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, the Interlink mail client, and other UXP-based applications.

History

Goanna as an independent fork of Gecko was first released in January 2016. The project's founder and lead developer, M. C. Straver, cited technical- and trademark-related motives to do this in the context of Pale Moon's increasing divergence from Firefox. 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, and applications that use Goanna always run in single-process, multi-threaded mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process application.