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Mathwiz

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Everything posted by Mathwiz

  1. Mathwiz
    Well, of course, not 10 minutes after I posted the above, I found a new potential issue. Is anyone able to expand a long quote? For instance, this quote should "fade out" after a few lines, with an "expand" button at the bottom to reveal the whole quote. Does the "expand" button work with older browsers? For me on Serpent 55, it appears to work inconsistently; i.e., I can expand the quote below, but not some others:
  2. Mathwiz
    It appears that the site issues that prompted this thread have been resolved. You could ask @xper, but there may be nothing more to discuss about the original topic. As such, you may wish to close this thread to further replies. Although I wouldn't object to having the last several posts moved to a new thread about browser sync systems. Up to you; it's fine with me either way.
  3. Mathwiz
    Not sure, but the topic came up recently in another thread, and this seems like the appropriate place to ask: Was support for Firefox Sync removed from MyPal 68? I looked around and couldn't find it, but the Photon UI is so Chrome-like (and Australis-unlike) I could easily have missed it. If it was removed, was it because of a requirement under the MPL?
  4. Mathwiz
    As you may know, Martok has just released Palefill 1.20. Since he has unfortunately declined to update Palefill to support www.ING.de, users of that web site will have to follow the above instructions themselves (do not key in the +'s; those merely indicate added lines) in order to use www.ING.de with Palefill 1.20 or subsequent releases. Oh, and by the way, GitHub is partially broken again with Palefill 1.19 or 1.20, at least when force-installed in Serpent 55. (Edit: Palefill 1.20 does seem to be doing the job in IceApe, so this must be an incompatibility between Palefill and St 55. GitLab is still working fine in St 55 though, so Palefill must be doing something right!) I swear, Micro$oft must require its GitHub developers to shoehorn in at least one use of every newly-announced Javascript feature, so that something on GitHub will break every time Google thinks up anything new! Luckily, downloading new releases still works (for now).
  5. Mathwiz
    Me too! But if I did want a sync service and were free to pick one, PM Sync is more secure (there's that word again), and both are free, so all else being equal I'd choose PM Sync. If one were very ambitious (and had enough free time and programming skill) the best solution might be to add code to, say, St 52, offering a choice of PM Sync or FF Sync. That way, if you (a) wanted a sync service and (b) used FF on other platforms, you could choose FF sync; if (a) applied but not (b) you could choose PM sync. Best of both worlds!
  6. Mathwiz
    I've always understood the word "insecure" to mean "not" secure vs. "less" secure; that's why I would've used the latter wording. But as you say, it's linguistic hair-splitting; hardly worth arguing about. A more interesting question is whether it's possible to restore Firefox Sync functionality to either version of Serpent. In the case of St 52, this would involve reverting some very old changes, which sounds risky: no telling what subsequent changes would be rolled back in the attempt. And St 52 users may be using Palemoon Sync now, and wouldn't want to lose that functionality. So probably best to leave St 52 alone, at least unless MCP blocks it from accessing Palemoon Sync. But St 55 still has the original Sync functionality it inherited from FF 53; it just doesn't seem to work for some reason. It may be feasible to fix Sync in St 55. Another possibility that comes to mind is MyPal 68; an XP-compatible FF 68 fork that may support FF Sync. (I haven't tried it.) Either could be the ultimate answer to @Dave-H's conundrum, since he could then use St 55 or MyPal 68 on XP, and Firefox on his other platforms, and could browse most modern Web sites, even on XP, without having to move to 360EE and lose Sync functionality.
