How to Install Pale Moon with its Linux Tarball (Beginners Guide)

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install Pale Moon web browser through its official Linux tarball in Ubuntu.

Pale Moon is a free open-source web browser that was started as a fork of Firefox, but now completely diverged from Firefox. It retains the highly customizable user interface, continues to support legacy add-ons and extensions, and runs in single-process mode.

The browser provides official package for Linux through a tarball, the binary package however is proprietary but NOT open-source.

This tutorial is going to show you how to install it through the tarball, though there’s an 3rd party apt repository

contains the .deb package for choice.

Step 1: Download Pale Moon

The browser provides 64-bit Linux tarball for Intel/AMD machines, available to download at the link below:

You may choose either GTK2 or GTK3 version, and click download using either Americas or Europe link.

Step 2: Extract and move source folder to desired location

After downloading the tarball, extract it from your Downloads folder. Then, navigate to the new generated source folder, and try to launch the browser by Running either palemoon or palemoon-bin file.

For long time use, it’s better to move the extracted folder to a certain location. For current user only, it’s a good choice to create Bin, Apps, or whatever folder in user home, then put all this kind of portable app folders into it.

In my case, I created a MyApps folder, then move the palemoon folder into it.

Step 3: Add Pale Moon into start menu or overview search result

To create desktop entry for the browser, first search for and launch “text editor” from the overview screen or start menu depends on your desktop environment.

When text editor opens, create new empty document (if not so), and paste following lines into it:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Pale Moon
Type=Application
Exec=/home/ji/MyApps/palemoon/palemoon %u
Icon=/home/ji/MyApps/palemoon/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Terminal=false
Actions=new-private-window;

[Desktop Action new-private-window]
Name=New Private Window
Exec=/home/ji/MyApps/palemoon/palemoon --private-window

NOTE: you need to replace the values of ‘Exec‘ and ‘Icon‘ (the text in bold), according where you moved the palemoon folder to. Just navigate to the palemoon folder, press ctrl+l, then copy the PATH and use it to replace the previous text in bold.

Finally, click Save the file. In the popup dialog, type:

• whatever name with .desktop extension.
• press ctrl+h and navigate to “HOME/.local/share/applications” for saving the file (create ‘applications’ sub-folder under .local/share if not exist).
• finally click save.

If everything’s done correctly, you should be able to search for and launch the browser a few moments later.

Uninstall Pale Moon

To uninstall the browser installed via the above method, just:

• delete the palemoon folder.
• then delete the palemoon.desktop file under .local/share/applications folder.