Mathwiz

Wow - adding a SM theme to BNav is pretty easy, but adding a language pack requires a LOT more "surgery" than I remembered I'm going to review those instructions and see if there's a way to automate that mess with a batch file or something.... Edit: Downloaded a couple of SM language packs to experiment with, and ... really? 7-Zip won't even open the .xpi files as archives! OK, I figured it out, but it's not good news: all I downloaded were 404 Not Found pages! Apparently all the SM language packs are gone! Luckily SM is available in many languages including German, but I guess you just have to download copies of the browser in each desired language now. Edit 2: There are language packs for version 2.49.4. I'm thinking the best option for Seamonkey 2.49.5 is just to install the browser in the language(s) you need; for BNav, SM 2.49.4 language packs will have to do. (Perhaps the version difference is one reason so much surgery is required.) Edit 3: It gets worse; the folder structure of BNav's omni.ja doesn't match the instructions! I'm guessing it was changed sometime between January and now. I'm giving up. BTW, 7-Zip works great on themes - I just double-click the .xpi (I have Windows set to open .xpi's with 7-Zip), click install.rdf, press F4 (set to run WordPad), paste the needed code in the right place, close WordPad, tell it to save, tell 7-Zip to update, close 7-Zip, drag the the .xpi to about:addons in BNav, and follow the prompts. Not trivial but not that tough either.

And considering (from my own experience) it's nearly impossible to get a nontrivial Windows batch script to work right the first time! I really wish Microsoft had just bought 4NT from JP Software and made that their batch language; it was also DOS compatible but much saner. But I guess M$'s NIH syndrome was acting up.... That said, I've written a new version of my Browser Downloader batch file - but this time, it's in a .7z archive along with some other stuff: myuseragents.js: my list of SSUAOs, mostly derived from PM 28, with a few updates @looking4awayout's UOC browser optimization files A couple of alternative background images and word-marks for the Serpent browsers by @dencorso (unfortunately there's a really nice one I couldn't include, but these aren't bad) And Info-zip's freeware zip.exe, needed to install the aforementioned background images and word-marks I consider this a "test bed" for new features; it's not intended to replace @i430VX's installer. It downloads to different folders than his, doesn't create desktop or Start menu shortcuts, and probably has some bugs! One known bug is that it won't preserve KM profiles when updating. I'll work on that; meanwhile you'll have to copy KM profiles back from the old folder manually. But if you don't mind creating your own shortcuts the first time you download one of @roytam1's browsers with it, it will take some of the drudgery out of your weekly updates: It will back up a previous download before downloading the current version It will offer to install myuseragents.js (except for mailnews, of course) It will offer to install the proper UOC file for FF 45, NM 27, or KM For Serpent 52 or 55, it will offer to replace the background for the Help / About dialog with your preferred alternative Also for Serpent 52/55, it will offer to replace the word-mark for the Help / About dialog as well. Edit: I had the .7z moved to @i430VX's server. You can download it here: http://i430vx.net/files/mathwiz/Browser Installer.7z To install, simply extract the .7z into a folder, (if desired) create a shortcut to the "Download Latest Browser.bat" file, review the .png files (they're both derived from the one already included in Serpent 52), choose the one you prefer (or create your own), and rename it about-background.png. BTW, in addition to the two custom word-marks in the .7z, @dencorso just gave me a couple more that are gold instead of light green. I'm attaching them to this post. You can add them to the same folder you extract the .7z to. All four word-marks now included in the download! To use, just launch, and follow the prompts. Edit 2: Time for some bug fixes. When I was adding the code to replace Serpent's Help / About backgrounds & word-marks, I introduced a bug with installing myuseragents.js (it got installed to the wrong directory) and the UOC Patch (same, unless you tried to install myuseragents.js - in which case myuseragents.js would not install correctly but the UOC Patch would). Also, none of those would even be offered by merely clicking the batch file - you had to run it from the command line while in the directory containing those .js files. All that's been corrected in the attached version of the batch file. I'll also let @i430VX know to update the .7z with this version. Edit 3: One more fix, to switch to @roytam1's newest domain (rths.ml). Edit 4: Two more changes: one to download @roytam1's new Arctic Fox builds for XP; the other to deal with a subtle name change in @looking4awayout's UOC Patch files (he added an underscore). This new batch file will work with either the old or new file names. Download Latest Browser.bat

OK, let's try this again, with corrections/additions: I believe somewhere back in the bowels of this thread is a post explaining how to modify SeaMonkey language packs for Navigator. the query was for @roytam1-only maintained browsers I was responding to the post quoted at the top of this post, which said "is there," not "do you have".

