Mathwiz

Amen. There is some truth in that. Case in point: MCP's refusal to support modern EMEs like WideVine because they're opposed to EMEs philosophically. Or for that matter refusal to support e10s because "I'm a browser, dammit, not an OS!" Do they really think those decisions have caused anyone else to rethink their own decisions?

I think a big part of the problem is that Javascript wasn't originally designed to do the kinds of tasks modern Web sites have it doing now. Originally it was just intended to do simple "bells and whistles" tasks that the site could live without - hence you could disable it and still use the site, albeit with less functionality. But since then, it's evolved into a complex programming language that folks even write .PDF viewers in! In a perfect world, perhaps we'd start over with C-script or something; some kind of language easy to JIT compile into efficient machine code. Come to think of it, didn't Micro$oft try to push VBScript as an alternative, many moons ago when IE was the dominant browser? The effort failed because no other browsers supported VBScript, but perhaps we'd be better off now if M$ had succeeded. Or not. Just a thought.

Yeah, that's unusably slow on St 55 (not strictly UXP but close), even with e10s enabled on 64-bit W7 with 8 GB RAM. But I'm not surprised an Android developer site uses Javascript that's only fast on "modern" browsers. After all, everyone who goes there (present company excepted) probably uses Chrome on at least an 8-core processor. Just bloat the site up with as many "cool" features as you can think of, and if someone finds it slow, just quote "system requirements" at them rather than making the slightest effort to optimize the code. It's the modern way of the Internet. My point was only that UXP meets @j7n's definition of "retro" - new functionality with an old UI. I even conceded that it was slow! Not many sites are as bad as that one, though.

I don't know if this is possible, but could you set up (say) an 8GB RAMdisk and then put the page file there? Obvious problem would be, how do you create the RAMdisk before the page file? Seems like you'd have to have XP boot without any page file, load the RAMdisk driver, then create a page file on the RAMdisk. Perhaps some sort of startup script could be used, IDK.... Edit: And if I'd just read two posts further down before posting this: https://msfn.org/board/topic/173201-gavottes-ramdisk-automation-package/

I think in this context, "older" means post-EOS, so Win 10 won't count for a few more years. Of course anyone is welcome here, whether they use an "older" NT-based OS or not. I was only pointing out that the very nature of this subforum will attract a disproportionate share of Win XP diehards, since XP was one of Micro$oft's most popular "older" OSes. I like that definition, even if not everyone uses the term that way. ReactOS is meant to be a Windows clone in the "style" of XP, although to be practical it must support at least some functionality of newer Windows versions. UXP browsers are another good example of that "retro" definition. They have the look and feel of older Firefox versions, but they do a halfway decent job of rendering many modern Web sites (as long as you're very patient).

You do realize you're posting in the "Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes" subforum, don't you? I don't think it's particularly surprising that XP diehards are over-represented here. It's certainly not all of MSFN. If the thread linked above is TL;DR, Moonchild explained: It would be illogical for DDG to block Pale (and New) Moon intentionally, since DDG and MCP are business partners. DDG must've just, um, forgot when they set this up. So presumably, DDG will have this fixed soon; in the meantime, you can use Firefox compatibility mode (or an SSUAO), or turn off "Redirect when necessary" under DDG's "Privacy" settings, to work around the issue. They don't want Mozilla. Every browser alive has a user agent that starts with Mozilla/5.0! It's a historical artifact stemming from the Netscape browser's dominance oh so long ago. They want Firefox, like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:115.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.2 Strictly speaking, that is correct. However, the implication of your post is that ECMAScript is completely independent of Google; apparently you think they just pull new Javascript features out of their collective arses, and Chromium and Mozilla then dutifully implement said features. But you know that's nonsense. Anyone can see that Google has a massive influence (and Mozilla a lesser influence, and MCP no influence whatsoever) over ECMAScript. After all, Google owns the dominant Web browser! I think you just saw "Chromium-exclusive features" (which, to be sure, was a wrong thing to say) and went off half-cocked a bit. But our opinions about Google's degree of "fault" in all this don't really matter. After all, the Web is what it has become, and any browser has to be able to handle what it'll find there: So, if one wants good performance on modern Web pages when running XP, it's gonna be Supermium or Thorium. I resent the fact that there's no "unGoogled" Chromium-based browser for XP diehards, but them's the breaks. Actually version 53 (you forgot about St 55)! Be that as it may, it sounds like you missed the start of the discussion, which was NHTPG complaining about DDG turning AdNauseum off (which in turn was in response to questions about DDG no longer working properly in New/Pale Moon - see above). NHTPG also mentioned that he preferred AdNauseum's UI over uBO's, but didn't go into specifics. As it turned out, it wasn't some sneaky DDG Javascript; rather, AdNauseum just disables itself on several sites, including DDG. The reason for this (which NHTPG disapproves of, although others may disagree) was discovered and explained. So the discussion was relevant to anyone using either DDG or AdNauseum, whether on @roytam1's browsers or others; it wasn't Chromium-specific. Luckily, those words appear within the filter lists you're downloading. You're unlikely to get in trouble as long as they aren't part of a URL you're visiting. Well, it was probably a bit better when it was first introduced . But yes; it went downhill for a while, and some sites still need browser-slowing polyfills, but today (performance issues and occasional tab crashes aside), it's really not bad.

