Moonchild Productions has released a major new version of its Firefox browser variant for Windows. As the version number implies, Pale Moon 24.0 and Pale Moon x64 24.0 are based on the same Mozilla code base as the latest stable build of Firefox, and come with the promise of significant performance improvements on top of a host of other changes and tweaks.

The performance improvements come from major changes and updates to Pale Moon’s rendering, scripting and parsing back-end, and should be visible in day-to-day use as well as via benchmarks.

The new build naturally fixes all relevant security vulnerabilities that have been discovered since Pale Moon 20.3 was released. There’s also an update to the Pale Moon icon, echoing Mozilla’s recent update to the Firefox logo.

Pale Moon 24 tweaks its settings to make mixed content websites more visible via the Address Bar.

Support for new standards continues to evolve, with the addition of a number of HTML5 elements and implementation of the WebAudio API again coming from the updated Gecko code base.

The QuickDial “New Tab” feature has been adjusted to improve its layout and the new build applies an extension of the address bar’s shading capabilities, now indicating problems with broken SSL/mixed content using a more obvious red shade.

Moonchild is also keen to maintain features that have been dropped from recent Firefox builds, with the hope of attracting more people to switch from Mozilla’s browser. These include the graphical tab switching feature with quick search via [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Tab], removing the tab bar if only one tab is open, options for loading images, more recovery options from the Safe Mode startup dialog box and the ability to integrate Send Link/E-mail Link functionality from a mail client.

Pale Moon 24 continues to maintain features dropped from recent Firefox updates.

One feature removed from Pale Moon 24 is support for Tab Groups (Panorama), but Moonchild has created an add-on that will restore this functionality for those who still want it.

Recent issues with SDK/Jetpack add-ons have also been resolved by the inclusion of an updated version of the Add-on SDK, while version numbers (and program icons) across both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are now unified by removing the architecture designation, which will solve potential compatibility issues going forward.

Pale Moon 24.0, Pale Moon x64 24.0, Pale Moon Portable 24.0 and Pale Moon Portable x64 24.0 are all available now as freeware downloads for PCs running Windows XP or later.