Pale Moon is a custom-built and optimized Firefox-based browser. Pale Moon Portable allows you to take it with you anywhere. You've enjoyed Pale Moon at home, or at the office. You?ve wondered if you could use it elsewhere: in a library, on a public computer, in a cybercafe... You need something portable, that is as simple as plugging in your USB stick and running your favorite browser, with all your bookmarks and passwords at your fingertips? Then here is the answer: Pale Moon Portable!

Why settle for a basic build of your Firefox browser on Windows Operating Systems when you can have one that performs 25% faster? Mozilla does not provide optimized browser packages for Windows, while many Linux ("from scratch") users get the advantage of a browser built specifically for their system. That needs to change! So, here is the Pale Moon project: Custom-built and optimized Firefox browsers for Windows Operating Systems. Make sure to get the most speed out of your browser!

Features
* Highly optimized for modern processors
* 100% Firefox sourced: As safe as the browser that has seen years of development.
* Uses slightly less memory because of disabled redundant and optional code
* Significant speed increases for page drawing and script processing
* Stability: experience fewer browser crashes.
* Support for SVG and Canvas, and downloadable fonts including WOFF
* Support for HTML5 and WebGL (v4+)
* Support for Firefox extensions (add-ons), themes and personas
* Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plugin execution)
* Able to use existing Firefox profiles, bookmarks and settings with this migration tool

Following the trend of other browsers, I have created a portable installation, which, thanks to winPenPack's X-launcher, is completely self-contained. Nothing is stored on the host computer, everything stays neatly where it belongs: on your stick.

Note that portable applications are not meant to have file/URL associations with the desktop.
If you require desktop integration, it is recommended that you do not use Pale Moon Portable, but the normal version instead!

How do I use this?
Three simple steps:
- Create a folder on your hard disk or a your USB stick
- Extract the contents of the ZIP file to your USB stick in a folder of your choice
- Run palemoon-portable.exe

I already have an earlier version of palemoon-portable. How do I upgrade?
Since Pale Moon Portable comes in a "virgin" state, you can simply overwrite an existing Pale Moon Portable folder with the files from a newer version. Your user profile will remain untouched as it doesn't exist in a freshly extracted Pale Moon Portable.

That's it! Simple enough?
The first time you run Pale Moon Portable, it may take a fairly long time to load, because it creates a new personal profile on your USB stick for you. This can take some time, also depending on the speed of your stick - up to 30 seconds, usually. After that, it will be much faster to start.

Of course, you don't have to use a USB stick, any writable medium would work: External harddisk, a networked drive, even an MP3 player if it allows you to access it as a drive in Windows.
Do note however that Pale Moon Portable doesn't run from read-only media like CD-ROM or DVD-ROM; it needs write access to the location it is run from.

Pale Moon: Release notes 12.1
A major update to the browser, implementing a number of visual and under-the-hood changes.
- Security fixes:
* Bug #745580 Thebes: handle bad results from Core Text shaping more robustly.
* Bug #744541 XPCOM i/o: Charset conversion issue.
* Bug #748613 Javascript: Scope vulnerability
* Bug #747688 Layout engine: Drop references for all destroyed frames
* Security update of the included MSVC runtime libraries
- Enhancements and fixes:
* Dynamic smooth scrolling algorithm for mouse/keyboard implemented. Smooth scrolling is now also enabled by default.
* Update to the status bar code to fix pop-up status not switching sides on mouse-over, as well as using a safer location / destruction mechanism for controls (potentially preventing memory leaks).
* Fixed: cache size override on new profiles (would be set to 1GB instead of the application default of 200MB). Bug 20120512-GN.
* Addition of a number of preferences in the Tabs category of the options dialog box:
A checkbox for inserting related tabs next to the current tab when opening a link;
A checkbox for closing the browser window when the last tab is closed;
A selection for new tabs: Choose from a blank page, the Pale Moon start page or the Quickdial page.
* Some slight color has been re-introduced in the navigation elements to improve clarity of the UI.
* Disabled an image decoding library with hazardous code. This has no impact on the browser's image decoding capabilities or performance as alternative methods for decoding are used by default.
* Some changes to memory handling which potentially keep memory use better within bounds.
* A change to the build environment to improve stability of Javascript. Note that this is a trade-off and may result in a slight drop in synthetic benchmarking performance of the browser compared to the previous version of Pale Moon. The impact of this on overall real-world performance of the browser is negligible.

This version marks the start of a different release schedule for Pale Moon.

Instead of following the rapid release schedule of Mozilla, the browser will use version 12, a properly matured build with essential functionality, as a base to make incremental updates upon.

The reasons for this are multiple, not in the least it will allow Pale Moon to implement things that have been on the "to-do" list for a while but which have been pushed back because of lack of time "keeping up" with the (too) fast releases of new versions by Mozilla. The rapid releases often little more than maintenance updates and one or two new features (sometimes even just partially implemented), but requiring a full development/testing cycle for Pale Moon because of the lumped-together patches. Another reason is that from this point on, Firefox will receive a few user interface overhauls to go off on the "Web OS"/"Metro"/"Desktop integration" tangent that goes against Pale Moon's goals of being and remaining a web browser.