Mathwiz

Since I don't get over here all that often these days, when I first read "When PH stops working," my first thought was ProofHub, a developer's site I have to use at work - which actually did stop working with the Christmas Eve update! Then I read further, and without clicking on any links except the erroneous Wikipedia article (which didn't make sense - in context, PH was obviously a Web site, not that 0-14 number that tells you how sour or bitter your solution will taste) I remembered the PM forum thread (which I had, indeed, read). Then I wondered, why the abbreviation PH, but not the abbreviation YT? As @VistaLover pointed out, porn is one of the most common uses of the World Wide Web - nothing to be ashamed of! Absolutely true, but not an answer to the question. Nothing @roytam1 is doing is holding MC back. There's no reason for hostility now that MAT has left. Indeed, since @feodor2 has shown (with MyPal 68) that it's possible for the Rust compiler to target XP, there's no reason XP and Vista can't have a version of, say, Waterfox Classic. You know, the browser that supports both legacy and WE add-ons. (That said, I don't know if Waterfox Classic has kept up with all the JavaScript enhancements MCP has incorporated into UXP lately, so UXP may still be the best non-Chrome-based choice for XP/Vista users.) the site opens in 12 seconds versus 16 seconds with a user agent from Firefox 60. There's probably a logical (albeit obscure) reason for this behavior, but if one were a bit paranoid, (s)he might think YouTube was deliberately slowing itself down on non-Chrome-based browsers! (Trying to be careful here to avoid being flamed again)

If you're an individual, the solution sounds simple: just don't use Gmail or other OAuth2-mandating email services like Micro$oft 365. But that can be easier said than done! I remember signing up for Internet service with Clearwire back when they were a thing. Like most ISPs, they gave me a "free" email account. Turned out to be Gmail in disguise! Of course OAuth2 wasn't a thing back then, so it wasn't a big deal - but still, that meant Google's AI was scouring all my email and learning all my likes and dislikes, all without me realizing that I was using "stealth Gmail" for several months.

Uh-Oh I just tried DreamMail Pro on my home system. It did the OAuth2 thing just fine, but when I logged in, Micro$oft gave me this nonsense: I don't think I'm going to get "admin approval" for this. They really want me using Outlook 365 on Windows 10 or 11, and I'm trying to find a way to avoid that!

OK, so Pegasus v4.80 works on XP, but 4.81 beta requires Vista. Well, at least we're getting close! It's pretty unusual to find software that installs on Vista but not XP. Most developers dropped both at the same time and moved up to Win 7. One other product I know that runs on Vista but not XP is Firefox 53. But it can be patched to run on XP with XomPie. Makes me wonder if Pegasus 4.81 can be patched as well. OTOH, maybe they'll fix it for XP. (I'm guessing 4.80 does not do OAuth2.) Of course, that's only half the battle. To work with Micro$oft 365, it needs not only to support OAuth2, but also to be registered with Microsoft 365 as an email client. This is the real show-stopper for XP email clients, which are likely to be individual developers these days (the big corporations having moved on long ago): you have to register your email client with every major email service that has mandated OAuth2: Google, Micro$oft, Yahoo, etc. Edit: Well, it looks like Pegasus 4.81 is a no-go. I tried it on my home machine (Win 7) and it supports OAuth2 for Gmail only. Not Micro$oft 365. Of course, once they have OAuth2 "down pat," they can presumably add other email services. So they may add 365 in 4.82. But until then, it does me no good. BTW, the Pegasus 4.81 installer rebooted my PC with no warning! This is very bad - I could've been in the middle of something important and lost it all! (Of course they say "exit all other apps before installing," but everyone says that, nobody does it, and everybody else gives you a "Restart Later" option.)

