Pale Moon – The Private, Secure and Fully Customizable Open Source Web Browser

If you’re looking for a fully non-commercial alternative to Chrome that respects your privacy, Pale Moon is built for you.
Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser built on its own maintained platform and rendering engine (Goanna™), available for various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux (with community-contributed support for other operating systems), focusing on customization, security, privacy and extensibility.

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Looking for specific download options like a package for a different operating system, development options or a portable version? Check the download menu at the top of this page!

Why Choose Pale Moon Over Other Browsers?

Total freedom in customization (Your Browser, Your Way™)

Pale Moon supports complete customization with full theming and support for legacy extensions (XUL), allowing you to make the browser look and work the way you want, without compromise.

Safe and secure independence

Pale Moon is built from its own independently developed source and is regularly updated with the latest security patches. The browser also offers additional security features like a clear indication of a site's identity and security level, and prioritizes security awareness with many defense-in-depth considerations aside from addressing any applicable vulnerabilities (CVEs) on a regular basis.

Secure by design and lightweight

By keeping everything in a single process, Pale Moon keeps a close eye on data security without exposing browser internals to the operating system. In contrast to multi-process browsers, it does not have to wrap every internal operation into a fragile messaging system to send to other processes, which has been a major attack surface for well-known browsers for years now. This also means Pale Moon is lightweight and doesn't use nearly as many system resources, or fill up your task manager with dozens of copies of itself.

True privacy with zero telemetry

At Pale Moon, privacy considerations will always remain at the forefront.
This is why we have chosen to be fully community-supported and the browser does not contain any ads, telemetry or data-gathering.
There is no DRM or A.I. integration in the browser and it does not spy on you or your browsing habits. You are not for sale. This extends to our deliberate choices for default search engine (DuckDuckGo), Geolocation (IP-API), and start page (start.me, but freely configurable to anything you like). We deliberately avoid inclusion of Big Tech services and if we can offer something in-house, we will.

Legacy add-on support (XUL)

Pale Moon is compatible with the vast majority of so-called "legacy" Firefox extensions, extremely powerful add-ons based on XUL that not only allow additional features to/manipulation of web content, but also allows core functions and the UI of the browser to be completely redefined or altered. A growing number of them have also been rewritten or forked by our community, to target Pale Moon specifically, and are actively maintained. In addition, Pale Moon has full support for the Netscape plugin API (NPAPI), offering compatibility with native plugins like Flash and Java.

Optimized for modern hardware and efficiency

From its inception, Pale Moon has always aimed to be efficient. In line with that goal, it is built with reasonably modern hardware in mind (see system requirements) to get the most out of your computer without wasting resources. The Goanna layout and rendering engine at the heart of it will make use of your computer's capabilities where it can, including acceleration offered by your graphics hardware (GPU). More information about Goanna.

A balancing act

Pale Moon aims to provide close adherence to a balanced set of official, common-sense modern and mature web standards and specifications in its implementation (with minimal compromise), and purposefully excludes a number of (draft) features and Web APIs to strike a balance between general use, performance, privacy, and technical advancements on the Web.
This does mean, however, that on the very Chrome-centric web of today, not everything will work out of the box with Pale Moon, and some websites will need special considerations or a secondary browser because they have been designed without broader compatibility in mind.

Top news:

01 May 2026
Pale Moon 34.2.2 has been released. This is a stability and security release.

28 April 2026
Pale Moon 34.2.1 has been released. This is a bugfix and security release.

07 April 2026
Pale Moon 34.2.0 has been released. This is a development and security update with a number of new features improving web compatibility and standards compliance.

More information in the release notes!

more news...

Freedom, not greed

Pale Moon is, and will always be, Open Source and completely free (gratis) to download and use!

This browser is released as a community project to aim for open, collaborative development of a full-featured, general-use web browser, as much designed by the community as it is by our development team. Everyone is welcome to become involved in its development, discussions around improvements, or to write extensions to enhance their browsing experience!
Please understand it is released "as-is" and in the hope that it will be useful to its users.

This project is heavily reliant on direct community contributions to make the development of not only a web browser, but also any other application that builds on the freely available XUL platform we are developing and using, possible.
Pale Moon and its platform are developed and maintained by a small team of community developers who believe that true independence without ties to Big Tech companies (and their politics) is extremely important. We are not funded by Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft or Amazon, and avoid affiliation with tech giants so there is no (financial or technological) leverage on Pale Moon or its services. As a result and because your privacy is paramount to us, our options for monetization are (very) limited. If you enjoy the browser and use it at least somewhat regularly, please consider helping us pay our bills for hosting, related on-line and off-line services, administrative fees, legal expenses and especially further development and maintenance, as well as increasing cost of living for those dedicating themselves to the project. You can support us directly through the following service:

Other options for supporting Pale Moon are available too!
We do not accept any form of cryptocurrency.

If you are interested in keeping updated of new releases of the Pale Moon web browser and other important news surrounding the project, please register on the official Pale Moon forum and subscribe to "Announcements", or subscribe to the news feed of the announcements board.