the change in status bar code, status bar packaging and switching to omnijar, it became possible to provide pre-compiled scripts with the browser, improving both the first-time run of Pale Moon and speeding up subsequent starts of the browser by pre-caching compiled versions of user interface code.
  • Added MPS detection for non-windows operating systems (NSPR fallback method) instead of always "1".
    This will be beneficial to people building on other operating systems like Linux.
Bugfixes ported over:
  • bug #968461 - Fix imgStatusTracker.h to build with gcc 4.4.
  • bug #912322 - Make sure document.getAnonymous* is no longer available to web content.
  • bug #894448 - Move IsChromeOrXBL to xpcpublic.h.
Security fixes:
  • bug #963198 - Don't mix up byte-size and array-length.
  • bug #966311 - Calculate frame size for stereo wave.
  • bug #958867 - Consistent OwningObject handling in IDBFactory::Create methods.
  • bug #925747 - Patch file extraction cleanup.
  • bug #942152 - Fix error handling on NSS I/O layer.
  • bug #960145 - IonMonkey: Don't ignore OSR-like values when computing phi ranges.
  • bug #965982 - Clean up client threads before I/O on shutdown.
  • bug #950604 - Backport of a small typed array bugfix.
  • bug #967341 - Fix up URI management.
  • bug #963974 - Null mCurrentCompositeTask after calling Cancel() on it.
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