This is from memory, so correct me if I'm wrong, but: Serpent 52 should be able to use Basilisk language packs Seamonkey 2.49.5 IIRC, @roytam1's build of Navigator can also use Seamonkey's language packs, but they require some "surgery" first

Ah - I see; if it's set to "Show my windows and tabs from last time," the browser.showQuitWarning setting is ignored. At the risk of being overly pedantic, the superuser.com page you linked to asked about a different dialog: ... and the answer you quoted referenced FF 57 (though the page title does say FF 50+). So it wasn't clear to me that it applied to @AndreasB.'s situation.

I'm confused. It worked for me:

I have a theory that OS-level programmers only have nine fingers. Why else would they always start counting at zero? Right. One could, of course, fill up the first cluster of the root directory then add a volume label, but I guess in the thread, the unstated assumption was that the volume label would be applied during formatting; hence the reference to the 8-sector-long "volume name entry" that got me so mixed up. I like that idea: having "extra" sectors in the FAT rather than (or in addition to) tweaking the number of reserved sectors. I don't think there's as much advantage in aligning the FATs as in aligning the clusters, but it can't hurt, and if you left the reserved sectors at the default 32, but then rounded up the FAT size to the next multiple of 32, then everything (both FATs and all the clusters) would be aligned on 16K boundaries, which would be good enough for just about every flash drive. I'm dubious about the advantage of 1 MB alignment, but if you wanted to do 1 MB alignment, with clusters 2 & 3 "split" between 1 MB pages, you could do it like this: Make the number of reserved sectors equal to the cluster size (which in turn is at least the drive physical sector size; usually 4K) Make the FAT size a multiple of 2048 sectors (1 MB) minus the size of one cluster Now the reserved sectors plus the first FAT fit in a whole number of 1 MB pages, the second FAT plus cluster 2 fit in the same number of 1 MB pages, cluster 3 is at the start of the next 1 MB page, and of course every structure is aligned on a cluster size (4/8/16/32/64K) boundary. For smaller volumes (e.g., 512 MB up to 4 GB or so), you could make the FAT size 1024 sectors minus the size of one cluster, saving 1 MB. Then everything through and including cluster 2 would be on the first 1 MB page, and again cluster 3 would be at the start of the next 1 MB page. Has something like this been tried and compared to, say, RMPrepUSB's FAT32 format? (I doubt it would make much difference, but at least it's elegant!)

To make things even more confusing, the thread I was reading, at http://reboot.pro/topic/16783-rmprepusb-faster-fat32-write-access-on-flash-memory-drives/ sometimes refers to cluster 3 as the "first data cluster" and cluster 2 as simply the root directory, as if we were back in the FAT16 days! I guess that terminology makes some sense: root directories don't often get very large, so most FAT32 volumes probably do have a relatively static, one-cluster-long root directory at cluster 2, everything else being files and subdirectories. But it sure got me confused. Incidentally, I was surprised there was any speed difference at all between the poster's F1 and F3 formats (even though the difference is small), but as I said, YMMV; it could be the specific flash drive he tested with, or even a quirk of where the FATs ended up in the two variations and not related to the 1 MB alignment at all. At any rate, if you need to use FAT32 I do recommend the RMPrepUSB program; it's free and will give your USB flash or AF drive a well-performing, aligned FAT32 format, without making you do any math!

