Pale Moon the real deal not a pale imitation!

An Alternative Alternative!

My browser of choice has been Mozilla based for many years; Netscape, became Mozilla, then Phoenix, onto Firebird and then eventually Firefox. Firefox has served me well I like the way it works, its plugins and add ons and have got used to its foibles. I've tried other browsers, various incarnations of Microsoft's IE, the lesser known Opera and Apple's Safari. Also the new contender Google's Chrome which is the nearest I have so far come to jumping ship but have always gravitated back to Firefox. On my Linux machines I use IceWeasel which is in reality Firefox rebranded by the Debian Project to deal a 2006 software branding dispute the Mozilla Corporation. On my Windows machines I now prefer to use Pale Moon.
Around for a while the Pale Moon Project is a customised build of Firefox especially optimised to run on Windows systems. Custom built and compiled to be as efficient as possible within Windows it certainly feels snappier then the standard Firefox build. It however does have a few lesser used features disabled, so if you are user of accessibility features or happen to need parental controls take a look at a standard Firefox.
A couple of my preferred features of Pale moon are the fully functional status bar, strangely removed by default in Firefox and a familiar interface unlike the originals slightly weird redesign.
Main 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
• Support for Firefox extensions (add-ons), themes and personas
• Support for OOPP (Out-of-process plugin execution)
• Able to use existing Firefox bookmarks and settings

Systen Requirements:

• Windows XP SP3/Windows Vista/Windows 7/Server 2003 or later
• A processor with SSE2 support
• 256 MB of free RAM
• At least 50 MB of free (uncompressed) disk space
  [source palemoon.org]

Pale Moon as it states on its web site "Aims to remain what it is: a web browser." and that "Added tools" are nice, but may be removed or disabled by default in Pale Moon if they go beyond what should normally be part of a web browser for general use." So it looks like the project is focused on providing a lean and mean browsing experience to counteract the inherent bloat and feature creep that seems to be accompanying recent Firefox releases.

You can give it a try, download here.