  7. Mathwiz
    I had to go back to that post because I honestly didn't remember reading anything about Basilisk being sold to a new developer, and when I got there, I saw why: There just isn't much to that post - mostly just "wow" without explaining what was so "wow"-worthy - and I'm not in the habit of clicking blind links just because someone says "wow." Basilisk wasn't even mentioned until the very last word - and that was in a quote about removing telemetry from Basilisk with no obvious relation to the rest of the post. Which brings up an MSFN question. When you post a link on MSFN to another MSFN post, MSFN "unfurls" it by default, providing a brief preview (although for some reason it didn't do so in @VistaLover's post). Does MSFN provide a way to similarly "unfurl" a link to a "foreign" site like palemoon.org? I've seen that feature at other fora, and it would've been quite useful in @XPerceniol's post. Thank you! This is actually such a simple solution to the branding issue I'm surprised no one thought of it earlier. Not that it would have satisfied the previous owners, but still, thanks again! I'm betting it's upstream, and that @roytam1 didn't even know about it. I'm also betting upstream couldn't possibly care less about our issues with the change. Perhaps @roytam1 could restore the original profile location; OTOH, deliberately forcing the path in MailNews back to "Binary Outcast\Interlink" would likely be viewed by upstream as trademark infringement. So perhaps it's best to live with it as is, particularly since you found a workaround.
  8. Mathwiz
    So (official) Basilisk lives again, under new management! I guess money talks. Official Basilisk doesn't run on the "older OSes" that are the focus of this subforum; still, I'm surprised. I don't remember reading anything about this news before now. I do hope the new owner is less hostile to XP/Vista forks than MCP was. He did say to a Mac developer: ... which is encouraging. @roytam1's Serpent has diverged from official Basilisk in several ways other than retaining XP support, since Roytam also retained support that MCP removed for e10s, WebExtension add-ons, container tabs, and possibly lots of other stuff I'm forgetting. Still, it's nice to know there's an "upstream" again.
  9. Mathwiz
    Come to think of it, even the word "insecure" overstates the case against FF 52.9. I'd probably describe it as merely "less secure" than 360EE, MyPal 68, and UXP-based browsers. WinXP is even older, of course, but we XP users got security updates through 2019, thanks to the POSReady hack. So strictly speaking, I guess FF 52.9 is even more out of date than XP itself! That said, the security risks involved are similar. IMO, they exist, but aren't terribly significant for most purposes. The best reason to move on from FF 52.9 is the one @Dave-H himself just gave; it just doesn't work well with the modern Web any more.
  10. Mathwiz
    Basilisk/52.9.2022.08.06? I'm surprised ABBO accepts that. Wasn't MCP's final Basilisk version released over a year ago? But, as long as it works.
  11. Mathwiz
    And here I thought Plex was just PVR software to run on your own PC! I guess they're branching out and trying to get into the streaming game with plex.tv.
  12. Mathwiz
    Let me push back a little bit against that. AFAIK, FF 52 does support TLS 1.2 and many modern, secure cipher suites. I probably wouldn't store my email or banking passwords in a FF 52 profile, but it's probably just fine for most casual browsing. Like WinXP itself, just because it doesn't have all the latest security features, doesn't make it "totally" insecure! You just have to be a little more careful.
  13. Mathwiz
    I can answer on @Dave-H's behalf. He also uses Firefox on Android and so relies on Firefox Sync, which hasn't been supported on, say, Serpent, in many years (specifically, since MCP created their own sync platform for Pale Moon and, at the time, Serpent Basilisk, and @roytam1 followed suit in New Moon and Serpent). True, he could probably "upgrade" to the last Serpent version prior to the changeover, but that really wouldn't improve his situation all that much.
  14. Mathwiz
    Possibly related: I'm using @roytam1's Serpent 55 and am able to post. However, when I click Submit Reply, MSFN doesn't appear to do anything. It actually does post my reply, but since it doesn't seem to, it's easy to accidentally double-post. That just happened to me. Edit: It appears this behavior only occurs if your post appears on a different page than the one you're viewing! So it usually works correctly, and only fails one time out of 15 (or if I'm replying to an old post). Edit 2: Seems to be fixed. At least, St 55 is working fine for me now.
  15. Mathwiz
    (deleted)
  16. Mathwiz
    Question about this: it wasn't long ago that addons.palemoon.org checked your browser's user-agent and wouldn't let New Moon users (version 28.10.*) or users on unsupported OSes (< NT 6.1) download any add-ons. Easily fixed with a SSUAO; e.g., general.useragent.override.addons.palemoon.org;Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:4.8) Goanna/20211001 PaleMoon/29.4.0.2 (that's a rather old Pale Moon version, but you get the idea) ... but is that not required any longer?