Glad you got it sorted out. That's correct. None of the Mozilla-based browsers use those, including the UXP line. Chromium-based browsers are, of course, different and do use them; that may be one reason Micro$oft was comfortable replacing Edge's browser engine with Chromium.

From the screen shots, connections to those sites are refused before you even get to the TLS negotiation stage, so TLS 1.3 support won't make any difference. (At present most sites still support TLS 1.2, so TLS 1.3 support doesn't yet add much to the places you can go. That will probably change in the future though.) I can get to all those sites with IceApe (although the GitHub site looks terrible). SeaMonkey 2.49.5 works too, so I think your problem could be a DNS issue, or maybe some kind of proxy is in the way. Whatever it is, some sites (such as SSL Labs) apparently work but others don't. If I "ping o.rthost.win" from a command line, I get responses from IP address 104.21.48.191. What happens on your XP system?

GitHub is problematic without some "help," but my IceApe-UXP pulls up the others fine. What problems are you seeing? Can you post a screen shot? BTW, your first two links above both point to the same GitHub page.

I believe @roytam1's attempted fix uses the M$ tokens from Thunderbird, so M$ should "think" MailNews is Thunderbird and work accordingly. (@Dave-H uses an OAuth2 proxy that works the same way.) The issues we're having are more complex. It appears you experienced a version of the same problem: OE Classic uses the default browser for the login, so logging in first via the Web interface works; but with MailNews, that trick doesn't help, because MailNews tries to use its own MailNews window for the login (it is a UXP application, after all) instead of opening the login window in the default Web browser. At any rate, thanks for confirming that OE Classic works with Hotmail. I figured it would, but I no longer have access to my licensed copy (due to a crashed HDD) and didn't really want to mess with it; as you may remember, I had numerous complaints about it when I tried it over a year ago, but it might be OK for a simple personal Hotmail account.

I'm not sure if that setting matters, but NHTPG doesn't use it. (We discussed it on @roytam1's thread.) His bug only occurs under certain conditions: Using a Serpent 52 version newer than July 2023 Using the Photonic theme Not using multiprocess mode Killing the Serpent process with task manager to force the restore session dialog (this is only done when the browser gets too slow due to the gradual build-up of memory-hogging Javacrap. NHTPG normally prefers to start his browser sessions "clean.") So it seems to be some sort of incompatibility between some change made in Serpent in August 2023 and the Photonic theme, but darned if I know what it could be.

I wanted to mention that, since Hotmail has gone OAuth2-only, @roytam1 has tried to implement OAuth2 for Micro$oft in MailNews. However, it's not (yet) working correctly. Leave it to Micro$oft to make OAuth2 even more complicated on their servers than it is on Gmail!

The recent problems with Hotmail are actually the very same problem I had with Office 365, which led me to start this thread in the first place! I don't hate OAuth2, but I do hate mandatory OAuth2! As @Dave-H said: So it's a way for email providers to control which email clients work with their service. That isn't foolproof - as Dave-H noted, you can "clone" the token issued to a registered open-source client like Mozilla's Thunderbird - but it does make it tougher for the folks who still write things for Windows versions before 10 to produce an email client that works with M$, Google, etc. IOW, it's planned obsolescence. AFAICS it doesn't add any security: you still sign on with a user ID and password as before, and you can set a cookie letting you get back into the same app without signing in again. Apart from Web browsers, the only XP/Vista email client that's likely to work with Hotmail right now is OE Classic, which I mentioned at the start of this thread. However, it had a number of shortcomings; read the start of the thread for details. I haven't used OE Classic in a couple of years, so some of its problems may have been addressed. (OE Classic did offer a free trial, if you want to see for yourself.)

Sounds like @roytam1 has some ideas, but Mailnews just isn't quite there yet. I do the same thing as @AstroSkipper; just use the Web interface. Unlike @AstroSkipper I don't have a choice since it's my O365 work account, not a personal Hotmail one. BTW, I set my user agent for Office 365.com to Firefox 77; this gives me the older UI which I prefer. Unfortunately it also gives me an "update your browser" nag from time to time. Even the older UI is quite machine-hungry, though. A FF 78 UA eliminates the nag but brings up M$'s newer UI, so next time I get the nag, I'll see if I can just block it with uBO. <off topic>OE Classic will probably work since I think the login procedure is the same for Hotmail as O365, and it works for O365. I lost access to OE Classic when my old Win 7 work PC's hard drive crashed, and since I was unhappy with OE Classic for reasons I've given elsewhere, I never bothered to try to recover the license.

@AstroSkipper, I just tried MailNews and I'm getting the same thing: Without making me wade through all the YouTube/Vorapis discussion, was a solution to this broken dialog ever found? I'm thinking there must be a solution since the dialog comes up correctly when accessing Outlook on Serpent.