I recently needed to find an XP-compatible email client for Micro$oft 365. Initially I asked about it in an odd place, @roytam1's browser thread, for two reasons: In addition to XP-compatible browsers, Roytam1 maintains a couple of XP-compatible email clients: IceDove and MailNews. The folks who follow that thread are very knowledgeable about modern Internet protocols in general. The stumbling block was the need for OAuth2 authentication. With modern email services like Micro$oft 365, you can't just enter your password into your email client anymore. As it happens, MailNews does support OAuth2, but that still wasn't enough. To work with modern email services, your email client now needs to be registered with their servers, something that was never done for MailNews. Luckily, @AstroSkipper pointed me to an XP-compatible email client that is registered with several popular email services including Micro$oft 365: Outlook Express Classic. ... so I went with OE Classic. I've now been using it for about a month. Unfortunately, I'm not particularly happy. OE Classic has several bugs and quirks that are problematic for serious use: My biggest gripe is with the severe limitations of the free version; particularly its insistence on dropping ads for itself into the first pages of all your emails. Thus, you're forced to upgrade to the Pro version for $37 before you can even evaluate it properly. I was able to tell that it did work with Micro$oft 365, but that was about all. (Also, your $37 only entitles you to use the "Pro" features on one machine. I would've expected 3: one each for home, work, and laptop. At a minimum, the software should give you 30 days before the limitations kick in!) So I paid my $37, and at first I was happy; but then I started finding other problems. Every time OE Classic polls the server for new email, it changes the focus to the last email on the list, causing you to have to find and select the email you were reading all over again. And I don't mean it moves to the most recent email; I really mean the last email on the list, however it happens to be sorted at the time. I often sort by sender or subject to find related emails, and if OE Classic polls the server while I have it sorted that way, I find myself looking at the Y's and Z's instead of what I was looking at before! (If I'm reading a specific email, a workaround I found is to open the email I'm reading. The main page will still move to the last email on the list, but the email I'm reading remains open in a separate window. So this isn't a complete show-stopper, but it's still quite annoying.) If a recoverable error occurs while polling the email server, OE Classic's response is to pop up an error window - and then just stop! It won't poll the server any more until you dismiss the window. This can cause you to miss incoming email if it happens while you're doing something else, such as Web browsing. If an unrecoverable error occurs, such as needing to re-authenticate (perhaps because my email password has changed, or just because Micro$oft 365 is being cranky), the only way to re-authenticate is to delete the account and recreate it from scratch! I'm required to change my password every 60 days, so this is really irritating! OE Classic doesn't appear to use multiple processes. This can really slow you down when using the IMAP protocol, especially if you have a lot of folders. It takes quite a while to refresh everything, during which, if you click on an email that needs to be downloaded from the server, you get to stare at a blank email for several seconds until OE Classic finally finishes what it's doing and gets around to downloading the email you clicked on. The "Unread messages" count on each folder doesn't update until you click on the folder to view it! That can cause you to miss emails that get sent to a folder other than the one you're viewing. The "Find" function doesn't work, at least on Windows XP. Perhaps it needs Windows Search installed, which I haven't done, but the original OE and Windows Live Mail had at least some search capability that didn't rely on Windows Search being installed. A more minor bug is, on Windows XP only, icons all have black backgrounds instead of transparent ones. (This didn't seem to be a problem when I tried it on Windows 7 though; only on XP.) If OE Classic just had one or two of these kinds of issues, I'd probably live with it and/or (if the issues were really annoying) get with the developer to see if he could fix them. But there are so many, I decided to start a thread here instead. Is anything else available for Windows XP - or even Vista? I did find one: IncrediMail v2.5. The free version is supposed to be adware, but I don't mind as long as I'm the one who has to look at the ads! Unfortunately the developer pulled the plug on this product a few years ago, so you can't register IncrediMail any more - but the client does work on XP, at least for a while. (I suspect, though, that without being able to register, it won't work forever - does anyone know?) Unfortunately IncrediMail 2.5 predates Micro$oft 365, so I can't use it. I don't know if there's a newer XP-compatible version either. I haven't found a copy to try yet.

It'll be nice to see that red X disappear at long last!

Which means my old iPad Mini 4 is safe! C'mon, Discourse, if you can support that....