  17. Mathwiz
    Well, your (and @VistaLover's) English is far, far better than my German (and I don't understand Greek at all)! But since this is an international forum, whenever I'm misunderstood, I always wonder if something I said didn't translate well into the reader's native language. Hence my preemptive apology for any language barrier. At any rate, it was all just a big misunderstanding! I knew at least one browser (my favorite St 55) requires palefill's install.rdf to be modified, and as far as I knew, there, well, "may" be others, so I thought it best to warn those reading my post about that possibility. But somehow that possibility got misread as an inevitability, so everyone thought I must have "assumed" that NM, or all browsers compatible with XP (or something - I'm still unsure what exactly I was thought to be "assuming") required a modification to palefill's install.rdf. The fact that the gh-wc-pf version I happened to be using (1.2.19.1) doesn't work with GitLab (which is why I recommended switching to palefill in the first place), but both the version before (1.2.19) and the one after (1.2.19.2) do work, likely added to the confusion. If your only goal is to download the latest CleanFlash installer, you don't need palefill at all; the last "official" version of gh-wc-pf on its GitHub page, 1.2.19, displays GitLab pages fine. But ironically, you are more likely to need to modify gh-wc-pf 1.2.19's install.rdf. Besides, palefill fixes some Web sites besides GitHub and GitLab. So even though you don't have to, it's probably worth switching to palefill anyway.
  18. Mathwiz
    (emphasis added) Wow; what a prickly pair of posts! Let me respond in kind. The GitLab link failed to load for me, not only in St55, but also in (UXP-based) IceApe. I was using 1.2.19.1 in both browsers, so I'm surprised to learn that GitLab works with "plain" 1.2.19; I guess the fix @roytam1 added in .1 (to fix a GitHub issue) broke GitLab somehow. Unfortunately Roytam's fixes are linked in comments and so aren't shown on gh-wc-pf's release page, so I was unaware 1.2.19.2 even existed until I read @VistaLover's post. Thus I turned to Palefill (v1.19.3), and the GitLab page loaded fine in both browsers. So I linked to Palefill as a known-working GitLab solution, though of course now that I know about gh-wc-pf 1.2.19.2, I suspect Palefill 1.19.3 doesn't incorporate the latest GitHub fixes (or equivalent ones) from it; so for the specific case of GitHub, I suppose gh-wc-pf 1.2.19.2 is the preferred solution. (Also unknown is what happens if both are installed at once!) At any rate, both add-ons are chasing many fast-moving targets. And speaking of Palefill, apologies if there is a language barrier, but I made no assumption about browsers. I said, "you may also need to modify install.rdf," not "you will also need to modify install.rdf." "May" makes the sentence conditional, so I didn't think I'd nonetheless be expected to test Palefill installation in every possible browser to see which ones needed a modification!
  19. Mathwiz
    Clean Flash Installer version 34.0.0.267 is now available at https://gitlab.com/cleanflash/installer/-/releases/. Unfortunately, JustOff's GitHub-wc-polyfill add-on is no longer v1.2.19.1 isn't enough to access GitLab from a UXP browser; if you have that version, you must now either downgrade to v1.2.19 or upgrade to v1.2.19.2 (links below) or use Martok's Palefill add-on. You may also need to modify install.rdf to allow either add-on to be installed. Palefill is compatible with more browsers without modification, and it fixes some websites other than GitHub and GitLab, so I now recommend Palefill over GitHub-wc-polyfill. Also, Serpent 52/55 must be in single-process mode. 360EE-based browsers should work without issue.
  20. Mathwiz
    I get the "unsupported after Dec. 2020" banner as far back as Version 77.0.235.9 (Aug. 2019). M$ had already built a time bomb into Edge by then.
