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Hi Just made an account here, I have been following threads on this forums ‘anonymously’ for quite some time now, and wanted to share a few words about this. Nothing makes him special, really. For what is worth, I do not like that he did not open source the project. I mean, I don’t know, from my philosophy and point of view, you shouldn’t charge for projects like this, but whatever, that does not matter, I myself ‘donated’ (read: paid) for this software a good few years back as well. Thing is, it takes a lot of time to research these kinds of projects, and yeah, it teaches you a lot, but there is no financial incentive to doing it. Not short term, not long term. So you need to have some spare time which a lot of people do not have much. Like, take security researchers, that do a similar thing, they play around looking with whatever tools they have available to the inner workings of various pieces of software. BigMuscle here did the same for DWM. Yet, security researchers have the incentive that if they find some critical vulnerability, they get paid by Google etc. Hacking DWM serves no one’s business interest, so... you get what I mean. Anyway, developing this kind of software is pretty hard and becomes tedious and boring easily. You work only with closed source code, you have access only to binaries you can disassemble to various degrees and fortunately, for Windows files, Microsoft offers you symbols, which are little pieces of information that augment the binary ‘code’. That’s it, from there on, you have to look and understand all their architecture, how things piece together and so on. This is tremendous work, and even with financial incentives, it takes time, sometimes you get it wrong etc. Also, the appeal to doing this gets even lower because once you publish it, you have to support it, people will like it and demand it gets ‘updated’ with every release of the Windows OS, and in a timely manner of course. And this complicates the initial problem: you have to find ways to patch it in a way that is less likely to break on newer versions, so that you minimize your work when a new update comes. That again, it consumes a few resources, and especially a lot of time. And also, what programmers try to do when they encounter projects like this, is try to reuse old dormant code that’s still in the binary from previous versions, by maybe also looking on binaries from older versions of the software that had what they wanted. It is pretty hard to develop new stuff for a closed source binary with hardly any public interfaces... Now, regarding DWM, it changed quite a bit in Windows 10 2004. A good couple of the methods BigMuscle hooked in pre-2004 are simply not there in the new DWM. Microsoft actually changed a lot of the underlying architecture. What exactly, for what purpose, what is the high level meaning behind it? I did not have time to look enough at it to figure it out. Also, I had a try at this myself as well. I disassembled BM’s Aero Glass a while ago and looked a bit on it a while ago and gathering a few ideas from there, I coded a utility that changed the title bar text in Windows 10 to be centered. “Version 1” was pretty future proof, but had some edge cases which were still problematic, plus it did not do it quite like Windows 8 did it. I researched a lot more and was able to now fix my main issue with it, namely centering the text between the window borders, not the icon and minimize button. But it took considerably more time and effort and hooking to achieve this minor effect. I looked on DWM a bit more (BigMuscle did the same, but probably on way more of it then I did until now) and could ‘easily’ do a lot of stuff. You know acrylic (aka blur behind)? I enabled that on all title bars via DWM, it looks pretty awesome, I’d daily drive that. Imo it looks even better than Aero Glass, but that’s not the point. Point is it can be done, I relatively easily have done it myself, there were some rough edges of course, but I played with it. Some other stuff came up, did not really had time to work on it anymore, at least for the moment. But maintaining the kind of hacks required for releasing a public version of this is insane. People want UIs, configuration etc, for a niche and specialized thing like this, even command line arguments are too much, I’d rather DEFINE some stuff and compile it for each user’s taste. And there also is not a community keen on developing this. A one man army on this is not feasible, but maybe a team, on a public Git could each member write small bits and get somewhere. That’s why I believe, for e.g., that BM better open sourced it. Even in its now broken state with a lot of the code not that useful on newer Windows builds, still, it is a starting point. In a closed binary, without even symbols, it is uselessly lost knowledge, unfortunately, as no one has the time and incentive, as I said, to take a look at it. There are brilliant programmers out there, but this does not pay off that much. Anyway, I write this on mobile. Maybe when I open the PC I could upload a screenshot of my ‘Aero Glass’, but I don’t want to needlessly tease. Because this probably will never ship. An optimistic plan is to integrate this with my previously mentioned tool, but in the state of mess (coding wise) it is at the moment, it may take a while, especially not having a lot of time to work on this. What I can do in the mean time, is leave you a link to WinCenterTitle (https://github.com/valinet/WinCenterTitle), this software I mentioned that centers your title bar text. If you go to releases to download binaries, the latest modifications are in a pre releas version situated there. So that’s the story of it, at least how I see it. Edit: Yeah, also, forgot to say, what is pathetic here is that DWM is closed source, especially considering that third parties cannot really do compositors for Windows. I mean, I blame Microsoft here, it would be so cool to have official, powerful mechanisms to hook into it and do cool stuff. With that, I tell you, in 2 weeks someone will implement, for e.g., the genie effect when minimizing windows and all sorts of crazy stuff. It is pretty much a shame they also have this mess lately (some stuff that should be in DWM is in Explorer for some reason, like Win Tab, Alt Tab, Snap Assist etc) and also do not realistically look forward to collaborating with the enthusiasts; DWM is actually a pretty decent compositor and window manager.

can someone try this? I wrote that in 15 minutes. http://o.rthost.win/gpc/files1.rt/oldtube-xul.xpi

