Pale Moon forum

Moonchild wrote:http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize

Boolean value, true or false.

It doesn't seem to work, I don't see a drop on RAM usage, but this could be what I am looking for, when it does happen to work.

It's not instant, megaman. It just sets Pale Moon to be swappable more easily when there is memory pressure.

link68759 wrote:I try to keep palemoon running 24/7, but as I keep coming back to, that preloader extension would be nice to have, if we could figure out why it isn't working or find some alternative that does work with palemoon. For now I guess I'll see if a startup shortcut with "start minimized" checked works as expected.

"Start minimized" doesn't seem to work with Palemoon (or Firefox, or any other browser I've tried it with). There are extensions which claim to do this, but I haven't found one of these that works either. You'll probably have to let it start normally and click minimize manually.

Moonchild wrote:It's not instant, megaman. It just sets Pale Moon to be swappable more easily when there is memory pressure.

Thanks for the heads-up, I will try the RAM Drive next.

Trinoc wrote:

link68759 wrote:I try to keep palemoon running 24/7, but as I keep coming back to, that preloader extension would be nice to have, if we could figure out why it isn't working or find some alternative that does work with palemoon. For now I guess I'll see if a startup shortcut with "start minimized" checked works as expected.

"Start minimized" doesn't seem to work with Palemoon (or Firefox, or any other browser I've tried it with). There are extensions which claim to do this, but I haven't found one of these that works either. You'll probably have to let it start normally and click minimize manually.

I had the same experience with XP and 7, but under 8.1, start minimized shortcut setting works fine, as well as an extension "minimize on start and close" does what it promises.

Finally put time to try the RAMDisk option. It does boot up 2 seconds faster, so that is an improvement totaling 4 - 6 seconds, but it leaves me doubts with the program saving and not saving my session. One blackout at any moment could cost me.

Actually, no idea how but Palemoon loads up faster now, even at cold boost, mystery that I will need to unveil. I am good for now.

I think I've found out exactly how to do what you're asking. I used this for years with Firefox and now, with just a slight tweak, am using it perfectly with Pale Moon.

Firefox Preloader is open source and available here http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/

To use it with pale moon you need to do three things:
1) Duplicate palemoon.exe in its program folder and make the second one's name firefox.exe
2) Open Preloader's settings and point it to your palemoon folder, not the default firefox program folder
3) Modify any shortcuts you use to open PaleMoon to point to your "firefox.exe" copy of palemoon.

Done! Preloader keeps palemoon in ram at all times even after you've closed all visible windows. Literally took my load time from 4 seconds to 1 second when asking for a new window when no others were open.

No ramdrive needed. Again used for years with Firefox without issues but I'm really happy to report that it has given me zero issues with Pale Moon now that I'm a recent convert. Hope this helps someone!

Unfortunately renaming palemoon.exe to firefox.exe will break a few things (jumplists will probably not work, and file associations will probably break as well, starting a non-preloaded palemoon.exe instead).

What should be done is rebuilding the preloader specifically for Pale Moon. Since it's open source,that should be easy enough to do. Anyone feel adventurous and have the time?

That would actually be pretty easy to do. I don't have a windows dev env set up right now (I do web development primarily) so I'll either do it at a later point or someone else will beat me to the punch.

I knew it probably wasn't a perfect find but it sure as heck has improved my use of this already awesome project (pale moon) so I wanted to share it with others!

As for file associations..I was able to associate with my renamed file in windows 8 and opening links and the like pulls up the precached copy just fine.

The only worry i have with a preloader that actually uses the active profile is: you never end your session. If you need to restart Pale Moon for a pref change or extension installation, for example, how is this handled by the preloader?

I havent dug into the code to see how/why it can handle this OK but I know two things about this:

1) It seems to elegantly handle a plugin/extension requesting the browser restart..installed a few under pale moon using it yesterday and had no issue.
2) There is a manual switch in its task bar icon to release its grip on the browser if you'd like.

