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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
    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."
  2. 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?
  3. 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.
  4. 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....
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Mathwiz
    I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for what Moonchild, MCP, and you have accomplished with PM, Basilisk, and the UXP platform, but, "always?" I think the word "originally" would be more accurate. I first downloaded and used PM back in the early 2000's when I was still using Windows 98. At that time, PM was basically just a clone of Firefox, but compiled for better performance; much appreciated on that old 733 MHz Pentium machine. But PM and Basilisk (and @roytam1's versions of those) have gotten quite a bit away from just being Firefox compiled with better optimizations. Today, folks (including me) turn to them for many good reasons, but I daresay no one uses them nowadays because they want a higher-performance FF clone! The words in bold are doing a lot of work there. In fact, I believe that not running on older CPUs was a strong implicit motivation, as opposed to an explicitly stated reason, for the change. I chose the word "noticeable" poorly when I said "... not to give PM a noticeable performance improvement on newer 64-bit processors that do support AVX instructions." Perhaps I should have said "significant," as the meaning I wanted to convey was "enough performance improvement to turn the use of PM on Javascript-laden sites from a painfully slow experience into a reasonably responsive one."
  8. Mathwiz
    Well, the only reason I made that point was to argue that PM architecture doesn't benefit from AVX instructions as much as a "modern" browser does; hence my conclusion that MCP's decision (to build the 64-bit version to use/require AVX) was primarily done to block it from running on older 64-bit processors that are presumably "too slow" (in MCP's opinion), not to give PM a noticeable performance improvement on newer 64-bit processors that do support AVX instructions. Despite its non-modern, pre-Quantum architecture, I'm sure MCP would love to implement all significant features required by "modern" Web sites in PM, if they could. It's just too big of a task for a small outfit like MCP to backport the constant fire hose of JS/CSS "enhancements" to its old engine. I would've gone with a simple block diagram. Face it: Quantum doesn't work anything like a jet engine! The Quantum browser engine doesn't have/need an air intake, compressor, fuel injectors (or even fuel), or anything remotely analogous to them. The only purpose of the jet engine diagram was to imply extreme speed and power; i.e., it's hype.
  9. Mathwiz
    Yeah but PM isn't a "modern" browser, so it doesn't work like a 3D game engine and doesn't really need AVX.... I had a hard time taking that article seriously after I saw the diagram of a jet engine, with its components labeled "Quantum" this and "Quantum" that.... Talk about hype - and that was from 2017! Is that how we're supposed to "understand" modern Web browsers now? What's next - an "explanation" of Chromium illustrated by a diagram of a rocket? OK, the Web has officially jumped the shark. Web sites are dictating processor architecture now? How the heck is that supposed to work if you have an ARM processor, or one of Apple's new processors, or really, anything but Intel / AMD?
  10. Mathwiz
    AVX instructions would be of some benefit on CPU-intensive applications like AI, but probably not much on a typical Web browser, and certainly not on an email client. PM might be an exception because its old FF 52 Javascript engine takes a lot more CPU than the corresponding engines in more modern browsers. Back in 2017, the JS engine could afford to be inefficient, but Web sites are much more bloated with JS in 2024. But if MCP is merely using AVX as a proxy for "faster CPU," then it seems silly to me. Instead of AVX, the PM installer could just run a simple loop to test CPU speed, and pop up a warning if the CPU is found to be "too slow." It'd be interesting to run some side-by-side tests of AVX and SSE2 Pale Moon builds on the same PC (with an AVX processor), so we could see how much improvement actually comes from AVX vs. the improvement just from a faster CPU. I suspect it's mostly the latter, but either way, it seems to me there would be a much greater ROI from backporting a more modern JS engine to UXP than from just building PM with AVX instructions to try to brute-force their way out of an old, slow JS engine. (Their stubborn insistence on a single process doesn't help either. Most modern CPUs have at least eight cores, but PM will basically use only one of them.)
  11. Mathwiz
    Not really surprising. Every time it hits an AVX instruction a software interrupt occurs; interrupt handler has to save everything, do what the AVX instruction would've done (if you actually had an AVX processor), restore everything and return to Pale Moon. Then a few nanoseconds later, it all happens again - over and over. Only reasonable solution is to use the build of Pale Moon without AVX instructions that you discovered above. Not really clear why MCP did this (as opposed to why they say they did it); perhaps by limiting Pale Moon to AVX processors, they're effectively limiting it to newer processors, and thus (indirectly) to faster processors that can handle the Javledygook on modern Web sites without bogging down.
  12. Mathwiz
    I'm just glad he's OK.
  13. Mathwiz
    Is @roytam1 on vacation? He certainly deserves one, so I have no problem if he is. I never thought we really needed weekly browser updates - or even monthly, unless some significant new feature is added or security flaw is fixed. Personally, I'd be fine with quarterly updates! But usually, each week there's either an update or a post telling us otherwise. And he's held to that pattern for so long, it stands out when the pattern breaks. So I was just a bit concerned.
  14. Mathwiz
    Supermium got mentioned by Micro$oft: I thought their typo ("Supremium") is actually a better name than Supermium! Seems to roll off the tongue a little more easily since "supreme" and "premium" are both common English words.
  15. Mathwiz
    I think that's better; yes.
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