I can help a little with the root directory: in FAT32 it's just like any other directory or file - a linked list of clusters - except there's a pointer to the first cluster in the BPB. See offset 0x2C at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system#FAT32_Extended_BIOS_Parameter_Block. FAT32 format utilities generally set this pointer to 2, the first cluster that actually exists on the volume, but strictly speaking, you're right; they don't have to. The volume label reference I made above is apparently wrong. There was some misleading discussion at reboot.pro that implied Cluster 1 exists: they kept referring to the "first" cluster, which I misread as meaning cluster 1, but actually cluster doesn't exist at all and the "first" cluster they were referring to is cluster 2. I'll edit my last post to fix that mistake. I think what threw me off was this sentence: (emphasis added), which I read as referring to an 8-sector "cluster 1" with only the volume name (and a whole lot of wasted space), but now I think it refers to cluster 2, with the volume name and the first several root directory entries. Anyway, the discussion was whether to put that "first" cluster at the end of a 1 MB page or the start of the next one. The thinking appeared to be: since it only holds the volume label and the first several root directory entries, it wouldn't change often and so shouldn't be placed in the same 1 MB page as the presumably more "dynamic" data clusters that followed it. But, since 1 MB alignment doesn't seem to matter (at least with the drive I tried) the whole discussion is moot AFAIAC.

Well, if there's only one FAT, then they just renamed "reserved sectors" to "FAT offset," but it means the same thing: the number of sectors between the start of the partition and the first/only FAT. Then they added the cluster heap offset so both the FAT and clusters could be properly aligned. In FAT32 the cluster heap offset doesn't exist, and the reserved sectors defaults to 32, which aligns the first FAT, but usually misaligns the second FAT and the clusters. By tweaking the reserved sectors, you can choose instead to align the second FAT, or the clusters, but usually at most one of the three. In theory you could achieve a triple alignment in FAT32 by choosing the partition size nicely, so that each FAT contained a multiple of 8, 16, etc. sectors. But short of that, experimentation with a "tweakable" FAT32 formatter like mkdosfs shows that aligning the clusters is by far the best choice. So I suspect there's little performance difference between exFAT filesystems (with both FAT and clusters aligned) and cluster-aligned FAT32 filesystems. Getting rid of the redundant second FAT may help exFAT a little, and the new bitmap probably speeds things up a little more, but they're not going to make a huge difference. I noticed that RMPrepUSB does this "hanging" alignment, aligning cluster 2 on a 1 MB boundary. (Thus, cluster 1, with the volume label, hangs off the start of the 1 MB page and is located at the end of the previous page, along with the tail end of the second FAT. That 1 MB page would be rarely updated as long as the drive doesn't get too full.) That may help with some older flash drives, but it didn't make any noticeable difference with mine compared to a simple cluster-aligned format done manually with mkdosfs. I think it's because newer flash drives have "smart" controllers that remap the 4K physical sectors to different 4K internal sectors, so 1 MB alignments don't really matter: with all the mapping, there's no way to predict which 4K sectors belong to the same 1 MB page. (Besides, unless the flash drive has been nearly filled up, most of the slow read-erase-rewrite operations are done by a garbage collection algorithm when the flash drive is idle, so they don't degrade performance as long as the drive has plenty of zeroed sectors for the garbage collector to work with.) So I doubt 1 MB alignments are worth the trouble, at least with newer flash drives. Edit: Ignore the struck-through references to "cluster 1" containing a volume label above. Cluster 1 does not actually exist on a FAT volume. The rest of the paragraph is OK, AFAIK. Still, with years of flash drives out there, with all their different technologies, there are probably a few somewhere that are helped by 1 MB alignment. So as usual, YMMV.

Strange they even bothered with this, since FAT32's "reserved sectors" effectively served the same purpose. It would've made more sense to add a way to align the Second FAT - and of course the cluster heap, which they did add and which is the most important thing to align by far. As for the overall value of exFAT, I haven't seen much. It does allow files >= 4GB, and it seems to be correctly aligned; aside from that, the only benefit I can find is to Microsoft, who patented exFAT so they could charge royalties for using it. But the net effect was only to ensure that manufacturers of cheap electronic devices often don't support exFAT, requiring FAT32 or NTFS instead; yet, most large USB flash drives now come formatted with exFAT, and have to be reformatted for use with said cheap electronics.

