Pale Moon forum

Is Pale Moon affiliated with Mozilla?

No.

Pale Moon (and Moonchild Productions) is in no way associated or affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation or Mozilla Foundation. Neither Pale Moon nor the developers have any ties with Mozilla, financially or otherwise. Mozilla does not benefit from people using Pale Moon.

Pale Moon is a fully independent product.

So what link is there with Mozilla?

Only one: We have used the freely available Open Source code of Mozilla/Firefox to make the Pale Moon fork.


This statement here is in place to let people know that if they wish to abandon Mozilla products as a whole for whatever reason, they can feel confident in using Pale Moon as an alternative.

More information about websites thinking Pale Moon = Firefox

Since there is apparently still confusion about this, a few notes:

1. If you visit certain sites (Including Mozilla Firefox product pages and the likes), they may think you are using Mozilla Firefox. This is because I (on purpose) set the "Firefox Compatibility" flag in Pale Moon, which makes the browser indicate in its User Agent string that it is Firefox compatible.
   This compatibility flag can be disabled in about:config, by setting general.useragent.compatMode.firefox to false
   As of Pale Moon 25.0.2, you can more easily do this by unchecking "Firefox Compatibility mode" in Options -> Advanced, tab General.
2. This compatibility mode is needed for a lot of websites that determine browser capabilities by way of the UserAgent (a bad practice, but still widespread because it is very easy for website designers to implement). If they find an "unknown" browser, the website may break in unpredictable ways, or what is often done these days, switch to a "mobile" version of the website which really doesn't work for desktop browsing. Ultimately, the website owners need to fix this and do proper capability or browser detection - please do write them if you find a broken website.
3. This is a trade-off. You have to choose to let Pale Moon indicate Firefox compatibility (with the chance of being detected as Firefox), or to drop the compatibility indicator (with the chance of websites breaking or displaying incorrect website layouts for desktop use).
4. So, by default, I choose to give people more compatibility, so it doesn't interfere with their browsing. People who want to break away from Firefox completely and want to drop any Firefox ID in the browser User Agent, can simply do so by setting the above preference or changing the option, at the risk of encountering "unknown browser" issues while browsing.