Pale Moon 26.1 for Raspberry Pi 2
Since Pale Moon browser is highly optimized for performance and memory footprint, it can be a desirable replacement to stock Firefox clones (Iceweasel etc.) on devices with limited hardware resources, like Raspberry Pi and similar boards.
This build supports armv7 (Raspberry Pi 2, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Odroid etc.) Since the only harware I have is Banana Pro, I can only test the armv7 build on this particular device.
This is a contributed build, which was created by an independent developer (me), and not by Pale Moon team. The binary packages are distributed under the terms of Pale Moon redistribution license. The full source code of this build is available on my github page.
Installation
The suggested procedure is to use the automatic installer, palemoon-setup.sh, which should be run as root. You can also run it by copying the command:
curl -sS https://raspi.palemoon.org/palemoon-setup.sh | sudo sh
in your terminal. This script implements the manual linux installation
procedure. It will automatically
detect the hardware architecture you have and download the right binary package,
which is then installed in /opt/palemoon/. Of course, you can
simply grab the suitable package and
follow the installation procedure manually if you prefer.
If you plan to use a flash player, make sure to run Pale Moon installer
after you install flash (e.g. with "apt-get install browser-plugin-gnash").
This way, the installer will find the plugin (in either
"/etc/alternatives/flash-mozilla.so" or
"/usr/lib/gnash/libgnashplugin.so")
and symlink it to the plugins folder of Pale Moon.
Configuration
Touchscreen
If you have a touchscreen attached to your board, you may want to tweak
the usability of your browser a little. First, install a virtual keyboard
which feels confortable. Debian has florence and xvkbd
packages you could try out.
Second, if you ever tried to use a virtual keyboard on address/search bars, you
know how annoying the autocompletion feature can be, since it constantly steels
the focus from your virtual keyboard. An easy way to avoid this in Pale Moon is
to set "browser.urlbar.delay" setting (found in about:config)
to 2000 or so.
Finally, you will probably want avoid the scrollbars and scroll the content by dragging. Fortunately, there is a Firefox addon for this which works perfectly with Pale Moon.
Flash player
If you have a flash player on your system, the installer script will do the necessary
to make it available to Pale Moon. However, there is one more configuration step
required before you can use flash in Pale Moon. Open the about:config dialog and
set "plugins.load_appdir_plugins" to true.
PDF in browser
Whether possible, you should avoid using built-in Pale Moon PDF viewer
and use an external application to handle PDF documents. This way, you will benefit
from rendering speed and security a full-fledged PDF viewer offers.
However, if you have to display PDF documents in the browser for some reason,
open the about:config dialog and set "pdfjs.disabled"
to false.
Support
If you have any questions, suggestions, etc., please get in touch via one of the forum threads:
This build is largely based on Pale Moon port to Open Pandora console, discussed in this Open Pandora forum thread. You should NOT ask questions related to this build over there, but it holds the answers to some rather technical questions regarding ARM porting. I also keep this link as an acknowledgement to the initial effort which made this RPi build possible.