Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 8, 2026

Goanna (software)

Goanna is an open-source browser engine and part of Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla's Gecko. 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. It was also unofficially ported to Windows XP for the K-Meleon browser and Mypal.

Last revised
Jul 8, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
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290 w
Citations
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Source
Wikipedia ↗
Goanna
DeveloperM. C. Straver1
ReleaseJanuary 20162
Written inC++
TypeBrowser engine
LicenseMPL 2.0
Websitewww.palemoon.org/tech/goanna.shtml

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.456 It was also unofficially ported to Windows XP for the K-Meleon browser7 and Mypal.8

History

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.910 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,1112 and applications that use Goanna always run in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process application.1314

References

References

  1. M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 2017-03-13. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
  2. "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". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  10. Brinkmann, Martin (2015-06-22). "Pale Moon to switch from Gecko to Goanna rendering engine". ghacks.net. Retrieved 2017-11-25.
  11. "Basilisk web browser". basilisk-browser.org. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  12. "Quantum". MozillaWiki. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  13. "Multiprocess Firefox". Mozilla Developer Network. Archived from the original on 4 September 2015. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
  14. "Multi-process, or: the drawbacks nobody ever talks about". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. 2017-11-20. Archived from the original on 2020-11-11. Retrieved 24 August 2018.