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New build of BOC/UXP for XP! Test binary: MailNews Win32 https://o.rthost.win/boc-uxp/mailnews.win32-20201107-355db4de-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z BNavigator Win32 https://o.rthost.win/boc-uxp/bnavigator.win32-20201107-355db4de-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z source repo (excluding UXP): https://github.com/roytam1/boc-uxp/tree/custom-older My changes since last build: - hackfix: enable devtools and downloads component when MOZ_SUITE is defined. (76a6e501) * Notice: the profile prefix (i.e. parent folder names) are also changed since 2020-08-15 build, you may rename their names before using new binaries when updating from builds before 2020-08-15. -- New build of HBL-UXP for XP! Test binary: IceDove-UXP(mail) https://o.rthost.win/hbl-uxp/icedove.win32-20201107-id-eed0566-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z IceApe-UXP(suite) https://o.rthost.win/hbl-uxp/iceape.win32-20201107-id-eed0566-ia-41157bf-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z source repo (excluding UXP): https://github.com/roytam1/icedove-uxp/tree/winbuild https://github.com/roytam1/iceape-uxp/tree/winbuild for UXP changes please see above.

New build of Serpent/UXP for XP! Test binary: Win32 https://o.rthost.win/basilisk/basilisk52-g4.7.win32-git-20201107-ffb32e0-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z Win64 https://o.rthost.win/basilisk/basilisk52-g4.7.win64-git-20201107-ffb32e0-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z source code that is comparable to my current working tree is available here: https://github.com/roytam1/UXP/commits/custom IA32 Win32 https://o.rthost.win/basilisk/basilisk52-g4.7.win32-git-20201107-ffb32e0-uxp-19499014a-xpmod-ia32.7z source code that is comparable to my current working tree is available here: https://github.com/roytam1/UXP/commits/ia32 NM28XP build: Win32 https://o.rthost.win/palemoon/palemoon-28.10.2a1.win32-git-20201107-fcd19efc9-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z Win64 https://o.rthost.win/palemoon/palemoon-28.10.2a1.win64-git-20201107-fcd19efc9-uxp-19499014a-xpmod.7z Official UXP changes since my last build: - Issue #1673 - Part 1: Allow tab-size to accept <length>. (49765b53a) - Issue #1673 - Part 2: Make tab-size animatable and fix typos. (7c2bcc48c) - Issue #1673 - Part 3: Bring minimum tab advance up to spec. (a2c26490b) - Issue #1673 - Part 4: Unprefix -moz-tab-size. (9ffc5e6c9) - Issue #1673 - Part 5: Fix brace style and missed -moz-tab-size reference. (d22717ff9) - Merge pull request 'Fix up -moz-tab-size and unprefix it.' (#1674) from athenian200/UXP:tab-size-length into master (9b1406f18) - [devtools] More gracefully (than a crash) handle stack capture failures. (bb4e9ad1c) - Issue #1676 - Part 1: Split MozTesting directives out of js/src/moz.build (395ef79b9) - Issue #1676 - Part 2: Split CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS directives out of js/src/moz.build (5bf19933d) - Issue #1676 - Part 3: Split DEFINES out of js/src/moz.build (0cdd39ff1) - Issue #80 - De-unify js/src (ec13658ab) - Issue #1676 - Part 4: Split builtin sources out of js/src/moz.build (24a5a7f7c) - Issue #1676 - Part 5: Split devtools sources out of js/src/moz.build (24b835f0a) - Issue #1676 - Part 6: Split ds sources out of js/src/moz.build (eedfa63a1) - Issue #1676 - Part 7: Split frontend sources out of js/src/moz.build (1396383ae) - Issue #1676 - Part 8: Fix up include for selfhosted.out.h (bc450dab4) - Issue #1676 - Part 9: Move DIRS down in js/src/moz.build (957f19d2b) - Issue #1676 - Part 10: Split gc sources out of js/src/moz.build (65eac50e2) - Issue #1676 - Part 11: Split irregexp sources out of js/src/moz.build (3d9bf5d7a) - Issue #1676 - Part 12: Split jit sources out of js/src/moz.build (95e057e73) - Issue #1676 - Part 13: Split perf sources out of js/src/moz.build (383bc182e) - Issue #1676 - Part 14: Split proxy sources out of js/src/moz.build (6f76f1cb3) - Issue #1676 - Part 15: Split threading sources out of js/src/moz.build (2f50f543a) - Issue #1676 - Part 16: Split WASM sources out of js/src/moz.build (1abc696f8) - Issue #1676 - Part 17: Put remaining source files which have debug code ifdef'd behind MOZ_DEBUG (ff355fe9a) - Issue #1676 - Part 18: Move and separate top level sources from vm sources in js/src/moz.build (59511eb8d) - Issue #1676 - Part 19: Split ctypes sources out of js/src/moz.build (cdf46e803) - Issue #1676 - Part 20: Split vtune sources out of js/src/moz.build (fd1b2dc2b) - Issue #1676 - Part 21: Use js-cxxflags.mozbuild in testing code and js shell (d2b6975eb) - Merge branch 'jsbuild-work' (2e0719919) - Issue #1677 - Part 1: Import new V8 regexp code with Mozilla's header modifications (78b3a722b) - Issue #1677 - Part 2: Add build files (19499014a) No official Basilisk changes since my last build. No official Pale-Moon changes since my last build.

Add VirtualMIDISynth to discontinued support list: https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth#versionhistory Last version for XP/Vista is 2.9.3 released in 2020-07-18, installer here https://coolsoft.altervista.org/download/CoolSoft_VirtualMIDISynth_2.9.3.exe