Firefox 8 too slow for you? Try Pale Moon 8

Only a few days have passed since Firefox 8.0 arrived, with new additions including an option to speed up launch time in some situations. If the browser still isn’t quite as fast as before, though, you could always try Pale Moon 8.0, released today.

This spin-off project starts with the same code base, so for the most part looks and behaves just like regular Firefox -- but it’s been carefully optimized to deliver even better performance.

As with previous editions, Pale Moon is compiled to take better advantage of modern CPUs, and that gives it a notable speed advantage in some areas. When we benchmarked the browser using SunSpider 0.9.1, for instance, it ran the Cordic element of the math test 29 percent faster than Firefox 8.0, while Dromaeo gave Pale Moon a 19 percent advantage on the "Bitwise And" test.

Most areas show nothing like as significant an improvement, of course, and so the overall performance lead is much smaller (5.8 percent in Dromaeo, only 1.6 percent in SunSpider). Benchmarks don’t tell the whole story, though, and this release in particular includes a couple of new tweaks that should help to accelerate your browsing.

Perhaps the most significant is that Pale Moon 8.0 now makes use of small network buffers, potentially a very useful optimization when you’re trying to access complex sites that fetch their content from many different servers. Exactly how this might benefit you will vary depending on what you’re doing online; however, Pale Moon’s developer reports that, in previous testing of this change he found that "overall page load time was improved dramatically".

The other major tweak in this release is a change to Pale Moon’s cache management, which essentially will reduce both the overall cache sizes and the maximum size of the elements they can store. Again, results will vary depending on how you use the web, but the majority of people should benefit from reduced RAM consumption, and more efficient cache use, as well as reducing the chance of annoying pauses whenever the browser tries to clean the disk cache.

Pale Moon 8.0 is a notable upgrade, then, that could make a real difference to its browsing performance. If you’d like to give it a try then this new release is available now. There is also a separate 64-bit optimized edition of Pale Moon 8, as well as a Portable version which you can take on the road.