Pale Moon 5, a tuned version of Firefox 5, is available for download and offers noticeable performance improvements.

I have to admit that this one slipped away under our radar. Pale Moon 5 was released on June 25, four days after the release of Firefox 5, but we noticed it just last week. Like the Pale Moons before, this is once again an option for enthusiast Firefox users who are willing to give up some legacy support to squeeze a bit more speed out of their Firefox browser.

Pale Moon is based on Firefox code, but removes support for outdated technologies, which Mozilla still includes to maintain compatibility with older computer systems (Firefox 5 support goes back to Pentium-class systems that were released in 1993). The developers promise a browser that is much better tuned to run on today’s hardware and software architectures than Firefox does.

However, the performance differences between Pale Moon and Firefox have always been difficult to measure and our comparison test results between Pale Moon and Firefox have typically been in the 2-3% range, which we consider a reasonable margin of error. Interestingly, it seems that this particular version 5 release has the clear edge in JavaScript performance and feels, subjectively, snappier than the original Firefox 5. Pale Moon 5 finished the Sunspider test in 273.4 ms versus 298.8 ms for Firefox 5. The V8 score was 4227 versus 3879 and Mozilla’s own Kraken test was finished by Pale Moon 5 in 6876 ms, while Firefox 5 took 7166 ms. The performance gain provided by Pale Moon was about 5-8% throughout, which is quite impressive, if you remember that this is the same code with a few targeted tweaks.

There was no performance increase in HTML5 performance: WebViz yielded a score of 3660/8.09 FPS in Pale Moon; Firefox 5 came in with 3750 points/8.21 FPS. Compared to its rivals IE9 and Chrome 12, Firefox 4/5/6 is generally at a disadvantage in this particular benchmark and will need on a much better graphics core (the coming Azure API 7 increases the score to 6070/27.56 FPS for the latest Firefox 7 nightly build) – a feature that isn’t affected by the Pale Moon changes.

I have to admit that we do not have much experience with Pale Moon, but we are impressed by the performance gains in version 5. We will add the browser, which feels just like Firefox (with the exception of the Pale Moon main menu item), to our benchmarks runs in future. If you have any experience with Pale Moon, please feel free to post a comment about your experience below.

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