  21. Mathwiz
    At least this time it's not Google causing trouble! I'm guessing, from the "-moz" prefix on the media queries, it's Mozilla this time - probably unintentionally too; the idea was probably to let Web designers give their sites a look "compatible" with the standard theme of a user's OS (so on Vista/7, a Web site could have an Aero look, etc.) But it also allows Web designers to make their sites unusable on any OS they dislike, as long as a Mozilla-derived browser is used. Just make everything hidden unless Win 10 is detected! And UA spoofing is useless, since the browser itself is determining the OS version and applying the CSS accordingly. I'm surprised MCP didn't use this CSS trick to make their sites useless to XP/Vista users running Serpent/New Moon/MyPal back when MAT was there! Might be a good idea to find a launcher that can fool the browser into thinking it's running on a Windows version other than the one it's really running on, just in case this becomes a bigger problem over time. Naturally, St55 does require install.rdf to be modified. But I've gotten quite used to that by now; once modified it installs and looks fine in St55. Naturally on Win 7, I get the Win 7 "look," which doesn't really match my "Classic" (Win98-like) theme! Still, my only complaint was that everything got way too big for my taste. It's perfectly usable.
  22. Mathwiz
    His argument seems to be that you, the user, shouldn't trust any add-on that allows logging into a banking site, because the add-on author could have slipped some code in to steal your password. (And although I doubt Martok would do such a thing, perhaps he worries about being falsely accused if someone's bank account were coincidentally hacked shortly after installing his add-on.) He has a point, but it seems his point proves too much, as it could apply to any add-on, not just one that specifically permits logging into a banking site. You have to grant a bit of trust to every add-on you install! Perhaps this is why Mozilla started requiring all the add-ons at AMO to be digitally signed: makes it easier to track down the author if malware is discovered in an add-on....
  23. Mathwiz
    All that stuff is saved in the browser's "profile," which is stored in a separate directory from the browser code itself. (To see the directory it's stored in, click Help / Troubleshooting, find the "Profile Folder" row, and click "Open folder.") So yes; all you have to do is unpack the new version and run it, and all your data will still be there. You can almost always unpack a new version over the previous version, although I prefer to keep at least one prior version, in case the new version has bugs the old version didn't have. Also, you don't have to update every week, although you're free to do so if you wish, of course.
  24. Mathwiz
    It seems odd.... custom elements (part of Web components) have been around for quite some time now and are recognized as a standard part of the DOM by now, while optional chaining and "nullish" coalescing are relative newcomers - yet we got support for the latter first! Evidently implementing custom elements is a great deal more work. Well, the concern is, no support may be better than incomplete or buggy support. That certainly seems the case with Web components. I leave it disabled, and let add-ons like palefill try to substitute for its absence. Leads to a better browsing experience overall. I'm less sure about PerformanceObserver. @VistaLover has evidently been inadvertently browsing the Web with it enabled for some time now, without apparent ill effects - so enabling it doesn't seem to hurt anything, at least. We need a relatively thorough Javascript features test page, even though I'm sure it'd be a lot slower than the pages I'm familiar with, like the GitHub test page and html5test.com. Those just test for the presence of a feature, but don't really exercise it enough to show whether it works properly.
  25. Mathwiz
    Ah, the old "behind a pref, disabled by default" trick. That's the third time I've fallen for it this month! BTW, setting pref dom.webcomponents.enabled to true turns CustomElements on GitHub's test page green. But I'm skeptical that it works correctly; my banking site (chase.com) does not quite function correctly if this pref is set. Perhaps there is incomplete support for custom elements in Serpent? If so, I have a hypothesis about the performance observer pref. It too was incomplete at the fork point from Firefox (since Mozilla didn't finish it until FF 57, the first Quantum version), so the pref was created and set to false. Later, MCP completed the implementation (and @roytam1 ported it to St55) but the pref was never changed (at least in St55). Not surprisingly, it's meant to, well, observe "performance" events. OK, I can see that for web pages that check your browser's performance; but why on earth would GitHub require it in order to function? (Rhetorical question. I do wonder, though, if there are other Web sites that require this rather old function to, well, function!)
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