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Mathwiz

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Mathwiz last won the day on June 8

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    Windows 7 x64

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  1. Mathwiz
    Yes; the page could've been clearer on exactly how "modern" your browser's Javascript needed to be. At any rate, UXP does seem up to the task, albeit inefficiently. There are many reasons that might have caused me to get the "denied" page, but it wasn't worth the effort to track it down. I was just wondering what kind of nonsense we WWW users have to deal with now, and why. My curiosity is "mostly" satisfied now.
  2. Mathwiz
    If you take the Anubis explanation (posted above by @VistaLover ) at its word, it seems to make sense. The idea is to make the user agent (browser or bot) do something rather hard, but not too hard; the idea being if you're just an ordinary user, the extra work is just a short delay in getting to the Web page; but if you're a bot crawling millions of pages, that extra work isn't worth the effort so you'll just abort the script after a few milliseconds and move on. But, then - why insist on "modern" Javascript and why force users to disable their privacy guards? I'm still somewhat skeptical that Anubis was telling us the whole story above.
  3. Mathwiz
    So it is a bandwidth issue. Fair enough. I had no idea that AI crawling had become such a burden for Web servers. Still having a hard time grokking why the AI crawlers don't respect robots.txt though. AIUI, their purpose is just to gather content to train AI engines; surely there's plenty of content even without violating such a longstanding norm! In any case, I question Anubis's assertion that "The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable." It took R3dfox v.139 several seconds to complete the challenge, to say nothing of UXP browsers. But I suppose there was a silver lining: MC probably had to ensure UXP could pass the challenge before using it to protect his own repo! It would be quite embarrassing if RPO couldn't be accessed by Pale Moon....
  4. Mathwiz
    I sort of figured, but why don't AI crawlers respect robots.txt, when other Web crawlers do? That's what I was really after. Which leads to another question: why do public repos need to block AI crawlers so badly that Gitea resorted to Anubis to do the job? Is it a bandwidth issue or a legal one?
  5. Mathwiz
    Anubis (from Egyptian mythology) was also the name of a villainous character on the Stargate SG-1 television series. AI crawling sounds bad but I'm not sure why, what it is, how it differs from ordinary Web crawling, or why robots.txt cannot be relied on.
  6. Mathwiz
    Unrelated to original problem, but WTF is this? FWIW, r3dfox passes whatever this is and lets you in (eventually). The WWW has become such an unpleasant place.
  7. Mathwiz
    TL;DR - The "Do Not Track" header was abandoned because virtually no Web sites paid any attention to it. Google may have made the decision to pull the plug but it was already comatose. It remains to be seen whether its successor, Global Privacy Control, will be similarly ignored. GPC may be enforceable in the EU, so sites may choose to honor it there.
  8. Mathwiz
    Good to hear. I use 55 myself, but I also keep a copy of 52 handy. The different names arose back in the early days. Originally Serpent was just a generic name used by "unbranded" builds of Basilisk; i.e., if you or I built the browser on our own PC, it would be called "Serpent" too. Basilisk was the "branded" name used for the official version distributed by MoonChild Productions. For several years the folks at MoonChild Productions expressed great irritation that some users sought support for @roytam1's Serpent builds at Basilisk's Web site (then run by MCP), so we were all taught to be careful never to refer to Roytam's builds as "Basilisk" and risk driving more Serpent users there.
  9. Mathwiz
    Discover.com works with r3dfox as-is, so no SSUAO needed there. (Edge or Thorium users aren't so lucky; Discover seems to demand a quite recent Chromium engine. Supermium would probably do the trick but I haven't tried it.) I see several sites with this SSUAO: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0 This works with chase.com as well. So I guess it was the r3dfox bit that it didn't like after all. Win 7 doesn't seem to bother it.
  10. Mathwiz
    On Win 7, R3dfox is now my preferred replacement for M$ Edge. I had been using the latest Edge version for Win 7 (109), with a UAO to Chrome 125, but that's no longer good enough for some sites (e.g., discover.com). I did find that Chase.com doesn't like the R3dfox slice in the user agent - or was it the OS slice, revealing Win 7, that it was objecting to? It kept telling me to "upgrade" my browser even though R3dfox is up to version 139! Well, either way, a straight FF 128 on Win 10 user agent satisfies both Chase and Discover, at least for now. It's ridiculous how bloody finicky some Web sites - particularly financial ones - have become. Security I dig, but way too many folks equate "security" with "only using Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, and a version no older than a few months."
  11. Mathwiz
    I think you mean Serpent 55. Basilisk is for Win 7+ and is based on UXP (like Pale/New Moon and Serpent 52). Serpent 55 is generally on par with the above UXP browsers, but derived from Moebius, in turn from an ever-so-slightly newer version of Firefox. Maybe just new enough to deal with Cloudflare?
  12. Mathwiz
    True. Also sad, as that version really isn't that old. Today I found myself unable to log into my discover.com account using Thorium. Seriously? Perhaps a UAO would've gotten me in, but the discover.com site was not at all helpful with regard to minimum supported browser versions. I only tried a Chromium 125 user agent, which didn't work. Version 125 works with Chase, which is only reason I tried even that one UAO. As a Windows 7 user, it was easier for me to just try R3dfox, which worked, so I didn't pursue UAOs any further.
  13. Mathwiz
    Well, nuts. I take a couple of months off, and come back and find out the MSFN forums have forgotten all of my last-read posts. So everything I click on starts on post #1! So it's "mark all threads as read", and start over from scratch for me....
  14. Mathwiz
    Interesting that OE Classic is being discussed in this thread again. I started this thread with a post about OE Classic! I wanted to like OE Classic. I liked both Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail, and OE Classic has the same familiar UI. But as you can read at the above post, I ran into too many frustrating bugs. It's been a couple of years though; have any of the problems I listed back then been addressed in the latest version? I still consider it a trial version. I'd be fine with only two email accounts (or even only one) and the lack of "some" features, but the free version, IMO, isn't really suitable for more than very limited testing. First: It's quite reasonable to limit spell check to the paid version, but spell check should default to disabled in the free version, with the pop-up only appearing if you try to enable it. The way OE Classic does it, forcing you to go into settings and re-disable it each time you start the program, to avoid a pop-up each time you try to send an email, seems like deliberate nagging by the developer, and AFAIC nagware is trial software. Second: I mentioned that in the first post of this thread! You're forced to advertise OE Express to all your correspondents before you've even chosen to buy it yourself! It doesn't even give you a grace period before the ads kick in.
  15. Mathwiz
    I wonder if this could be done with a plug-in? I realize that NPAPI plug-ins are considered passe and aren't supported by more modern browsers, but UXP still supports them; if it would work it would be a perfect way to add support for new image compression formats without having to add bloat to the browser itself. They may be right; I don't know. But that's a question for Web sites to consider, not for browser developers like MCP! The question for MCP should be, are there enough Web sites using AVIF that lack of support is a barrier to using PM? If not, don't spend time on it; there are other areas that need more attention. But if there are, then MCP needs to support it, even if it's crappy; or PM will lose even more users. MCP is not Google! (Thank goodness!) They can't kill something they don't like by refusing to support it; they can only hurt themselves.
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