It's not just UXP they're targeting either. This undoubtedly exterminates Discourse on MyPal 68 too, since FF didn't implement this particular bit of Googledygook until FF 71. (And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think FF/MyPal 68 will load "legacy" FF extensions like JustOff's; so MyPal 68 is completely out of luck. At least UXP has a workaround.) What a load of, well, you know. As if they can't even make Discourse work unless they use the latest Googledygook! Explains something I've wondered about from html5test.com: Never could understand how UXP managed to support VP9 but not VP8. Turns out, it does support VP8; it just doesn't "think" it supports VP8!

Believe it or not, I sort of agree. Certainly with the "slow" part. It's especially ironic given that Pale Moon started out as simply Firefox optimized for performance on Windows. I may not like that Mozilla mostly started over with Quantum, but I have to admit that MCP is pushing FF 52's Javascript engine to the limit to get it to handle all the latest "Googlisms." It's surprising that it works as well as it does. From the Web developer's standpoint though, I've written a fair number of very simple Web pages, and I absolutely cannot understand why any Web developer would rely as heavily on JavaScript as most do for tasks the Web server itself would be much more suited to do. It's almost (have to emphasize those disclaimers now, apparently) as if they were trying to make their Web pages as slow and inefficient as possible!

C'mon, guys, get a grip! If you bothered to read my entire post, you should've known I was speaking tongue-in-cheek: @NotHereToPlayGames, you in particular should be ashamed! The whole point of the post was that MCP's so-called "ancient" browser was enhanced so that NextCloud did work - and then a few weeks later, it stopped working again! No, I don't think NextCloud deliberately broke Pale Moon. But the coincidence was so striking, I think one could be excused for being a little suspicious in this case. Not "each and every time a web site is discovered not to work on our 'ancient' browsers" as you wrote. Next time, try to read what I actually wrote, and give me the benefit of the doubt. OK?

Wow, that was quick! This is going to sound paranoid (because it is) but it sounds like the folks at NextCloud discovered - horrors! - that Pale Moon had started working with their Web site and immediately started looking for a new way to break Pale Moon. Can't have non-Google-approved browsers accessing our site - that would be a "security risk!" No, I don't think that's what happened - probably just a coincidence - but given what folks seem to think "security" means nowadays, I can't rule it out....

Welcome back! Your new QUOC is a natural for MyPal 68 (based on FF 68, of course). The folks who need the (Q)UOC patch the most are those with less powerful hardware, and those same folks often run older OS versions like Windows XP and Vista. So it seems like a match made in heaven.

Not dumb; maybe confused a bit. First that last part: the "No official * changes picked since my last build" refers to changes to only Pale Moon or Basilisk. Changes made to both browsers are likely to be changes to the UXP platform that is common to both. There have been many important changes to UXP, but few specifically to just Pale Moon or to just Basilisk. Unfortunately I don't know which versions of New Moon 28, if any, are compatible with SP2 of Windows XP. Perhaps @roytam1 can answer that, or you could try a "binary search:" go to http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/, download the latest NM 28, see if it works; if not, download the version halfway between the version you're using and the latest, see if it works; then depending on whether it works or not, move forward or backward halfway through the remaining list until you find the last version that works with SP2.

Rather than setting an increasingly long list of SSUAOs to deal with what is likely to be an ever-expanding problem, would it make more sense to set a general UAO omitting Goanna/*, then set SSUAOs only on sites that do require (or at least, work better with) it in the user agent string? For that matter, are there any such sites? Perhaps on the modern Web, the Goanna/* slice is best left out of user agent strings completely.

Good! In that case your script shouldn't cause a problem then. IDA, OTOH, apparently does do concurrent downloads (at least the paid version) so be careful with it. Hopefully there's some way to limit the number of simultaneous downloads.

Well, no; but someone might read your post and try it, not realizing the problems it causes for @roytam1. Is there an easy way to download multiple versions sequentially vs. concurrently, so the downloader doesn't eat up all the server's bandwidth?

Pretty sure he didn't intend it that way. It's just how his writing style comes off (at least to us Americans). One gets used to it after a while. Yes, since I don't get on that often, I was reading the penultimate page of the thread and decided to reply. I posted my reply, and the board moved to my post on the final page; I then edited my reply to add more info, after which I finally scrolled up and saw that the conversation had continued for several more posts including yours. But, there's no "delete" option, and I didn't want to edit my post down to merely "Never mind...."

