Portable Pale Moon

For those who find themselves having to quickly switch devices for personal or work-related reasons, creating a portable setup can do wonders in terms of saving time, energy and computing resources for a maximized level of productivity.

As such, one of the most important pieces of software nowadays is the web browser, and Portable Pale Moon’s open-source and lightweight offering focused on speed and privacy may be the perfect choice for easily taking entire browsing profiles and history with you on a removable storage device.

New users may be intrigued by the program’s interface, with design elements reminiscent of Mozilla Firefox’s 4.0 update released in 2011, but Pale Moon’s philosophy values function over form. Thus, it focuses on familiar layouts that simply work and on fast browsing without sacrificing privacy in its quest to provide people with a lightweight alternative to already-established tech giants that seek to siphon user data.

The no-frills design language ensure that no distracting icons or menus take up valuable screen space. This browser’s strengths also carried over from Firefox, with the dedicated search menu on the side of the URL input field, toolbar customization menu and syncing capabilities using Pale Moon’s own servers being present in this version.

The main settings lie within a drop-down menu placed on the left side of the title bar, followed by the navigation buttons, URL bar, bookmarks, history and downloads, culminating with the bookmarks bar and the browser’s active tabs sitting atop the webpage loading area.

Being based on a fork of Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine, named Goanna, this browser carries over the burden of ensuring that the web does not rely only on Google’s Blink-based Chromium platform, which seems to dominate the browser market share. The more people use Gecko-based engines, the more inclined developers will be to ensure their websites work properly on other platforms, restricting Google’s increasingly monopolistic aspirations.

Besides its interface which may be preferred by many over Firefox’s latest GUI improvements, another advantage of using Pale Moon is that there are no telemetry settings activated out-of-the-box, meaning that users have one less toggle to switch off if they want to protect their privacy.

To users looking for a basic, user-friendly and open-source alternative to the complex behemoths that mainstream browsers have become, Pale Moon provides a great package meant to get things done on-the-go.