Pale moon

http://www.palemoon.org/

This project started off as merely fiddling with the build process on Windows, seeing first off if I could manage to make my own Windows build of the Firefox browser and then seeing how my own builds compared to official ones. Finding the difference significant, the resulting browsers (simply "my own Firefox builds") were given to a number of friends to use, with very positive results.
This was back in the time when Firefox was still in its 1.5.x stage.

I have since built Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey specifically for different systems, gaining experience, learning the quirks and following code development. Eventually, with Firefox 3.5.2, I settled on what I found was an optimal compromise between speed, features and useability of the browser. At that point in time, the Pale Moon project was given shape, releasing the highly optimized browser to the public from Oct 4th, 2009.

Since its release, it has become rather popular, with no less than 15,000 visits to the home page just in the first month of release. With many downloads from a wide range of locations, not all of them monitored or counted, it is anyone's guess how many people are actually using it, but it has surpassed anything that was initially expected.

Feedback has been positive, and as a result of several requests from people, a second build version was created of Pale Moon, to cater specifically to the capabilities of Athlon XP and Athlon MP processors, still extremely popular processors for currently used systems. Later on, a portable version was also created to allow people to take Pale Moon with them on USB stick, removable drives, or to simply have a self-contained environment for the browser.

As the source code developed, so did Pale Moon, and a few major changes have been made with the transition from 3.5 to 3.6 versions, and later on to separate Pale Moon installations from Firefox ones. Always attempting to strike a balance, some minor features were removed, and later added again; feedback from the users has always been taken into account, and the development of Pale Moon has therefore been given shape, in part, by its users.

When version 4.0 arrived of the Firefox code, after extensive betas, Pale Moon deviated further from its parent by also making changes to the standard UI (User Interface) layout. UI design choices made to "innovate" the user interface, removing quite essential user feedback and changing the layout of navigation controls were considered to be poor choices, and have been altered to provide a more familiar, and also more intuitive, interface to the browser.

Future directions

With Firefox 4 released, and more major versions planned by Mozilla, with little to no information on what exactly the changes will bring that are planned, Pale Moon will most likely continue to focus on the current browser versions. The outline seems to be to make Firefox more than a browser, and to spread thin across different disciplines to attempt to make a pseudo-web-OS out of it. These are just course plans at the moment, may look nice on paper, but would most likely see a vast amount of practical issues when trying to implement them -- on top of requiring users to change their way of working every three months with the current plans (Firefox 5, 6 and 7 are planned to be released in approx. 3 month intervals in 2011)
Pale Moon aims to remain what it is: a web browser.
Both the 3.x and 4.x branches will continue to be developed, updated and supported.