- Web compatibility is a difficult issue because so many websites (including Google who should know better) are still using arbitrary checks for "browser detection". To mitigate the most severe issues, Pale Moon 26 will have several "compatibility mode" preferences with different results:
- The well-known Firefox Compatibility mode checkbox in Options will cater to most "user-agent sniffing" websites that check for a "Firefox/xx.xx" version in the user agent string.
- Gecko compatibility mode, which will insert a Gecko compatibility slice (Gecko/20100101) in the user agent string, which is Firefox's frozen Gecko string.
The preference for this is general.useragent.compatMode.gecko and defaults to true (meaning the string is inserted by default) to give as much compatibility for sites checking for "Gecko" as possible. - Several site-specific identification strings for individual websites that require something specific to satisfy their checks (major culprits are FaceBook, Netflix, WhatsApp, iCloud, and Microsoft services like outlook.com and live.com)
- Extension compatibility is tricky as well, but considering Mozilla is now deprecating any and all current extension implementations, a few approaches will be different in Pale Moon:
- We are hard at work with providing an independent repository of Pale Moon specific and compatible Firefox extensions. Over time, addons.palemoon.org will become the prime location to get your extensions over Mozilla's sister site.
- Contrary to previous publications, we've seen insufficient reason to actually lie about ourselves in the platformVersion presented to extensions. This will likely mean that a small number of extensions that actually do check the platform version and expecting a Firefox product version there will need some minor updates to work properly with Pale Moon. The general impression we've received from the public betas is that extension compatibility on the whole is not dependent on this application information being tied to the higher number than our platform version in Goanna-based releases.
- We will continue to support binary XPCOM components in our extensions as opposed to Firefox.
- We will continue to support XUL extensions, and this will remain the preferred method of writing extensions for Pale Moon.
(Thanks to one of our community members, we may soon also have a XUL GUI designer tool available to help extension developers with designing XUL windows) - SDK and bootstrapped extensions will also be supported in Goanna-based Pale Moon versions, although for SDK-based extensions it may be slightly tricky to get them to work with us due to some existing differences between the Firefox and Pale Moon extension SDK.
- The following new major features will be present in the Goanna-based toolset:
- Support for the WebP image format
- Support for VP9 profile 1 (YUV4:4:4) encoded videos
- Support for more key ES6 features (in progress)
- Support for additional non-AES, internationally recognized strong encryption ciphers
- Full Windows 10 compatibility in the back-end
- A whole range of performance improvements, including for image-heavy sites
- Better alignment with several HTML5 specifications and standards (e.g. 3D transforms, EXIF data, regular expressions, styling of frames/iframes)
- On the browser-side, Pale Moon 26 will further have the following new major features:
- Support for Ruby annotations (by setting a user preference)
- A slightly different look of the user interface (default theme) and of course Full Themes to change this look (in progress)
- Full Windows 10 compatibility in the user interface
Also, since there seems to be some confusion with some people in the browser scene: I re-iterate that "Goanna" is not a "code name" or "milestone name" for the browser, but is the name for our fork of the Gecko engine and will not change with the next version(s) of the browser.