These "Cap" programs are "wrappers" used with programs that don't normally have a provision to use a proxy server. That was my situation; I had a program (OE Classic) that I needed to use a proxy server (just once, to activate the "Pro" license I'd bought) but OE Classic provided no way to do that. (Probably no one ever needed it before me.) As for the "best" of these "Cap" programs, I'll take @AstroSkipper's recommendation of SocksCap64 to heart (despite the name, it does have a 32-bit version). FreeCap had one job: let me activate OE Classic. It did that job, but I'm not wedded to it!

Try setting pref security.ssl3.rsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256 to true. Ciphers are part of NSS, which @roytam1 keeps pretty up-to-date in his Serpent/NM builds, but this pref defaults to false for some reason. I'm not sure why; it doesn't use the less secure SHA1 hash; it doesn't use CBC, which proved problematic; and it doesn't use a weak cipher. Edit: I think I know why it's considered "weak" by SSLLabs: it's not that it's inherently weak; it's that it doesn't provide "forward secrecy." If a determined attacker recorded all your encrypted conversations with mega.nz, and at some point in the future, mega.nz's private key were compromised, the attacker could retroactively decrypt everything you'd sent to or received from them. (Of course the other cipher suffers from the same "weakness," but it's pref defaults to true; go figure.) I like SSLLabs, but I wish they were a bit clearer about what the problem is when they say a cipher is "weak." (Of course, there's only so much room on the results page, so I guess they can be excused for not being as verbose as I'd prefer.) Ignore that the pref contains "ssl3;" I'm pretty sure this cipher suite is only used by TLS 1.2.

To minimize clutter from add-ons, I had to do this with a clean profile. Ugh. I didn't realize how much I rely on Classic Theme Restorer! Error console shows a large number of "unreachable code after return statement" warnings: Also a few "Expected one argument" errors, with no context to help locate the error:

Although my immediate problem has been solved, that's a good idea. My proxy solution has worked for a long time, but with all the ch-ch-ch-changes at the office lately, I can't be sure it will continue to do so. But it seems likely that ForcePoint would also block connections to public VPNs, so I'd probably have to set up my own (possibly at home). Doable, but I'll wait until it becomes necessary.

Will do, time permitting. I appreciate your patience!

HTTP and Secure (HTTPS) are set to use ProxHTTPSProxy on port 8079; see screen shot above. ProxyCap appears to be a no-go for me: to configure anything, it requires the user to be not merely an Administrator, but a member of the "Administrators group." Groups only exist on domain-joined Windows versions, so although I'm an Administrator, I'm not a member of any group and ProxyCap won't let me configure anything. I'll look at the alternatives mentioned, starting with the proxycfg command. Something like Wireshark, I presume? Actually, OE Classic's author already got back to me on that: So the activation server is apparently www.oeclassic.com itself. And it sounds like he implemented his own HTTP(S) client, a la Firefox, in order to implement modern security protocols; that's why the system settings used by IE8, etc. don't work. (Of course Chromium still manages to use them, so it should be possible for OE Classic to use them in the same way.) Edit: Proxycfg didn't do the trick, but FreeCap did. I'm activated and (hopefully) getting my $37 worth.

Thanks; Googled it and it still exists! Only concerns I have: Can't tell if WinXP is supported It's also payware ($30). Not only is this starting to get expensive, but won't I run into the same problem trying to activate it as with OE Express? It seems I need ProxyCap to get ProxyCap Never mind. Says Win XP is supported. It has a 30-day free trial, so if it works, I could use it to activate OE Express, then uninstall.

Not "system-wide;" just set up in the system proxy settings (Control Panel / Internet Options / Connections tab / LAN Settings button): ... then in "Advanced:" This is how you set up a proxy, not only for IE8 (which I almost never use) but also for MSOE, Windows Live Mail, Chromium-derived browsers (360EE), Office (Excel, Word), etc. Basically anything that doesn't have its own proxy settings page like Firefox-derived browsers do.