Additionally, of course, any time the computer itself is restarted the browser gets reloaded. But mainly the first one. It seems to handle just fine an extension install requesting the browser to restart. It's a really cool little program. Not a huge boost on all computers I suppose but on my really low powered atom machine it makes a big difference.

Speaking of atom, Moonchild, did you see my post in the Atom build thread? I was really tickled to find you had made that build and left some experiences with it.

Good news all around then! If someone has the time to compile it for Pale Moon then, it'd be an awesome addition (and I'll endorse it, of course).

Yes I saw your post on the other thread. I'll continue making ATOM builds, but they will not use the automatic updater, so you'll always have to manually update (to prevent an optimized build from being replaced with a generic build).

Interesting find! But the project has been marked as inactive and the last version build is from the year 2005!

I would assume that something has changed so it wouldn't work any more with the latest firefox/pm but I have no idea how it works really.

Edit: link to the home page on sourceforge is dead too.

Yeah, it is old. But once again I report it works without flaw on latest Firefox and, in my several days of using Pale Moon now, seems to work just fine with it too. Being open source of course someone could pick it up and keep working with it. I just dont think anyone has because it is very simple and doesn't need frequent updates to do what it does.

chedemefedeme wrote:Yeah, it is old. But once again I report it works without flaw on latest Firefox and, in my several days of using Pale Moon now, seems to work just fine with it too. Being open source of course someone could pick it up and keep working with it. I just dont think anyone has because it is very simple and doesn't need frequent updates to do what it does.

Do let us know if you end up customizing this for palemoon!

Edit- Actually I went through the source and did a quick and dirty find/replace of firefox->palemoon and Firefox->Palemoon. I'm going to bed while visual studio downloads/installs, maybe I'll have some success. It's time I actually did something proactive in learning real programming.

My only concern is this program is primarily 32bit. Optimally I'd compile it in 64bit for x64 palemoon- I expect this won't be so simple.

Compiling for 64-bit shouldn't be too much of an issue with a simple program like this. Just make sure you use the x64 compiler/linker toolset (Usually found in $VS_INSTALLDIR\VC\bin\amd64, or with the appropriate settings from the IDE)

I'm having trouble getting it to compile at all.

I've had some help with fixing a few lines (apparently a few lines look like C and not C++ and are not compiling under vs2013), I commented out some lines involving ::GetVersionEx (edit- it's just something about the tray icon and pre XP system support), which also cause the compiler to fail.
edit- I also added an 'int' at the beginning of a few lines here and there, because the compiler complained about undefined types and "assumed int", but apparently won't compile with it's assumptions.

Now I'm getting this

1>CVTRES : fatal error CVT1100: duplicate resource. type:MANIFEST, name:1, language:0x0409
1>LINK : fatal error LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt
edit - I solved this by deleting the manifest.xml and removing references to it from the rc file.

edit nvm, got it to compile. Installing 32bit palemoon to test against.

edited for verbosity

Disclaimer- I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. I basically hacked through the code with a knife, hit my computer with a hammer and screamed like a dying crow until it compiled out of sheer pity for me.

http://sdrv.ms/1jS2tp5

This does weird things to the x64 version of palemoon. It opens a window that is supposed to be hidden I guess? Dissatisfied, it keeps opening more windows. I got it to stop once.

32 bit version of palemoon behaves better. I guess it's working, but I don't think it loads my session. Maybe it did? I honestly cannot remember which is a good sign I need to get some sleep.

If you want to provide XP support, you may need to take extra steps in VS2013 (not familiar with 2013 myself, I use 2012 -- and even there I have to go through a few extra hoops to compile with XP support).

For now, I'm just concerned with seeing if it works at all, as I haven't yet tested thoroughly.

As far as the code goes, I believe the XP support (and even older) is all built in and ready to go- I've read that the problem is apparently GetVersionEx doesn't work with Windows 8.1, and I would need to use the updated equivalent.

There was something about 0x501 is the lowest supported OS vs2013 will compile for though, so that might be a problem. I suppose you can't just use g++ with a visual studio project?