Pale Moon 29 is out: first release of 2021

[harlan4096]

The development team behind the PaleMoon web browser has released Pale Moon 29.0.0, the first release of the browser in 2021. Pale Moon 29 is a milestone release that bumps the browser's version to 29.

Existing installations should receive the upgrade automatically thanks to the browser's built-in automatic updating functionality. The new release is also available as a standalone download for all supported operating systems.

Tip: you can check the current version by selecting Menu > Help > About Pale Moon.

Pale Moon 29: release information

The official release notes provide details on the changes and additions. The team notes that it did not include Google WebComponent support in the new release and that it focused the release on improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes instead.As far as new features are concerned, there are a few. Pale

Moon 29 supports AV1 video by default, an up-and-coming media format. Another useful addition comes in form of a new preference:

browser.tabs.allowTabDetach prevents that tabs can be dragged and dropped outside the tabbar area to create new windows. It needs to be set to FALSE for that on about:config; the default value of TRUE means means that tabs can be dragged and dropped to create new windows.

What else is new? Linux users get official GTK3 builds next to GTK2 builds, first steps for supporting FreeBSD builds have been implemented, and Pale Moon 29 blocks autoplaying media in background tabs by default now.

As far as Google WebComponents is concerned, some functionality has been added but is set to off by default. The development team suggests to keep it off unless users want to help the team with the implementation. Adventurous users may set dom.webcomponents.enabled to TRUE to enable the feature.

Pale Moon 29.0 introduces a number of fixes and other changes. NSPR and NSS have been updated, a crash on Mac has been fixed, and a memory safety issue has been fixed. The development team disabled the Storage Manager API by default, and "removed a large chunk of Android-specific code".

Interested users can check out the official release notes for a full list of new features and changes.

Now You: have you tried Pale Moon recently? What is your take on the browser?
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