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I am currently limited to using Server 2008 R2, and Supermium Version 132.0.6834.224 (Official Build) (32-bit). I haven't updated because other than the ffmpeg issue, it works great. Don't fix what isn't broken. There might be a glitch where it uses more memory on WinXP. After scrolling Facebook's main feed for a long time, I got the commit charge to about 1 GB and it would fluctuate around that number. I have 8 GB of memory. This was more continuous scrolling that I could ever read. I wouldn't keep the tab open continuously after finishing with the task. https://i.imgur.com/peXNaAq.png

I only use 32-bit Supermium and haven't experienced any significant problems on normal sites, even the heavy app ones like Discord or YouTube. The multi-process nature allows the browser to use all available memory. On XP you can "only" access about 1.5 gigs per process. The site I ran into problems tried to load ffmpeg webassembly for converting media files in the browser. The native exe is just over 100 MB. But the site used over 3 GB of RAM after switching to the 64-bit version. That is insane.

I see the hiew.ru page in all browsers. The IPs of the server are 13.248.177.206, 76.223.53.100.

Apparently multiple news sites are behind Ad Shield and 80% recipe sites have "switched to it overnight". https://www.reddit.com/r/nextdns/comments/1qk1eoe/many_recipe_sites_being_blocked/ If they are readable without JavaScript, which stops everything including Ad Shield from running, that is the easiest method to access. I don't want to jump between web browsers if they are by and large the same engine with a different skin, and each takes some time to set up and disk space.

The message "problem loading the page" is not a fault of the browser, but a condition created by the script that tries to access blocked Ad Shield servers (html-load, content-loader, unfreezehuge). This is seen as a "problem" because those indeed could not be loaded. Supermium works fine for all I need. Of course uBlock Origin can have a finer control over what is blocked than a DNS or IP filter, and it can probably disable the master script that is embedded in the mage or work around it somehow.

The site indeed can be read with JavaScript disabled. In classic Opera you could disable JavaScript at any point after the initial load and formatting. With today's browsers it can only be disabled entirely. Apparently this company is called "Ad Shield" and it's been around for a year or so. But I encountered it for the first time. I'm getting the repeating error message even on New Moon after a full reload. "PiHole" is a DNS blocker like what I am doing with Mikrotik. This works really well with freeware smartphone games, in combination with a sniffer to discover the domains. https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/1sw89js/psa_the_anti_adblock_service_ad_shield_is_coming/ "Ad Shield" seem to be really upset about "dark traffic" because we don't load Google analytics. Maybe they should have not overloaded a page with a hundred calls to such analytics to upset us.

I tried to visit a website called a-z-animals.com today. It initially displayed, and then a moment later changed to a message about adblock being active. https://a-z-animals.com/animals/giant-wood-moth/ It turns out that it makes use a dedicated service to ensure advertisements don't get blocked. It makes a gazillion requests to multiple domain names. Some of them seem to be comprised of nonsensical words and likely will keep changing. I have noticed this strategy used by ad providers before. The ad-system is protected by CloudFlare and therefore cannot blocked by IP ranges without also blocking other CloudFlare sites. CloudFlare is becoming a menace of the Internet in multiple ways. I guess the only way is use an in-browser adblocker who will fetch the ads but hide them, which I don't want to use for non-essential websites. Blocking by IP has successfully worked for me with other ad networks that have many domains. I use a NAT rule to redirect IPs from a list to a dummy server. An error is returned immediately and the website opens without delay. After blocking all domains that I found, I can read the website in New Moon. But in Supermium I am interrupted by a message "There was a problem loading the page." .*html-load\.com .*content-loader\.com .*unfreezehuge\.com ad-delivery.net error-report.com report.error-report.com Even if I wanted to disable adblock for this particular site, I couldn't do it because it is implemented in DNS.

LBA was expanded to 48-bits. At first it was 28 bit. But disk controller drivers were slow to be adapted for the full range. Since old Windows could only support a 2 TB disk at most, there was no need for driver authors to provide more. But Windows 2003 added support for GPT, which could address a bigger disk.

Since modern sites can easily fully load an old CPU by doing silly things, it's best if not all cores are fully loaded, then we can at least close the browser.

With Intel Rapid Storage driver you can use a 4 TB disk under Windows Server 2003. I haven't tested the built-in driver, but I suspect it to work because Windows 2003 advertises support for large volumes. Aligned partitions have been the norm for a long time and work well. Every SSD gets aligned. You will be only using a giant disk for a data volume not boot, so any issues betwene booting and alignment won't even arise.

Could working driver releases be collected in the first post now that this thread has been renamed and expanded in scope and length?

It would take less work to configure Windows XP to look like Windows 2000. A web brower requires post-XP level hardware anyway to run.

I don't think a minimal build without any codecs is a good idea. If you drop ffmpeg.exe into the path, it can be found by various applications and used. Something that cuts the size down to 30 or 50 MB is enough.

Not really. I would have to "install" ffplay still when I could install some other normal software like MPC-HC Using command-line is not convenient for routine tasks. Since ffmpeg is really large and updated often, I prefer to just keep only the XP version in my archives. I imagine it takes a "supercomputer" to compile an extra build.

What is the difference between XP and Vista? The XP build runs on Server 2008 R2, so we can just use that. There is no need for playback in ffmpeg. It is a converter. The player part used to be MPlayer. Why does ffplay bloat the size of ffmpeg.exe, which is separate? What codecs are removed by not including external libraries?