Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Pale Moon Version 33.8.1 Released with Security Updates

 Pale MoonPale Moon has been updated to version 33.8.1.  This is a bugfix and security update.

Changes/fixes:

  • Pale Moon no longer accepts nameless cookies. See implementation notes.
  • Improved the "copy as curl" command in devtools further, partially rolling back the DiD changes in previous versions since we aren't offering cross-platform commands and it caused potential issues with overzealous escaping.
  • Fixed a potential use-after-free scenario in the CSS parser.
  • Fixed uninitialized use of fontconfig scenarios for Linux/GTK.
  • Adjusted CSP URI reporting to more closely match the current spec and common browser behavior.
  • Fixed a potential crash in font handling.
  • Adjusted the size of WASM compiled table size limits to match V8/Gecko.
  • Increased restrictions on the types of data loads <object> elements are allowed to trigger, to match the fetch spec more closely.
  • Fixed build issues for PPC architectures.
  • Security issues addressed: CVE-2025-8031, CVE-2025-8028 (DiD), CVE-2025-8037 (and related), CVE-2025-8029, and several others that do not have a CVE number.

Implementation notes:

  • From this version forward we no longer accept nameless cookies. If a cookie has no name and starts with an equal sign, it is outright rejected. If a cookie consists only of a string with no equal sign, it is interpreted as a valueless cookie with the name set to the string. This departs from our inherited Mozilla behavior where this was previously treated as a nameless cookie with the string as the value.

    RFC 6265 forbids cookies without an equal sign (§5.2 step 2), but browsers accept them anyway for web compatibility reasons (poor web design). Moreover, §5.2 step 5 explicitly forbids nameless cookies.

    Valueless names also make more sense in web context: Set-cookie: itself supports secure and httponly as valueless attributes, and HTML supports valueless attributes as well.

    Our new behavior therefore makes more logical sense, is closer to the spec and general principles, aligns with webkit/Safari and solves a whole class of potential sec bugs like CVE-2025-8037. Apologies if this causes web compat issues, but it's the same thing to do when encountering non-compliant cookies.

Pale Moon includes both 32- and 64-bit versions for Windows: Pale Moon for Windows downloads.

Update: To get the update now, select "Help" from the Pale Moon menu at the upper left of the browser window.  Select About Pale Moon > Check for Updates.

Release Notes
Release Cycle

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