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Give the users a choice between Chrome and Chrome, and they'll pick Chrome every time!

Did I not say I've twice (Edit: now three times) posted that the UOC Patch is where the problem lies.

IMHO, the best thing for both @looking4awayout and the community consuming his efforts (UOC Patches & Enforcers) would be for him to change to git (or other Version Control System) and ultimately host his nice project on GitHub | GitLab and similar; then, automation would be the simplest of things... Just my 2 (euro)cents, of course...

Wow - it turns out that privacy.resistFingerprinting does a lot more besides what canvas.poisondata does! The full list of what it's supposed to do is in the spoiler. Most of this was not implemented in Serpent 55, and I'm unsure which of these functions interferes with Flash, but something does:

Warning to users of Adobe's "Flash" plug-in: I have discovered that the 52 ESR version of the UOC Patch sets two preferences that interfere with Flash: privacy.resistFingerprinting dom.ipc.plugins.asyncdrawing.enabled #1 is more serious. For some reason, it prevents Flash from working at all. Luckily, it also has the easiest workaround: set it back to false, or remove the line enabling it from the UOC_Patch_52.js file; instead, use an extension (I use "Canvas Defender" but there are several others) to resist canvas fingerprinting. #2 may, or may not, affect your system. To test, first disable the above preference, then go to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/about/. If both the Flash animation and your currently installed Flash version appear, you're fine and can leave this preference set to true. If the page doesn't work properly, you'll have to set this preference to false also. Unfortunately I know of no workaround to retain its function if you have to turn it off. Edit: It turns out that privacy.resistFingerprinting implicitly does lots of things "behind the scenes". Some of these changes, such as user agent overrides, could cause Web sites to malfunction or otherwise affect usability. Luckily, most of the changes didn't land until FF 55 (which won't run on XP) or later FF versions (but Serpent 55 may include some of them). Still, I think it would be best to remove this preference from the UOC Patch. Edit 2: The troublesome privacy.resistFingerprinting also appears in the FF 45 version of the UOC Patch, but that preference doesn't do as much in that version, so it may not cause trouble with Flash there. I haven't tested FF 45 with the UOC Patch and Flash. Edit 3: Found one more. This one's more obscure, but I'm posting it anyway, just in case anyone runs across it. The UOC Patch sets pref apz.allow_zooming, which conflicts with the Multi-Account Containers add-on. That add-on is the main reason I switched to Serpent 55, so my own customized version of the UOC Patch now omits privacy.resistFingerprinting and apz.allow_zooming, and sets dom.ipc.plugins.asyncdrawing.enabled to false to ensure Flash always works. Hopefully I now have everything working again!

nope, just because x64 version of .mozconfig was being touched unexpectedly causing a full rebuilt.

Mozilla's restored boycott of site-specific useragents keeps showing their contempt of user needs. And keeps infuriating me :realmad: "it was just old code" ?! Incredible. Now they don't even bother anymore to think up some phony pretense why their continued destruction of useful features should be "necessary". Not that it would matter anyway, since the real purpose is always very obvious by the effect of their deeds: driving even the most loyal users away as fast as possible. Bugzilla said: > the technical burden of maintaining the code that does this (even assuming it's "bug free") > is not worth it. I agree that it was more convenient just to add a pref for what you wanted, > but webExtensions allows you to do that just as easily, and is well tested. What a phony lie too. At the same time claiming this task were super easy for addon hobby devs, yet for their mega-corporation it's supposedly a too heavy burden! Although they wouldn't even need to do anything new, just KEEP an already existing file :realmad: By the way this native function allows users to just toggle PREFS to use it. To give them a better GUI, this simple-pref toggling could also be done by addons in enabled builds, or if necessary xpi-addons could just enable it themselves with 2 lines. If already enabled anyway, as in roytam's builds, that pref-toggling can easily be done by K-Meleon macros too (like useragents2018). Yet all xpi-addons that I've looked at closer in the past, overruled instead this native browser function completely, rendering those native prefs useless. Never quite got it.

Of course. But even I who am very aware of such EoS dates (even if they don't mean much to me, since I keep using Word 2000 and Acrobat Reader 9.5.5, not to mention Shockwave 12.3.5.205 and Silverlight 5.1.50918.0) was somewhat taken aback when the latest Chrome (on Win 8.1, at work) started nagging more than one year in advance. Of course I'll keep Flash on my machines! And it'll be a "long goodbye", no doubt, but it's sad, even when one believes firmly that EoS != EoL, like I do, to see such a good piece of software being put away like a rabid dog, isn't it?

Well, a clean profile didn't work on this machine either. But, perhaps a clue.... The first time I accessed the "Check Adobe Flash Version" page after switching to a clean profile, I got a pop-up saying something about "Tracking Protection Enabled." Remember, this was a clean profile - no add-ons! So it appears the latest Serpent build has some kind of "built-in" tracking protection, which, I suspect, is "protecting" me from Flash (a notorious privacy leak). I also noticed the 64-bit version was built (rebuilt?) three days later than the 32-bit one. I need to go back and take a look at what @roytam1 added. Edit: I may have figured it out! I just remembered that a "clean profile" isn't necessarily the same thing as "factory default" settings! You can change preferences outside the profile too, by, for example, installing the UOC Patch - and the only browser with the UOC Patch installed is the one that Flash doesn't work on! Of course, now I have to figure out which line of the UOC Patch is interfering with Flash.... Edit 2: This is turning out to be more complicated than I imagined, but I found part of the problem. The UOC Patch sets privacy.resistFingerprinting to true, which inexplicably interferes with the Flash animation. Removing that line from the UOC Patch lets the Flash animation play normally.

It's funny you mentioned SSUAO in Firefox, because today I became aware of another Mozilla change involving SSUAO support in Firefox... During the pre-Australis era, Mozilla had implemented native SSUAO support in Firefox (but I'm now too lazy to search and quote relevant Bugzilla bugs, it's 01:50 AM on Friday already here...), but then disabled it at some point (in Fx 25.0 ?) in desktop Firefox (but kept it in the mobile version) to, supposedly, gain a 7% speed increase in page loading times... The feature supporting module (UserAgentOverrides.jsm) was still kept in the source tree, but was not initialised in desktop Fx versions - hence the need of an extension (or additional code) to re-initialise it properly in Fx ESR 52.9.x In a previous MSFN post, I had searched Bugzilla and found that the SSUAO native feature was again restored in Fx 55.0, so from Fx 55.0+ one would not need extensions (legacy/WE) or JS code to apply SSUAOs in the browser... However, it appears that this native useful feature was again binned, starting with Firefox Browser (previously known as "Quantum") v71.0 (currently in the beta channel); this time, the original SSUAO supporting module (UserAgentOverrides.jsm) was completely excised, reason being "it was just old code", and those users wanting the removed functionality back should, once again, resort in using a dedicated (WE) addon... I was alerted by the following Mozillazine thread: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3055169 Bugzilla bug #1513574 : Remove UserAgentOverrides.jsm Once again, I beg to differ...

There used to be Web Rings on various topics that a site could join by adding a footer to their pages that linked to the Next or a Random site in the ring as well as to a hub or index page for the ring. Now there are Social Media bars to register a page on popular destination sites and other site aggregators. Perhaps an IE8 web-ring hub can be created that compatible sites can link to. IE8 users could also tag any compatible sites they come across.

If/When @looking4awayout's build process slows down a bit, I can happily host it on my site. I can do it now but it wont be easy keeping up with his new builds every five minutes.