Jump to content

Mathwiz

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,858

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    51

  • Donations

    0.00 USD 

  • Country

    United States

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Mathwiz

  1. Mathwiz
    Hmm.... AI for a search engine makes sense, although I couldn't help but at this load of manure: "Unlock the joy of discovery?" "Feel the wonder of creation?" Give me a break - it's a search engine, not the freakin' James Webb Space Telescope! (If done well, I suppose it might indeed "empower" me to "better harness the world's knowledge," so I'll give them a pass on that part.) So yes; bring on the AI search engine. But I'm not so sanguine about AI in a browser: I don't know if that was AI-written, but I can tell it wasn't targeted at "techies" like us. "Lengthy financial report?" "Competing company?" "LinkedIn post?" They're clearly targeting gullible business executives.... In any case, I'm pretty sure any AI capabilities will require lots and lots of CPU cycles. So even if some genius were to succeed in backporting Edge to XP, I think we can forget about it running well on any hardware over a year old - or even on lower-end current hardware! OTOH, I often need help tightening up posts like this one, so maybe I should consider the new Edge (and a new high-end PC) myself. That only leaves the question of why the new Bing requires the new Edge. I can't see any logical reason for that dependency other than playing Monopoly. That's as reasonable a choice as any. Roy's current thread is always near the top of this subforum, so it should always be easy to find. Container tabs are also present in St55, and WE add-on support is a bit better in 55. Thus, 55 also supports the Multi-Account Containers app that makes container tabs rather more useful; one of the main reasons I prefer 55 over 52. That said, I found that container tabs (as implemented in Serpent 52/55) have one big weakness: you can't have the same cookie in more than one container! I once tried to set up separate "banking" containers for myself and my wife, but it wouldn't work; I had to go with completely separate profiles, which was a maintenance headache when dealing with add-ons. Probably good advice regardless of the environment, given the inherently experimental nature of @roytam1's browsers. BTW, for the uninitiated, e10s is Mozilla's cryptic abbreviation for "electrolysis," which is their term (trademark?) for multi-process mode. Indeed. To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer!!
  2. Mathwiz
    Sounds to me like another genius move by Micro$oft: make sure even fewer folks use Bing! Hasn't affected me, since I routinely spoof Win 7 or 8.1 in my UAs; but Chase long ago fell for the FUD that old OSes are inherently too insecure. I remember years ago when they blocked their own Android app on Android 6 for the same reason. Of course that just meant I had to use Chrome instead of their app. Maybe Moonbat works for Chase? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering. Sorry, couldn't resist! I checked mine, and mine is user-set to ... which is better, but obviously way out of date! Problem with pointing it to this thread is that it, too, will be locked someday.... Multi-process mode was removed from Basilisk by MCP before @basilisk-dev got ahold of it. @roytam1 omitted those particular commits, so it can be enabled in Serpent, but even Serpent doesn't have it enabled by default! IIRC, multi-process mode was still in its infancy when the two Basilisk versions were forked from Firefox. Even FF 52 disables it by default on XP. That said, I've had generally good results running with it enabled, except for some incompatible add-ons; notably Palefill and Classic Add-ons Archive. (The latter has a "hack" which was written for Waterfox but can be enabled for Serpent, which makes CAA open in a single-process mode window.) If one site hosts multiple domains, the certificate will typically include a Subject Alternative Name for each domain hosted at that site. As long as the domain you're accessing is one of the certificate's SANs, the browser shouldn't give a warning. But if the domain isn't listed as a SAN, a warning should appear.
  3. Mathwiz
    Same as before: IOW, no matter how good it is, I can't use it unless the publisher jumps through Micro$not's hoops. So far, of XP- and Vista-compatible email clients, only OE classic has done so. On Win 7 there are many more options to choose from. I was particularly impressed with eM Client. If you use all the features, it's probably well worth the $60 cost; if not, the free version is still quite usable as long as you only have one or two email accounts. The only thing to beware is that eM Client gives you a 30-day trial of the "full" version; after that, you must either pay the $60 or get a "free version" license. At that point you may find you were relying on a feature from the "full" version that you will lose.
