Goanna is an open-source browser engine and part of Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla's Gecko.[3] It is used in the Pale Moon and Basilisk browsers. It underlies the Interlink mail client, Hyperbola's fork of Basilisk known as Iceweasel-UXP, and other UXP-based applications.[4][5][6] It was also unofficially ported to Windows XP for the K-Meleon browser[7] and Mypal.[8]

Goanna
Developer(s)M. C. Straver[1]
Initial releaseJanuary 2016[2]
Written inC++
TypeBrowser engine
LicenseMPL 2.0
Websitewww.palemoon.org/tech/goanna.shtml

History

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Goanna as an independent fork of Gecko was first released in January 2016.[2] The project's founder and lead developer, M. C. Straver,[1] cited technical- and trademark-related motives to do this in the context of Pale Moon's increasing divergence from Firefox.[9][10] There are two significant aspects of Goanna's divergence: it does not have any of the Rust language components that were added to Gecko during Mozilla's Quantum project,[11][12] and applications that use Goanna always run in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process application.[13][14]

References

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  1. ^ a b M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 2017-03-13. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
  2. ^ a b "Release notes for old versions of Pale Moon". palemoon.org.
  3. ^ M.C. Straver. "The Goanna layout engine". Pale Moon website. Archived from the original on 2023-01-24. Retrieved 2023-01-24.
  4. ^ "UXP vs goanna". forum.palemoon.org.
  5. ^ "Iceweasel-UXP". Hyperbola. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  6. ^ "There is only XUL". Retrieved 18 September 2018.
  7. ^ "K-Meleon on Goanna". kmeleonbrowser.org.
  8. ^ Mypal browser homepage
  9. ^ "Introducing Goanna". forum.palemoon.org. M.C. Straver. 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  10. ^ "Pale Moon to switch from Gecko to Goanna rendering engine". ghacks.net. 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2017-11-25.
  11. ^ "Basilisk web browser". Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  12. ^ "Quantum". wiki.mozilla.org. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  13. ^ "Multiprocess Firefox". developer.mozilla.org. Mozilla. Archived from the original on 4 September 2015. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
  14. ^ "Multi-process, or: the drawbacks nobody ever talks about". forum.palemoon.org. M.C. Straver. Retrieved 24 August 2018.