Need for speed, but Firefox is too slow? Try Pale Moon 11
Firefox 11 delivered some useful features, including add-on synchronization, extended developer tools and the ability to import some Chrome profile data.
It wasn’t so hot on performance enhancements, though, beyond support for Google’s SPDY protocol (and that’s not yet widely used enough to make a big difference for most people). So if you value speed above all else, then you may want to check out Pale Moon 11, released today: it’s based on the same source code as Firefox 11, so looks and feels very similar, but is further optimized to deliver the very best performance.
This build is essentially a maintenance release, and new features such as SPDY and enhanced CSS and HTML5 support won’t be too visible to most people. WebGL and font rendering performance should be further enhanced, though, and it’s good to see that the developer has re-integrated status bar functionality again. This can show you links, network status and more, and clicking Tools > Status Bar Options allows you to set it up just as you’d like.
So how fast is the program, exactly? SunSpider showed Pale Moon 11 maintaining an average 9.1-percent lead over Firefox, very marginally down from its 9.5-percent lead last time. And Dromaeo’s inclusion of the important DOM handling operations make it a little more relevant, though, and here we found Pale Moon had a 15.8-percent advantage over Firefox, a notable increase on its 9-percent lead last time.
Browser benchmarks don’t properly assess the full benefits of Pale Moon’s optimisations, though, and the results vary considerably depending on what you’re doing, anyway. SunSpider’s access tests gave a lead to Firefox, for instance, but the date and string operations showed Pale Moon had anything up to a 40 percent advantage over the competition.
If you like Firefox but need some extra speed, then, Pale Moon could be a good compromise; while not always fast enough to notice any difference, the program does perform a little better overall, and the Pale Moon 11 downloads are available now.
Photo Credit: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock