Mathwiz

This may have been mentioned before, but I don't recall seeing it. The default "Get Add-Ons" pages for IceApe-UXP, FF 45, and Serpent 55 are all broken. The others work, but MCP keeps changing their add-on sites to thwart forks like NM/Serpent (although they can be fixed with a SSUAO). So if your "Get Add-Ons" page doesn't work (or you just don't want the default), try this easy trick to make the Classic Add-Ons Archive your "Get Add-Ons" page! (You probably get most of your add-ons from there anyway!) Install the Classic Add-Ons Archive. Start it from the Tools menu once to set up the database. Go to about:config. Accept the warning if you haven't disabled it. Search for the pref extensions.webservice.discoverURL and change it to caa:. Now, when you go to the Get Add-Ons page, you'll get the Classic Add-Ons Archive page! Notes: In FF 45 and IceApe-UXP, the Get Add-Ons page will unfortunately be cluttered with a JSON object listing all your installed add-ons, but you can click on any of the links at the left to get rid of that garbage. (Maybe someone can improve my trick and remove the garbage proactively.) In IceApe-UXP, you'll probably have to download an add-on and modify its install.rdf file before you can install it. However, Hyperbola's IceWeasel and IceDove add-on pages generally work without modifications. If you want to use one of those as your "Get Add-Ons" page instead of Classic Add-Ons Archive, change extensions.webservice.discoverURL to https://iw.addons.hyperbola.info or https://id.addons.hyperbola.info respectively.

@D.Draker, that's the second time you've posted that link in this thread, implying that all the Firefox forks invade your privacy, but did you even read the entire post you linked to? Because the very first post says this: To which I would add IceApe-UXP, a SeaMonkey clone with privacy mitigations built in. Note that SeaMonkey and IceApe-UXP are also Firefox forks. Just because Mozilla went darkside (and MCP went nuts) doesn't mean all forks of their browsers are equally bad!

Anytime you see a message like this from a Web site, the first thing you should try is a user agent override. 90% of the time the site is just checking your user agent and displaying a message like that to try to frighten you into upgrading to the latest Googleware. Since NM 28 works, try starting FF 45, going to about:config, and setting general.useragent.override to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:4.8) Goanna/20211001 PaleMoon/28.10.4a1. Then try your Web site again. It will probably either work, or give you a blank page a la NM 27. If you get the blank page, you'll probably have to consider a UXP-based browser like NM 28 (but @roytam1 has others to choose from). You can reset the above pref after you're done testing.

Well, that's crazy - I guess I can schedule a task to "touch" config.xml daily, but if that's necessary, how did the thing ever work? And another issue: touching Config.xml worked, but only after I also closed the gadget, reopened it, repositioned it where I want, resized it, and re-entered my location! That's an absurd amount of work to go through every three days. So, if I "touch" Config.xml daily (so that it never gets 72 hours old), will the weather gadget keep working without having to go through all that?

And there are a lot of games that were written to use Flash that some still like to play. To be fair, with Flash's long-anticipated "official" demise, almost everything on the Web was rewritten, as was any new software. So your odds of needing it in a modern browser are low.

https://weather.codes/ doesn't seem to work. Never mind, being in the US, I just entered my Zip code in the app's settings, and it worked - until Dec 1, when it quit. Now it looks like this: I can click on the city name, or Thursday or Friday, and it will open an MSN Web page with the missing forecast. But if I try to re-enter my Zip code in the settings, it just says "Location not found". I think on Dec. 1, M$ disabled the Web service that sends the .xml file the app uses.

They're called Widgets on Android, but on Windows 7 I think they were called Gadgets. Microsoft deprecated gadgets but they're still available here, including Microsoft's Calendar Gadget: https://8gadgetpack.net/ As the Web site name implies, Gadgets work on Windows 8[.1] too. (And Win 10 and 11)

Keep in mind that if you're running 32-bit Windows (except server versions), 3 GB is just about all the OS will use since the address space is only 4 GB and the graphics card will eat up a big chunk of that. So if a browser uses 3 GB, you can't do much of anything else while it's open! Remember this is in the "Browsers for older OSes" forum. Technically that includes some 64-bit and server versions that can use lots of RAM, but I'd bet over 95% of the folks visiting this forum are using 32-bit Windows XP or Vista. Now, I do find some of these browsers useful even on 64-bit Windows 7 - 360Chrome v13 lets me run Flash without nags, while still handling pretty much any Web site I browse to - but I'm a minority of a minority. Win 7 has plenty of other browser choices, at least for now. Oh, and BTW, it's spelled "nerds...."

I wish they would concentrate on finishing that rather than finding more things to remove from UXP! customElements has been standard for some time and implementing it would probably go a long way toward making their browsers work with several troublesome sites. I would guess that YouTube tests whether some aspect of Web Components is enabled; if so, it tries to use it, then fails due to the incomplete implementation. So in this case, no implementation beats partial implementation.