  4. Mathwiz
    I agree that would be ideal. Start with v11 (or at least v12, which also runs reasonably well on older computers), then add all the Googlisms and what-have-you that are needed for the modern Web. But that's basically what Moonchild Productions has been trying to do with their UXP platform. But they're still way behind, even though they got an earlier start, have a lot of software developers contributing, and have made impressive recent progress. Practically, I think all it means is, if you think Chase's Web site is malfunctioning, you need to check it on not only a "supported" browser, but also with a clean profile with no extensions, before you report the issue. Which is pretty good advice anyway. I certainly have no problems using, say, uBO at chase.com; in fact it speeds up their Web page noticeably. BTW, Google had a good idea with the "permissions" concept (which Mozilla adopted, and which is also used for Android apps) but the "permissions" they defined are so broad that any browser extension (or Android app) usually needs several scary permissions in order to do anything useful. Yes, of course a browser extension needs permission to read and change Web pages and responses! How could uBO or Palefill work if they couldn't change Web pages? There's a similar one for Android: permission to "read and change data on your device." Meaning permission to read from and write to files. Well, duh.... Making the permissions much more granular would have also made them much more useful.
  5. Mathwiz
    V2.13.2 is about 4 pages back from the most recent versions on GitHub. Once you get it installed you can update to 2.14, although @VistaLover experienced the crash even with 2.13.2.
  6. Mathwiz
    And after two more weeks, I can sign in again with St 55. Although (as with Google Translate) I don't know if a recent Serpent update is responsible for the fix, or if Chase updated their Javascript. Most likely the former, but I'm too lazy to fire up an old Serpent version just to find out! BTW, as I mentioned on Humming Owl's thread, Chase is upping their minimum browser requirements soon (to FF 98 and presumably a similar Cr version), so soon this breakthrough may be for naught. If they spring a ??= or &&= on us, it's back to MiniBrowser; if it's something even newer I may have to give up on XP-compatible browsers entirely and just move to Win 7. Then we'll see how long we can make that OS last....
  7. Mathwiz
    The end may be near. Chase.com with Kafan MiniBrowser: I realize the banner could be overcome with a custom user agent, but that may not work when they really do get around to upping their minimum requirements. We'll see soon, I suppose. Edit: OT, but the minimum Firefox version will soon be FF 98 (determined via a binary search using custom user agents, which are simpler with FF than Cr). So the minimum Cr version will probably be close to that. What we don't yet know is whether there will be any Googlisms in Chase's updated code that actually require FF 98 / Cr 9?. I'm hoping to get lucky with nothing more than a custom user agent, and to defer XP/Vista obsolescence a while longer.
  8. Mathwiz
    I don't know if this will help, but I had to roll back to VM v2.13.2 to complete that step. This was on latest St 52 but I suspect VM has actually been incompatible with St 52 since, well, "long ago in IT world time." With 2.13.2 I did not experience a crash when clicking on the "not found" links. An interesting discovery, but since our consensus seemed to be that dom.enable_performance_navigation_timing should be left false in any case: Google's implementation of the measure() function (measureOptions parameter) requires at minimum Fx103 ... and since Moonchild apparently agrees (this pref now defaults to false), and since Google has heretofore been very clearly unwilling to change their code to accommodate older browsers, and since the only reason the question was brought up in the first place was confusion with a different but similar-sounding pref, there seemed little reason to recheck! I guess it's good that you rechecked anyway, so if we someday discover a Web site that requires this pref be set to true, we'll know that we no longer have to choose between that as-yet-undiscovered site and Google Translate. Just a reminder that we started going down this rabbit hole because of an off-hand comment by @UCyborg: I never figured out why he mentioned that pref, but it appears GitHub requires it (sigh). I tend to agree with MC that it's a privacy hazard - and there's no straightforward way to enable it for specific sites (like, perhaps, GitHub) where you decide the benefit is worth the risk to privacy. BTW the Edge download page has now decided to start working again in my "dirty" St 52 profile (which, like the "clean" profile, has the pref set to the default values of false) - I changed nothing. I agree 100%! The only thing I can think of is, when you click on one of M$'s download links (with @UCyborg's Palefill version - 1.25.4), you get a pop-up license agreement that you have to click the "I agree" box on before you can download the installer. But the installer is one of those "on-line" installers that's obviously far too small to contain Edge - instead it merely downloads Edge when you run it, so the installer could have popped up the license agreement itself. Who cares if someone wants to reverse-engineer (or otherwise violate M$'s terms) an "on-line" installer? BTW, the installer fails on my Win 7 system with an error x'80000003', an error code not documented on M$'s help page.
  9. Mathwiz
    I love Firefox-based browsers, but the one thing I don't love about them is that they have way too many similar-sounding preferences! I too have dom.enable_performance_observer set to true, although I no longer remember why. I was thinking of dom.enable_performance_navigation_timing, which must be false (now the default value) for Google Translate to work, because the implementation is evidently different from what the Goog expects.
  10. Mathwiz
    Thanks, but now I have a new problem! After installing palefill-1.25.4 in St 52, the Edge download page goes totally blank immediately after downloading! It has to be a profile issue. I installed palefill-1.25.4 in an otherwise-clean profile and it worked. Someone told me to try that first But now I have to figure out what I could've done in St 52 that I haven't done in St 55 that blocks the Edge page from loading in the former....
  11. Mathwiz
    But I bet performance suffers, negating the purpose of native Web components (dom.webcomponents.enabled=true) in the first place. So yes, you can use them together, but you patient Frisians are best advised to wait a few more weeks, until Palefill and native Web components reach some sort of truce. In the meantime, impatient Americans, Greeks, et al. will have to choose between slow performance (Palefill) and fast but incomplete support (native Web components). What @VistaLover said. Doesn't even work if you spoof Win 7 or greater in your user agent. You've got to appreciate the irony! M$ doesn't let you download a modern browser (Edge) unless you already have one, in which case, why would you want Edge? Here's a short windows .bat/.cmd file to automate that process. Set winsys=System32 unless you have a 64-bit system and you've downloaded a 32-bit browser; in that case set winsys=SysWOW64. copy dependentlibs.list new.list for %%f in (api*.dll msvcp140.dll ucrtbase.dll vcomp140.dll vcruntime140.dll D3DCompiler_*.dll) do if exist %windir%\%winsys%\%%f (del %%f && ren new.list b4.list && findstr /ilv "%%f" b4.list >new.list && del b4.list) if exist new.list ( ren dependentlibs.list dependentlibs.bak ren new.list dependentlibs.list ) I don't think it's so much a matter of good v. evil as that the UXP implementation breaks Web pages such as Google Translate, that are probably used more often So structuredClone is probably not a Googlism? (Perhaps a Mozilla-ism?) Wonder who thought that one up, and why? No, it's not a "Moonchildism;" that would only apply if Moonchild added support that no other browser had. The answer is right there in your question: Google had it in Chromium, then removed it because "Google likes a rival format it helped develop, AVIF." Can't have any open alternatives to the Goog, can we? Well, of course not, because "CSP Level 3 Inline Hash" is a Googlism!
  12. Mathwiz
    Sounds very similar to my experience with M$ 365. Probably very JavaScript-heavy, with lots of Googlisms in the JavaScript. With Gmail your best XP bet (for now) is probably Kafan's MiniBrowser. I haven't tried Outlook.com, but it's probably identical to the M$ 365 interface. (I doubt M$ invented two different Web mail interfaces - although it wouldn't totally surprise me if they did.) M$ 365 actually has a pretty, nice, full-featured Web interface, but it can be horribly slow without the fastest hardware to run on. (M$'s motto: We make our software as inefficient as we can, then force you to "upgrade" to even less efficient software! We exist to make you buy a new PC every year or two! ) Of course, older hardware is a big reason folks still use Windows XP, so the M$ Web interface is a last resort for most XP users.
  13. Mathwiz
    Pull-quote from another thread about a different site with this problem (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=26061&p=207349#p207323): Emphasis added. And further down the page: So it looks like Google gets the blame after all. They gave sites a needlessly complicated way to do something simple for no benefit (unless they consider breaking older Firefox-based browsers a "benefit")
  14. Mathwiz
    Good instructions. Let me add a few more things. Easiest way to find the profile folder is to click Help / Troubleshooting Information, then click the Open Folder button next to the Profile Folder heading. The Profiles folder is located under a folder named OpenSource\MailNews, but "old-timers" may also have a Profiles folder under Binary Outcast\Interlink. This folder is no longer used; it's where the profile for early MailNews versions resided before Binary Outcast added the "generic" branding. I recommend deleting the Binary Outcast folder and its subfolders to avoid confusion in the future. MailNews isn't a browser, so there's no address bar where you can key in about:config! So how do you do step 3? I went to Edit / Preferences and set my MailNews Start Page to about:config. Then when I restarted the browser, the about:config page appears in the pane that will later display your email content. From there you can interact with it normally.
  15. Mathwiz
    I guess that would depend on both the email web service and the browser (or at least the browser it pretends to be). I only have experience with a few: M$ 365 gives a full-featured browser interface, but it's very JavaScript-heavy, making it slow; fastmail.com is pretty good as well, and a lot faster. Keptprivate.com has a more bare-bones interface, more (I'm guessing) like the ones your email services provide. (Fastmail.com also supports app passwords for old email clients. So it's probably one of the better choices. It isn't free though.) In general, I prefer a dedicated email client, as long as it will work with the email service, over a browser interface. I'm just saying that if you can't find a dedicated email client that works satisfactorily with your email service, check out their browser interface: it might be just fine.
  16. Mathwiz
    I'm definitely not clairvoyant, nor precognitive - but I can spot a trend and see where it's going, and the direction isn't good for XP/Vista email clients. But I do have some good news. I'll always prefer a well-written email client for email, but Web mail has gotten pretty good. Web mail is noticeably quicker and more responsive on @roytam1's latest UXP browsers than on earlier UXP versions. And for now, the Cr-based browsers work well too. So if Google and Yahoo do shut down our email clients the way Micro$oft has, we can still get by comfortably with Web mail.
  17. Mathwiz
    I should have been clearer: none of the XP/Vista OAuth2 email clients are currently acceptable for my needs, though DreamMail Pro comes close. And you're really saying the same thing: MailNews and DreamMail Pro are acceptable for your needs. But beware; the world is moving in the direction M$ 365 has already arrived at, and MailNews in particular has a glaring weakness in that world: it's based on BOC's Interlink, and BOC has no interest in registering Interlink with any of the big email service providers (Gmail, M$, and Yahoo). So I believe its days are numbered. In fact, AIUI BOC removed OAuth2 support from Interlink itself in protest of the registration requirement. Luckily, @roytam1 retained it in MailNews, so it works for now; and if it does fail someday, DreamMail should still work as long as it retains XP compatibility.
  18. Mathwiz
    That is true. FF isn't a Cr fork. In fact, it's the only non-Cr-based browser left that can render modern Web sites. But to be blunt, modern FF doesn't look, act, or perform much differently than Cr either. It's sort of a hybrid: bits and pieces of the old FF live on, along with bits and pieces of Cr, particularly in the JS engine. I don't think modern FF really accomplishes anything more than, say, unGoogled Cr, so there's not really much reason to prefer it anymore.
  19. Mathwiz
    Try this: Ctrl-Shift-B to open the "All Bookmarks" window. Click "Import and Backup." Click "Export Bookmarks to HTML." Save your bookmarks.html file somewhere. Remember where you saved it. Close that browser; open the other one. Repeat steps 1 and 2. Click "Backup" and save a backup of your bookmarks in case something goes wrong. Click "Import and Backup" again, then "Import Bookmarks from HTML." Select the bookmarks.html file you saved in step 4. If things go haywire, click "Import and Backup," then "Restore" and restore the backup saved in step 7.
