** If you want to discuss items in this guide, make a post in the appropriate board (e.g. technical chat) **
Since Pale Moon comes with a number of extra features and a different code base than Firefox, some things are not available, and other things are not documented in the general Firefox documentation or knowledge base. This Pale Moon Tweak Guide (PMTG) will give a run-down of important tweaks and comments about common tweaks found on the Internet in other tweaking guides. This PMTG is provided AS-IS and is aimed at the tinkerers and tweakers among you. Anything in this guide is applied at your own risk, and in principle isn't supported, so if you run into issues with Pale Moon after having "tweaked" it, always revert it to default settings to try and reproduce your problem before asking for support on the browser. Most of these tweaks require you to make changes to parameters in the advanced configuration editor (about:config).
Graphical tweaks
- nglayout.initialpaint.delay integer
default: 150 (ms)
This is a common parameter people tweak in on-line guides for speeding up the browser. Almost invariably, the tweak guides set this parameter to "0" - this is a bad setting. The delay is built in because the browser needs to read and parse the HTML served to it before it is ready to start drawing content on your screen. Setting this value to 0 will tell the browser to not wait and immediately start drawing, even if you don't have anything to draw yet. This actually makes display of pages slower, not faster, because it will try to draw something, while still parsing the header, and unnecessarily goes through the paint function with nothing to paint, which in turn delays parsing of the HTML because it is busy painting nonexistent content. The default value is recommended for most systems. If you have a particularly fast computer with a very fast networking connection, you can lower this value a bit, but anything below 100 is not recommended. - webgl.prefer-native-gl true/false
default: false
You can tell the browser to use native OpenGL for WebGL 3D hardware accelerated graphics, instead of the ANGLE DirectX wrapper. This may be faster on some drivers/graphics cards, but can also cause rendering problems or system instability - webgl.msaa-force true/false
default: false
By setting this parameter to true, you can tell Pale Moon to always anti-alias WebGL content, or force anti-aliasing to a certain level. By default, Pale Moon uses anti-aliasing of WebGL content already, so normally you only want to set this if you want to customize the level of AA
If set to true, the parameter webgl.msaa-level determines the level of anti-aliasing to be performed. See also: bug #615976
To be written - but as a rule of thumb, Pale Moon comes with optimal defaults for the engine and build.
Performance/memory tweaks
- javascript.options.mem.gc_incremental true/false New in Pale Moon 15.0
default: true
When set to true, this enables "incremental garbage collection" in Pale Moon. Not recommended for any version below 15.2
When you set this to true, you may also want to set javascript.options.mem.gc_incremental_slice_ms to 20 for improved performance of the garbage collector (Firefox default is 10, which is a little on the short side)
- browser.display.standalone_images.background_color string New in Pale Moon 15.1
default: #2E3B41
This parameter determines the color of the background when viewing images directly in the browser. The parameter supports named colors ("white", "black", "red") and Hex colors (like the default value) - browser.urlbar.autoFill true/false
default: true
Setting this value to true will make the browser suggest root domains to browse to (e.g. mydomain.com/) when typing in the address bar. - browser.padlock.shown true/false New in Pale Moon 15.2
default: true
Determines whether the SSL padlock will be shown in addition to a colored identity panel for secure sites - browser.padlock.style integer New in Pale Moon 15.2
Updated in 20.2
default: 1
Where to show the padlock if browser.padlock.shown=true
1 = inside the identity button, on the right-hand side
2 = inside the identity button, on the left-hand side
3 = inside the address bar, on the right-hand side (next to bookmark star)
4 = on the status bar, default on the right-hand side ("old school")
5 = on the tabs bar, right-hand side (next to the all tabs and tab groups buttons)
6 = inside the identity button, on the right-hand side classic style
7 = inside the identity button, on the left-hand side classic style
8 = inside the address bar, on the right-hand side (next to bookmark star) classic style
9 = on the status bar, default on the right-hand side ("old school") classic style
10 = on the tabs bar, right-hand side (next to the all tabs and tab groups buttons) classic style - browser.padlock.urlbar_background integer New in Pale Moon 15.2
default: 1
Determines the address bar background or shading on secure sites
0 = don't show color/shading on the address bar for secure sites
1 = show a shaded blue or green border on the address bar for secure sites