There is a relatively simple way to squeeze more speed out of your Firefox browser. If milliseconds count, then Pale Moon may be for you.

Pale Moon has been around for quite some time as an option for those who would like to have an optimized Firefox web browser. Pale Moon is not a tuning package, but an entire browser that is based on the Firefox source code. Pale Moon and Firefox are largely the same and there are no feature differences. However, the developers of Pale Moon claim that their optimizations result in higher browser performance.

There are conflicting reports whether that is true and how significant the effect is, but the dramatic changes from Firefox 3.6 to 4.0 gave the pale Moon developers some options to evaluate performance options. It is the first we noticed a substantial and somewhat strange jump in JavaScript performance on our test system.

At first sight, Pale Moon is closer to Firefox 3.6 than Firefox 4 is: There is the old reload button and there is a bookmark bar that is enabled by default. The tabs are slightly different and the Panorama feature, which was identified as a performance hog was kicked to the curb. Other than that, the browser pretty much feels like Firefox 4.0.

We ran a few benchmarks to find out whether there was any measurable performance benefit other than purely subjective impressions. We noticed that Pale Moon 4.0 posted a very consisted 261 ms time in Sunspider 0.9.1, which compared to 280 and 281 ms times of Firefox 4.0. A differences of 20 ms is substantial and well outside the margin of error – it is, however, a surprising result as both browsers use the same JavaScript engines. The 261 ms time is, by the way about even with the result of IE9.

It wasn’t a fluke. Pale Moon also outran Firefox in Google’s V8 benchmark (4298 vs. 4036 points; average of five runs) as well as Mozilla’s own Kraken benchmark (7387 ms vs. 7693 ms, average of five runs).

We do not know whether our system reacted in a certain way to Pale Moon that enabled those results, the clear advantage in JavaScript, however is very noticeable. We did not see similar advantages in GPU acceleration benchmarks. We will be including pale Moon in our upcoming browser benchmark run for a more thorough evaluation, but the first results are very promising.

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