Mathwiz

No newer version, but 20211012 starts fine on XP 32-bit. Please provide a screen shot of the error you get trying to start it on XP 64-bit. ArcticFox is a 32-bit program; I can't imagine why it would work on XP 32-bit but not 64-bit, but stranger things have happened.... @IXOYE was having trouble accessing msfn.org with ArcticFox version 20211012. I couldn't reproduce; msfn.org came up fine in it for me.

Yeah, my water bill is cheap too, but in my case, water and electric is all bundled together, and electric is a lot more. (AIUI Texas has some of the highest electric bills in the US.) So the city gets a break: the same 58 cents (just recently went up from 55) covers a bill that's usually well over $200.

I rather like the new handle! I guess the old handle no longer made sense because you're no longer using Arctic Fox as your main browser?

My electric/water "company" is the city in which I live, so I'm in the same boat (unless I want to move!). So, I just use their auto-pay service; after all, I have to pay the bill each month, whether I like how much it is or not! But how do I see how much it's going to be each month so I can plan? Turns out, the USA has this great service - they will actually deliver a printed document detailing my monthly expenses straight to my house! Yes, it's a bit slower than seeing it online, but it still arrives in plenty of time, and no "browser" is required to read it! For cable (which I use for Internet service only; for TV, well, I stream some of it, but it turns out there's a lot available - much of it in HD - at no monthly cost whatsoever, using an amazing piece of technology I've discovered, called an "antenna"), it gets even better! This "postal service" works both ways so I can send them a document called a "check" authorizing them to deduct my payment directly from my bank account! The charge for this "postal service?" Only about 1% of my bill. Kids these days....

Well, that's the question, isn't it? The OP has one bad sector on his HDD. Is that just a fluke, or the start of HDD failure? No way to know at this point. I'd advise regular backups (which should be done anyway, but if the OP has been putting them off, now's the time to start) and check the SMART stats periodically too. If you see another bad sector show up soon, grab a replacement HDD or SSD, swap them out, and restore the latest backup. But if it just stays at one measly bad sector for the next several months, probably nothing to worry about.

No interest myself. Just curious why it took them so long to get rid of it!

Obviously doesn't matter to us Windows addicts, but does that mean "official" PM/Basilisk used to supports Macs and no longer does? Or were Macs never supported and this is just cleaning up leftover code? If the latter, seems MCP spent a lot longer getting around to removing it than they took removing support for XP, WebEx, e10s, etc.

OK, so it's a board issue rather than a browser issue. (Whew! When even web.archive.org stopped rendering correctly, I figured msfn.org might not be far behind....) Edit: Adding a code snippet to <profile folder>\chrome\UserContent.css like this: @-moz-document domain("msfn.org") { div.ipsQuote_contents { background-color: #CCC !important;} } ... makes those quotes readable again. Adjust the #CCC to the background RGB color of your choice, but keep it light (C through F) for best results.

What the heck - take a look at this screenshot of two quotes from this thread: The first one is fine; the second is nearly unreadable unless I highlight the text with my mouse! Is this a new, weird problem with Serpent 55 or is it happening with any other browsers?

I agree privacy is an issue with all these browsers. But it's a moot point if you can't browse the Web at all because of "Googlisms!" Even the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) now fails to render properly in Serpent! Of course it's fine in ChrEdge.... My best recommendation for privacy is probably to start with one of @ArcticFoxie's "unGoogled" versions of 360EE. Yes, it's a Chinese browser, and China is renowned for spying on their citizenry, but the folks here have worked hard to remove all the telemetry they could find, and China couldn't care less about us Westerners anyhow....

Yes, for a while. But surely you can see Google's long-term plans: More & more Web sites will require a post-SSE3 version of Chrome (or Firefox, as long as Mozilla cooperates) to decipher Google's latest Googlisms; therefore, older machines will become increasingly useless for browsing the Web. It probably won't even take them very long. I'm really starting to hate "Monopoly!"

I had no trouble installing it in Serpent 55, although I haven't tried to use it yet. Are you sure you downloaded a file named serpent-tester-tool.xpi ? Probably reasonable to assume @Eclectic (not Electric) is using Pale Moon (actually probably New Moon) 27 & 28, and Serpent 52 & 55.