You can enable it if you have an Encrypted Media Extension worth running. The only EME left is Google's WideVine, but the last version that runs on XP is no longer used for streaming, so there's not much point in enabling it. I just checked and that pref is enabled on my browser, but that was just a leftover from testing the Adobe Primetime CDM (another EME) for playing h.264 videos. It works, but @roytam1's browsers have simpler ways to play those, so there's not much point in enabling it either.

@roytam1 can better speak to this, but it's unlikely that later versions of his FF 45 build will help with Web compatibility issues. AIUI, the changes he's been porting into FF 45 are mostly security-related. I'd be surprised if any changes to FF 45 have been to support newer Web features, like According to the chart at the link, customElements wasn't added to Firefox until version 63, well into the Quantum era. No hope for any of @roytam1's browsers unless either: JustOff can pull off the trick with an add-on somehow (not holding my breath) MCP gets around to adding customElements support to UXP; is that what @UCyborg meant by "not finished yet?"

Those are two different things. The P2P update capability in Windows 10 is built into the OS and doesn't rely on any browser being installed.

Organizations, though, would generally be running XP Pro to log into a network domain, and its logon screen is different: you type your user ID rather than selecting it. In that environment there's nothing to stop you from typing "Administrator" if you know the password.

I'd advise caution going that route: that's the way MCP decided to go (and lost their minds when forks like @feodor2's and @roytam1's didn't follow, but that's a separate rant), instead of devoting resources to keeping up with the latest Googlisms. The result is simply that Pale Moon is a less useful browser. Don't remove useful functionality from the browser just in the name of "lightness!" That said, I do agree that themes (dark or otherwise) should generally be downloaded separately from the browser itself. (With an exception, of course, for the default theme!) @NotHereToPlayGames, I know (thanks to @Humming Owl) that v13 is based on Chromium 86, but which Chromium is v13.5 based on? I don't expect @roytam1 to do what MCP has already failed to do. He's only one person, and he has his hands full just hosting and releasing his browser builds, let alone developing enhancements to them! I think JustOff is the UXP crowd's last, best hope at this point. He's already shown he can make GitHub/GitLab, at least, work with the latest UXP browsers. JustOff isn't an "older OS" fan, but his enhancements are OS-independent.

I think you want radio buttons vs. check boxes for mutually-exclusive choices, but aside from that, I like it!

We kinda drifted OT a bit, didn't we? Trying (perhaps in vain) to bring things back around to browsers, I think the Web browser is the one app Google, M$, et al. use to force us to quit using our favorite OS and "upgrade." After all, that's the main reason I no longer use Win 98SE: can't browse the modern Web, even slowly, with anything that runs on it. We've all done a remarkable job here keeping XP alive with @roytam1's builds of Firefox-based browsers and @Humming Owl's and @NotHereToPlayGames's builds of 360EE. All are useful and the latter two are compatible with pretty much anything the modern Web can throw at us. But UXP has taken us about as far as it can, and even 360EE is about to reach the end of the line for XP. And you all know full well that the powers that be will keep changing things, so we'll all be forced to "upgrade" to a new browser (probably based on Chromium 95 or "modern" Firefox) that has no hope of running on XP or Vista. Luckily we do have Win 7, which isn't a huge adjustment for XP/Vista users, but the writing is on the wall for Win 7 too. Maybe China will once again buy us a few more years, but eventually even Win 7 will succumb to the shifting sands of the Web, and browsing will become impractical even on Win 7. At that point, I think Win 8.1 (with Classic Start Menu) is at least tolerable, but Linux is looking better & better....

IceApe is pinned to my Win 7 taskbar now. After installing JustOff's wc-polyfill add-on, it's now my go-to browser for GitHub.com and GitLab.com. I have 360EE (@Notheretoplaygames's "unGoogled" version) pinned as well. Never say never though; Win 8.1 (with the Classic Start Menu app) may be our last chance to hold out against the dreaded Win 10+!

Unfortunately the POSReady '09 trick doesn't work anymore because Micro$oft has shut down the Windows Update pages that XP connected to. Your best bet is probably this: https://github.com/deeemen/wsusproxy. It's a "man-in-the-middle" proxy (like the popular ProxHTTPSProxyII) with additional functionality to rewrite XP's Windows Update requests so they go to a still-functioning Microsoft server. Of course, even that will only work if the updates are still on Micro$oft's server. You're gonna need a new Web browser. Try ... or

It may be some time before we can get a "clean" version of .201: See Darktohka's note at https://gitlab.com/cleanflash/installer So to me it looks like to get around the DMCA, he's reworking the installer to download (and perhaps install) "dirty" Flash (presumably from www.flash.cn), then patch it to clean it up, rather than providing an installer with Adobe's copyrighted code built in. I wish him luck. But until then, .192 is working fine (and nag-free) in all my Win XP and Win 7 browsers (including 360EE) except of course ChrEdge on 7.

As it happens, I do watch TV on my computer instead of a TV. But I don't use a Web browser to do it! Windows (7) Media Center does the "TV" (and "DVR" and "DVD player") jobs just fine.

