Pale Moon 9.0.1 blazes past Firefox 9 speed tests

If you’re not satisfied with the performance of your Firefox installation then a good first step is to make sure you’re fully up-to-date; Firefox 9, released just before Christmas, introduced some worthwhile improvements aimed at optimizing speed and cutting resource use.

If that’s not enough, though, you could always check out Pale Moon 9.0.1, released today. It’s a custom version of Firefox that has been further optimized for performance, and our initial benchmarks show some interesting results.

When we tested both browsers at Dromaeo, for instance, Pale Moon 9.0.1 took a major lead in the important DOM tests, with a 37 percent advantage on DOM Attributes, and a 33 percent lead on the DOM Queries benchmark. It also scored well on the math and logic tests. And while the story elsewhere was more mixed, Dromaeo still gave Pale Moon 9.0.1 an overall performance lead of 9 percent over Firefox (that’s up from a 5.8 percent advantage when we tested version 8.0).

Surprisingly, SunSpider 0.9.1 delivered even better results, with improved string and date operations in particular helping Pale Moon to a 9.5 percent lead over Firefox (that’s up from 1.8 percent last time).

And, as usual, Pale Moon includes a few additional tweaks which won’t always show up in benchmarks, but could make a significant difference to some people. In this case, the browser’s WebGL 3D implementation has been set to prefer DirectX over OpenGL, as the developer reports that “there were issues with the rendering using native OpenGL causing poor performance on a number of systems”.

There is also one minor issue this time, in that if you use an existing profile and “upgrade” the browser version from Firefox to Pale Moon, then the add-on assistant may in some situations disable the status bar add-on by default. So if this matches your situation, and you’re presented with the assistant during installation, then make sure it’s configured to keep the status bar (listed under third-party) before you continue. Which is an irritation, but we’re told it’s on the “to do” list and should be resolved in the next version.