Pale Moon browser new release, better media support

The Pale Moon browser had a new release this week.

I have updated my palemoon.SlackBuild and have uploaded fresh Slackware packages for this new Pale Moon 27.4.0. As previously shared with you, I diverge from the official developers’ recommendations about how to compile this browser on Linux. For instance the gcc compiler I used on Slackware 14.2 is gcc-5.3.0 (which is part of this distro release). On -current I failed compiling with the gcc-7.1.0 compiler which is the default there and I had to create a “gcc5” package for gcc-5.4.0 (which was an earlier gcc version in slackware-current). I wrote an article on this very blog about that gcc5 package if you are interested, it can be installed in parallel with Slackware’s own gcc-7. There are some other differences, mainly in the way I optimize my build.

The resulting palemoon packages have been quite stable. Note that many crashes are triggered when you use Pale Moon in KDE4 with the oxygen theme selected for your GTK+2 programs. Get my patched oxygen-gtk2-1.4.6.1 package in my SlackBuild repository, if you are experiencing crashes.

What’s the news for this release? The most effort seems to have gone into solving the media streaming issues, by rewriting the Media Source Extensions (MSE) code to make it compliant with the official MSE specifications. This is what Youtube reports about the media capabilities of the new Pale Moon on Slackware:

Be aware that unlike the official binaries, my palemoon package relies on ffmpeg for the multimedia support – not on gstreamer. This means that on Slackware 14.2 you need to install a ffmpeg package (I used my own ffmpeg-3.3.2 package to compile palemoon). Slackware-current already has a ffmpeg package so you are OK there (but you still might want to replace that ffmpeg with my own package which is more feature-packed).

NOTE: let me know and do not bother the Pale Moon developers with any issues you encounter while using my Slackware package instead of the official binaries.