And fine with FF 53 too. Evidently a very unique bug. I see; the procedure is passed a 32-bit value, and wants to ensure it's a valid port number (in the range 1 to 65535), so that you'll get the error if you enter something idiotic like microsoft.com:0 or google.com:65536; but it was first assigning the 32-bit value to a 16-bit value, cutting off the high-order bits and rendering the check for being over 65535 meaningless. Worse, it was a signed 16-bit value, so anything over 32767 tested as less than 0 and was blocked as an invalid port number! Edit: Roytam's fix works! BTW, I saw that he found and fixed the same coding mistake in FF 45 and the Tycho browsers (PM 27 and KM); yet it didn't cause the same bug, at least in the FF 45 build I was using. (Haven't tried the others.) Like later FF versions, FF 45 accessed port 50100 just fine.

Good - sounds like the issue was unique to the Moebius platform and doesn't affect UXP browsers. Which sort of makes sense, because IceApe is itself a UXP browser - I think they would've noticed if they couldn't browse their own change log!

Thanks! I'll be sure to download the next Serpent 55 update once you post it. Does this affect any other platforms, such as UXP? If so I'll download those too. I looked at the code you linked to, and it looked pretty straightforward. There's a hard-coded list of `bad' ports, and you can add more ports to the list with the network.security.ports.banned pref, and/or remove ports from the list with the network.security.ports.banned.override pref. So it was quite strange that it wouldn't work no matter how I set those prefs!

Thanks, but no dice. There's no network.security.ports.banned pref; yet it refuses to connect, even after I created string pref network.security.ports.banned.override and set it to 50100

Hopefully this will be an easy one for one of the Firefox experts. Trying to learn about the IceApe browser, Serpent (55) gave me this: Apparently Serpent (at least 55) blocks port 50100 for some strange reason, but that's where the IceApe changelog is. Is there a pref to control this? Searching for 50100 in about:config yields nothing....

Interestingly, the profiles are already isolated (I think by accident). 55's are in "%APPDATA%\Moonchild\Basilisk\Profiles", while 52's are in "%APPDATA%\Moonchild Productions\Basilisk\Profiles"! So I think your suggestion about renaming one of the .exe's (for those trying this at home, rename the one that isn't your default browser), is probably the way to pull off the trick. But for non-e10s operations, New Moon 28 suffices, and it gives me the chance to "go retro" with the older UI every so often. BTW, on the topic of FF browser UI's, I think it's mostly a matter of what you've gotten used to. I was a bit annoyed when Mozilla switched FF to the Australis UI, but I'd gotten used to it by the time I got into @roytam1's builds, so I chose Serpent so I could stick with it. Back in the day, I used to use one of Mozilla's very early post-Netscape browsers (I think v1.4!) and that UI lives on in SeaMonkey, BNavigator, etc.

Second that. Or at least a pointer to this forum (if possible)! The recent move of the browser threads from the XP forum to here makes some sense, but it really messes with me catching up on the latest XP news.

I think it depends on the "web dev" in question, what newer feature(s) they're using, and why. If a newer feature adds useful functionality, you can't blame devs for using it! But many of Micro$oft and Google's own sites seem to use as many "new features" as they can cram into a Web page, yet it doesn't make their Web pages better, AFAICS - just less compatible. So I think it's reasonable to infer they're mainly trying to force the use of Chrome/ChrEdge/modern FF and kill off any forks based on older versions. The name of the game is "Monopoly," and Google is clearly winning. As to why M$ is cooperating, here's one possible reason: Given the recent kerfuffle, I'm sure MCP would do the same thing if they had Google's market dominance.