Wikipedia to the rescue (is there anything you can't find on Wikipedia?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_Firefox#Tabbed_browsing It was the Mozilla Application Suite that had the SeaMonkey look, and (according to the above) also introduced tabs, so that may have been the browser that was forced down everyone's throat (except yours ). Tabs did catch on, at least; they were an improvement over M$'s "windows within windows" MDI (does anyone remember Win 3 and the Program Mangler?) and now every browser has them. (I'm even starting to see them in apps other than browsers. Ironically, M$ Office could really use them, but as of Office 2016 at least, it still lacked them! I guess M$ thought taskbar buttons were good enough. Maybe M$ finally added tabs in Office 2019?) But that one UI feature, nice as it may be, is a pretty poor excuse to ram one browser down everyone's throat!

All true; but you're missing a rather obvious point, I'm afraid. Not sure who owns GitLab, but GitHub, BitChute, and MSN are all owned by Micro$oft. And what browser does Micro$oft provide with their current OS offerings? The Chromium-based version of Edge! So they have a clear vested interest in insuring that their sites only work with Chromium-based browsers like their own Edge. (Oh, and don't forget; starting next year, the latest "official" Chrome won't even run on Windows 7 - even though Win 7 has another year of Extended Support Updates coming in 2022. And even China is giving up on WinXP and Flash. Browsers may be free, but Win 10+ definitely isn't; nor is the new PC you'll need to run it.) It's also likely that anyone using website development software provided by Google or M$ will suffer the same incompatibilities, even if they have no personal or corporate interest in favoring Chromium. I'm speculating here, but I strongly suspect that is behind GitLab's compatibility issues with older browsers. Saying that a company has to be owned by Google to be affected by Google is rather myopic, IMO. Luckily, we have developers like JustOff, who have generously written add-on patches to restore compatibility between GitHub/GitLab and recent versions of UXP browsers. But even a talented developer like JustOff can only deal with so much of what Google is shoveling out these days. Every few weeks, it seems, I have to install a new version of his Web Components Polyfill add-on, or GitLab quits working on IceApe. A lot of work just to keep two websites working on UXP! (Hey, wasn't it you who complained about having to update browsers ridiculously often?) And does any of it actually improve the Web? If it does, I haven't seen it. AFAICS, it has one primary purpose: to render older browsers and their forks obsolete, thus forcing all of us to use either Chromium or a "chromoclone" (i.e., not based on Chromium, but forced to emulate it) like modern Firefox. So, perhaps M$ and Google should both be in the dock for collusion in restraint of trade. Such cases are tough to prove, but there appears to be ample circumstantial evidence to support an investigation, at least. Do you mean the original post-Netscape Mozilla browser - the one that looked like SeaMonkey? I didn't know Firefox even existed for most of the 90's. (Although IIRC, the original Firefox was essentially the Mozilla browser sans the mail/news reader. It's been a few years.) But I'm with you on stupid corporate mandates. Why even bother with PCs if you're going to force everyone to use the exact same software? A browser should be a browser - you should be able to use whichever one helps you do your job - even IE, if it works for you! But ironically, Google and M$ are doing the same thing your former boss did; it's just a bit less obvious than "you're fired if we find an 'unapproved' browser on your PC!" "Two wrongs don't make a right." But all that said, as long as I'm forced to use Chromium, I'm glad I can use 360EE, and especially your versions of it. Thanks for all you do!

A lot of it is just what you get used to, which is why many users of Firefox-based browsers prefer the old UI found in Pale/New Moon, or the even older UI found in SeaMonkey/BNavigator/IceApe. I've gotten Serpent 55 humming along pretty much the way I like it with add-ons, preference settings, and the like, so I'm not terribly psyched about starting over with a brand-new browser. (Same thing goes for OSes, BTW, which is why so many want to run Windows XP on newer machines.) Even moving to a UXP browser like Serpent 52 means losing some add-ons, which may not be easily replaceable. But UXP does restore compatibility with DropBox, GitHub, GitLab, etc., so I always keep one (currently IceApe) in my Quick Launch bar. For maximum compatibility, though, nothing beats Chrome. It shouldn't be that way, but unless/until someone comes down on Google the way the government did on Micro$oft a quarter of a century ago, it's the situation we're all forced to deal with. And your "unGoogled" 360Chrome versions are one of the best choices right now, being compatible with XP, Adobe Flash (sans the hassle of "standard" Chromium), and all those "troublesome" Web sites. So it too has earned a permanent spot on my Quick Launch bar.

That's actually a good question! (The only dumb questions are the ones you fail to ask.) I'm not sure about this, but I think the V8 engine is included in 360Chrome versions. JavaScript in Chromium-based browsers is a bit slower than in browsers using IonMonkey, but it's still a lot faster than in Firefox-based browsers with IonMonkey disabled. Seems unlikely Google could achieve such performance without a JIT compiler. If I'm right, I don't know if there's a way to turn V8 off, except by going to a sufficiently old version of Chromium. But I'm also not sure if V8 has had the number of security issues IonMonkey has, so turning V8 off for security may not be as desirable.

To be fair, he may have done that long ago, when such a transplant worked rather well, then just never bothered to remove extensions that became obsolete.