A major update building on the Firefox 8.0 code base, with improvements that were planned for the (unreleased) version 7.0.2.
This version sees the following improvements in addition to those inherent to Firefox 8:
- Improved cache handling: this will make the browser handle system resources more efficiently on most systems.
- Improved networking: communication with web servers should be noticeably faster and smoother
- Fix for a rare image decoding bug (garbage, possible crashes)
It should be noted that the shift in focus of development has been towards the back-end of the browser (background resource handling and background networking), considering the rendering and scripting speed is not the bottleneck for current versions of the browser. Inherently, this
may result in less of a clear difference in benchmark scores when comparing to its vulpine sibling or previous versions of Pale Moon because of re-balancing of code priority when building. Maximum benchmark scores are nice, of course, but the main goal of Pale Moon remains to be as efficient as possible
when taken as a whole, including those parts that
aren't measured in limited benchmark tests.