Well, after several weeks of reading, I finally reached the (current) end of "My Browser Builds (Part 3)!" No thanks to the forum software, which reset my "last visited" page to back to page 1 when the thread was moved this week (need an emoji for "mildly irritated" here - "angry" doesn't quite fit). Still rocking Serpent 55 as my main browser, even though it's showing its age. Using New Moon 28 + JustOff's add-ons for GitHub/GitLab (I'd use Serpent 52, but I can't run 52 and 55 at once). Of course very disappointed with some of what I read: MCP bullying @feodor2 into axing MyPal/Centuary and taking the UXP source repo private (now releasing source only with release builds; probably the bare minimum they can get away with under MPL). It does show that all MAT's bluster about "proper branding" was nothing more than an excuse to harass @roytam1, since MyPal followed all his branding rules and still got targeted! (Although if I were to suggest a new name for New Moon at this point, I'd probably go with Uranus, for reasons that should be obvious ) Even though I don't expect to use it much, I grabbed and installed the last MyPal build (thanks, Wayback Machine) out of spite. Also disappointed, but not surprised, with Google playing "Monopoly" and forcing their "Web Components," or whatever their nonsense is called, down all our throats. Why use simple HTML when you can make the Web so complicated it'll bring a quad-core CPU to its knees instead? Main reason Serpent is looking so old these days. Reminds me of Micro$oft's reindeer games from a quarter century or so ago! Haven't started reading the 360EE threads yet, but that'll probably have to be my next task. (Now angry fits ) OTOH, very pleased that @mixit spent so much time finally tracking down and fixing that nettlesome 23-minute (or thereabouts, depending on audio sampling rate, of all things) video playback bug! Even got the fix into the Mozilla code base, even though it's a moot point nowadays. I like that idea - sort of an XP version of Waterfox (yes, I know Waterfox was forked from FF 56) - but I rather doubt it'd help much with the modern Web. I also vaguely recall this being discussed once before, and I think it was said that FF 53 is pretty much the end of the line for XP, which basically gives you Serpent 55. If it could be done, though, it would be compatible with more WebEx add-ons, which is something, at least.

Just read the thread and realized no one answered your question! Firefox was the last major browser to drop Windows XP support. By that time, the last official versions of IE and Chrome for XP were hopelessly outdated, so FF 52.9ESR became the default choice of WinXP users for Web browsing. Then, Moonchild Productions forked a very recent version of FF, 52.6ESR, for their Basilisk browser, and used its UXP engine for the next version of their Pale Moon browser (28). MCP disabled Windows XP support in their forks, but @feodor2 and @roytam1 were able to build XP-compatible versions of both of MCP's browsers. With these, XP users were able to continue browsing the modern Web. For several more years, those browsers were indeed the best choice for Windows XP. Unfortunately, Google is playing "Monopoly" these days, developing new Web "standards" almost daily, that are first supported by new versions of their Chrome browser. Even Micro$oft (no stranger to the game of Monopoly itself) has jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, abandoning both IE and their original Edge browser in favor of a Chromium-based version of Edge. Firefox is the only major browser still using a different engine, but even it looks and feels a lot like a clone of Chrome these days. So today, the UXP-based browsers are starting to show their age. These days, the browser best able to handle the modern Web for Windows XP users is probably 360EE, an XP-compatible Chromium browser developed in China. But the XP-compatible forks of MCP's browsers are still popular, especially with those still trying to resist assimilation into the Goog Apologies for the number of USA-based pop-culture references....

@VistaLover was actually answering a question of mine about a different matter. On Win 7, I noticed one more process than on Win XP, and that was his explanation. That "extra" process will only appear on St 55 on Win 7+. Setting browser.tabs.remote.separateFileUriProcess to true does apply to St 52 as well as 55 and Win XP as well as 7+; it creates an additional process when using file:// URLs to browse HTML on your local PC or network. Probably not a big deal for most folks.

(The following applies to St 55. May be true of St 52 too, but I haven't tested.) I don't know if this was ever answered in this thread, but it seems to work with pref dom.max_script_run_time (default 20). Basically if a script runs for over 20 (or whatever other value you set) seconds, a yellow banner pops up at the top of the window, giving you the option to cancel the script. There's also an option to dismiss the banner, but it'll come back in another 20 seconds if the script still isn't finished. The banner will go away on its own anyway, if the script finishes. If dom.ipc.processHangMonitor is set to false, a dialog box pops up instead of the yellow banner, with the same options. There's also a "don't show this again" checkbox on the dialog box, but it doesn't seem to do anything; the dialog will come back even if you check the box. Doesn't seem to make sense, but that's been my experience. I find both true and false settings annoying, so instead I set dom.max_script_run_time to 0. This seems to be the only way to fully disable it and let long-running scripts finish without interruption. You could instead set it to a larger value, such as 120, instead of 0, depending on your patience for letting long-running scripts finish. Edit: Tried this with Serpent 52, and I had to set both dom.ipc.processHangMonitor to false and dom.max_script_run_time to 0 to let long-running scripts finish. Apparently the latter time limit only applies to the dialog box that comes up if the former is set to false, at least on Serpent 52.

Oh, that's good! Maybe it was just some kind of temporary glitch 7 months ago. I probably should have noticed the amount of time that had passed before making my first post. But at least you got better h.264 video support for FF out of the deal - thanks @grey_rat!