Edit: Due to the fact that this article is old, the installation instructions may not work anymore. In order to successfully install the latest version of Palemoon, please access the palemoon tag and open the latest article (the one on top).
The latest installation instructions for Palemoon
As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.
Palemoon is based on Firefox, has support for the official Firefox extensions, but does not contain all of the Firefox features, including: social API, accessibility features, WebRTC and has some specific customizations and configuration options which are not available on Firefox.
Also worth mentioning, Pale Moon did not adopt the Australis interface and is not planning to.
The latest version available for Linux is Pale Moon 26.1.1, which has been recently released. The changelog:
- Fixed a few oversights in the Firefox extension compatibility changes in 26.1.0 that should improve compatibility with a number of Firefox extensions.
- Changed memory handling to (hopefully) address the memory inflation issues some people have experienced with 26.1.0.
- Updated YouTube compatibility, which should once again allow users to choose between Flash and HTML5 players on YouTube.
Installation instructions:
Pale Moon is not available via any repository, but installing the latest versions of this Firefox-fork is not difficult.
The latest versions of Pale Moon are available as pre-compiled libraries via sourceforge, so we need to download the archive (i386 or i686 for 32 bit systems and amd64 or x86_64 for 64 bit systems), extract it and run the palemoon file. Also, it is advised to remove previous versions of Pale Moon, move palemoon to /opt and create a symlink, for an easier usage.
The below instructions should work on all the popular Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, LXLE, Linux Lite, Debian, Robolinux, SparkyLinux, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux, Manjaro, ROSA Desktop etc.
How to install Pale Moon on 32 bit Linux systems:
$ wget http://linux.palemoon.org/files/26.1.1/palemoon-26.1.1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf palemoon*.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/palemoon*
$ sudo mv palemoon /opt/palemoon
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/palemoon/palemoon /usr/bin/palemoon
Next, to start the Pale Moon browser, type palemoon in your terminal.
How to install Pale Moon on 64 bit Linux systems:
$ wget linux.palemoon.org/files/26.1.1/palemoon-26.1.1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf palemoon*.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/palemoon*
$ sudo mv palemoon /opt/palemoon
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/palemoon/palemoon /usr/bin/palemoon
Next, to start the Pale Moon browser, type palemoon in your terminal.
How to import your Firefox profile (bookmarks, history, extensions, etc) on Pale Moon:
There are a lot of extensions capable of doing this, but I prefer the good old fashioned way: copy the profile manual, from Firefox to Pale Moon:
$ cp -R ~/.mozilla/firefox/* ~/.moonchild\ productions/pale\ moon/
Also worth mentioning, due to the fact that Pale Moon is not based on the latest Firefox version, but on Firefox ESR, some extensions may not work on Pale Moon.