My Browser Builds (Part 5)

[roytam1]

3 hours ago, soggi said:

Hey roytam1,

is it possible to make New Moon 28 work better and add the grey border of the tabs again?

Here are screenshots of the 0516 and 0606 release of New Moon 28 (32-bit/SSE2) together with task manager and all 9 visible tabs (PCGamingWiki to EPoX EP-7KXA) loaded after exactly 5:00 minutes, nothing other has been changed except starting NM28. As you can see the 0516 release took 2:59 minutes and the 0606 release took 3:59 minutes CPU time (33 % more) on a dual core in those 5:00.

kind regards
soggi

for border issue, it could be https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/3088

others are security related patches and I can't find which cause the slowness.

[soggi]

Thx @roytam1,

so it possibly will never be solved?

kind regards
soggi

[VistaLover]

14 hours ago, roytam1 said:

for border issue, it could be https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/3088

Yes, and Moonchild acknowledges this: 

Quote

Note: this will need a theme change in the front-end.

Perhaps the issue is more visible with tabs-on-bottom ? On Vista, with Aero-enabled, I can't easily tell any difference, though...

[roytam1]

9 hours ago, VistaLover said:

Yes, and Moonchild acknowledges this: 

Perhaps the issue is more visible with tabs-on-bottom ? On Vista, with Aero-enabled, I can't easily tell any difference, though...

marked for next update.

but I'm still waiting for https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/issues/3111 to be fixed.

Edited Monday at 01:32 AM by roytam1

[AstroSkipper]

Here's a quick status update on New Moon 28 (32-bit) (2026-06-04) - the current release - under Windows XP running on a single-core 32-bit P4 with 1.5 GB of RAM. I have installed 25 extensions in my profile, 23 of which are enabled, 17 UC.JS scripts, 1 UC.XUL script, 4 USER.JS scripts, and 4 CSS stylesheets. When I launch the browser, it uses 184 MB of RAM, and it takes only a few seconds to load. My browser console shows no errors when the browser starts. If error messages appear, they are caused by websites.  The reason for this is that New Moon 28 runs smoothly out of the box – at least as far as the browser console is concerned, thanks to @roytam1 – and I wrote my UC.JS scripts on the premise of running completely error-free. And regarding  extensions I either fixed faulty ones myself or, if unfixable, I removed them. 

Edited Wednesday at 04:58 PM by AstroSkipper
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[AstroSkipper]

The only real issue that all browsers in single-process mode as, for example, New Moon 28, have – and which has always been the case with every version of Firefox – is their inability to free up RAM when tabs are unloaded or closed. The amount of memory that is actually released is pitiful compared to the amount that was originally used. It’s a problem that has remained unresolved since the very beginning, so to speak.  And these days, developers no longer worry about wasting RAM, because most of them have plenty of it. But my Windows XP computer doesn't. 
What is particularly pleasing, however, is that GitHub has been running smoothly in New Moon 28 for some time now and, as far as I can tell, is actually running very well at the moment. 

Edited Wednesday at 05:04 PM by AstroSkipper

[AstroSkipper]

Yesterday, I uploaded files to MediaFire, and the used RAM increased to over 600 MB. After closing the tab, only a very, very small amount of used RAM was freed up. @roytam1, any chance to natively improve that behaviour in New Moon 28? 

Edited yesterday at 11:32 AM by AstroSkipper

[jumper]

I would try lowering the browser.cache.memory settings or disabling it altogether.

Extensions CacheToggle and CacheSwitch can flush the memory cache out to disk.

 

[AstroSkipper]

On 6/10/2026 at 2:07 PM, AstroSkipper said:

Here's a quick status update on New Moon 28 (32-bit) (2026-06-04) - the current release - under Windows XP running on a single-core 32-bit P4 with 1.5 GB of RAM. I have installed 25 extensions in my profile, 23 of which are enabled, 17 UC.JS scripts, 1 UC.XUL script, 4 USER.JS scripts, and 4 CSS stylesheets. When I launch the browser, it uses 184 MB of RAM, and it takes only a few seconds to load. My browser console shows no errors when the browser starts. If error messages appear, they are caused by websites.  The reason for this is that New Moon 28 runs smoothly out of the box – at least as far as the browser console is concerned, thanks to @roytam1 – and I wrote my UC.JS scripts on the premise of running completely error-free. And regarding  extensions I either fixed faulty ones myself or, if unfixable, I removed them. 

 

10 hours ago, jumper said:

I would try lowering the browser.cache.memory settings or disabling it altogether.

Extensions CacheToggle and CacheSwitch can flush the memory cache out to disk.

 

Thanks for your reply and hints, @jumper! Yesteday, I checked all prefs related to memory management and performance. And there are a lot. After investigating them, I adjusted my settings, and now New Moon 28 behaves better than before. When starting the browser under same condition as before, the palemoon.exe process decreases its RAM usage from 184 MB to 139 MB. And after surfing some sites and closing their tabs, my automatic memory minimization in the background is now able to release more memory than before. But of course, that doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with browsers that run in single-process mode. But it’s a significant improvement nonetheless. My user.js is now totally optimised for my old P4 processor.  Regarding your suggestion, I don't think setting browser.cache.memory to false is a good idea. My IDE hard disk is too slow for that. Although my RAM is SD-RAM, it is much faster.

Edited 2 hours ago by AstroSkipper
Update of content