  20. Mathwiz
    A nice side effect of this change for me is that I can now use GitHub/GitLab in multiprocess mode! (Palefill is incompatible with this mode, and so not installed in my multiprocess profile.) I no longer need to right-click those links and use "Open With" to open them in my single-process profile (and wait for a new Serpent instance to start up); a simple left-click now works as it should. Unfortunately it hasn't fixed everything. Chase.com made a change a couple of weeks ago, after which I could no longer sign in. (It prompts for my user ID and password as always, but when I sign in, I now get the unhelpful message "It looks like this part of our site isn't working right now." I've had to switch to 360EE or MiniBrowser (both Chromium builds) to use Chase.com.
  21. Mathwiz
    That could be an advantage: if the "current" script versions contain Googlisms incompatible with UXP, you'd get an "outdated" script that actually runs! Edit: Poking around in the .xpi, it looks like you'd have to hack a few things to make that idea work. Still an interesting idea though.
  22. Mathwiz
    What @VistaLover said.... but let me add that in the long run, I think it's the opposite! At the moment MiniBrowser (Cr 87 based) leads the pack in rendering the modern Web on pre-Win 7 systems, but I have very little hope of ever seeing a browser based on Cr 88 or later for Vista, let alone XP. Even the Chinese have moved on to Win 7. UXP is still behind 360EE v13/MiniBrowser, lacking dynamic module imports, that worthless ??= Googlism (as I've said before, some Googlisms are quite useful, but this one does nothing that can't easily be done without it: A??=B is clearly equivalent to A=A??B), and I'm sure several other things I've forgotten. And UXP will undoubtedly always be behind, because MCP doesn't have a partnership with Google like Mozilla does. (And they don't want one either, and I don't blame them. I see no reason to develop a browser platform that is just Cr under another name, which is what FF has become.) But here's the difference: Unlike 360EE, MiniBrowser, et al., UXP is still being developed. So, as long as it can be back-ported to XP and Vista, it keeps those OSes "in the game." (Although there are other challenges to those older OSes - I recently started a thread on OAuth2-compatible email clients for them. There are a few that work, but none are really acceptable at present.)
  23. Mathwiz
    I found a Web application that runs in MiniBrowser (Chromium 87 based) but not in 360EE v13 (Chromium 86 based): Microsoft Teams. I had to join a Teams meeting yesterday when I was working from home and didn't have any "modern" browsers handy on my Win 7 PC (I just never got around to downloading one), nor did I want to install Micro$oft's Teams app. I was about to give up and download a modern browser, but I decided to give MiniBrowser a try first since I have it on my PC for testing - and it worked! Kind of surprised to see anything where 87 is the minimum Chromium version. Obviously no real need for MiniBrowser on Win 7, but XP/Vista users might find my discovery useful.
  24. Mathwiz
    Understood and thanks to both @AstroSkipper and @VistaLover. FWIW, the SSUAO general.useragent.override.addons.mozilla.org to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0 will re-enable the "Add to Firefox" button for all the WE extensions at AMO that will install on Serpent 55. But some probably won't work after installing, since Serpent 55 is actually based on FF 53 as @VistaLover noted above, so you may prefer to change "55.0" to "53.0" in the string above. Add-ons requiring a newer version than whatever you specify in the SSUAO will have a yellow banner similar to the one that triggered this discussion, although it will read "You need an updated version of Firefox" vs. "You'll need to download Firefox...." OTOH some add-ons don't really require the version they say they require; so if you like to experiment, you may want to leave the version at 55.0; just be aware that not all add-ons will work once installed.
  25. Mathwiz
    Sometimes I get confused by your examples. Decentraleyes 2.0+ says it requires FF 56. Were you implying that it will run in Serpent 55, or was this just a random example? Serpent 55 "pretends" to be FF 55, so Decentraleyes 2.0 and up won't install OOTB, even if you set up a SSUAO to restore the "Add to Firefox" button (and older versions aren't available at AMO). Of course, you can edit the Manifest.json inside the .xpi (which means you need to download it anyway). That breaks the signature, but Serpent 55 doesn't seem to care; it installs anyway. But it doesn't seem to work, so I assume v2.0+ isn't compatible:
×
×
  • Create New...