I did notice one cosmetic change with the latest Serpent 52 version: When enabling and using the hidden "Developer Edition" theme, the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on can no longer "square" the browser tabs! The Tab Appearance selection is greyed out, and there are new messages on the Classic Theme Restorer Tabs settings (Page 1) that say "Tab appearance is controlled by the current theme." and "Third party theme detected! Some options do not work with third party themes!" Apparently CTR now considers the Developer Edition theme a "third party" theme, but didn't in earlier Serpent 52 versions. I don't know if that's a new bug or a fix for a bug (i.e., square tabs were never supposed to work with the Developer Edition theme, but did anyway until now). That's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but I did happen to like the Developer Edition theme with squared tabs. I guess you can't have everything though.

Interesting that a "native" Basilisk user agent works, given that a "native" FF 52.9 UA does not! It implies that Github has chosen to support Basilisk (at least, the official version), which is hopeful for the future. Once Github stops supporting 60.9, it may be best to move to the above (via a SSUAO) vs. trying to spoof FF 68. Why lie if telling the truth works?

I agree with @VistaLover; it seems to work OK for me. But I do use a user-agent override to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:60.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.9 ... which can be implemented either by a github.com-specific SSUAO, a general UAO, or by the compatibility prefs @VistaLover mentioned. Without a UAO of some sort, Github.com hasn't worked with FF 52 or Serpent for quite some time. (I agree that before long, we'll need to start spoofing FF 68 to have a chance, and even that may not work, depending on what new Javascript and/or CSS features Github decides to start using.) Also, if you have enabled either dom.webcomponents.enabled or dom.webcomponents.customelements.enabled, you need to disable them for Github.com to work with Serpent. (I have no idea why.) Everything seems to work fine with these disabled, although disabling them costs you a few points on html5test.com....

Getting back to the original topic, I was intrigued by the discussion of FAT32 alignment. So I ran a couple of tests with a 64GB SanDisk Ultra flash drive plugged into a USB 2.0 port. First, I formatted it with GUIFormat.exe, a popular freeware FAT32 disk format utility. Then I ran the CrystalDiskMark6 benchmark on it: Not very impressive, but I was only using a USB 2.0 port. Next, I reformatted with RMPrepUSB, which aligns the clusters with the flash drive's (presumed) 4K sectors, and ran another benchmark (with the same USB 2.0 port): OK, that's only about a 5-10% improvement in random read speed, but a 40% improvement in random write speed, and a whopping 50% improvement in sequential write speed! With this alignment, FAT32 actually out-benchmarks (slightly) NTFS! Pretty impressive and clearly worth doing if you need a FAT32-formatted flash drive or AF hard drive. Edit: Rezeroing the flash drive (easily done with "format i: /p:1" on Windows Vista or later; WinXP unfortunately does not recognize the /p switch) before formatting with RMPrepUSB produced a bit more improvement: ... although the read speeds dropped a bit from last time, so the previously noted improvement may have been a fluke. Of course, the improved write speeds probably won't last as the flash drive fills up again, but if you're formatting, you might as well start with the drive as fast as possible.

I realize uBlock Origin isn't an antivirus product, but it does support several anti-malware filters, so I think a post on uBO is justified in this thread: It's not just you; Mozilla long ago decided (capriciously, IMO) to remove all "legacy" (by which they mean pre-WebExtensions) add-ons from addon.mozilla.org, and won't sign any new "legacy" .xpi's. They weren't specifically picking on uBO, but that did leave FF stuck with WE version 1.17.4. (Our pal VistaLover detailed a way to get 1.18.4 working on FF 52 in another thread, but it required jumping through several hoops.) As for MCP, they've gone the opposite direction and removed all support for WebExtension add-ons from their products! This bifurcation is why JustOff supports a "legacy" version of uBO (leaving GorHill to focus on the WebEx version): the legacy version is for PaleMoon & Basilisk; the WE version for Firefox, Waterfox, etc. As you discovered, the unsigned legacy versions of uBO will work in FF 52 ESR, provided you turn off code-signing enforcement, so FF 52 ESR (and @roytam1's Serpent, which doesn't support code signing but didn't remove WE support) give you the choice of either a legacy or WE version of uBO. As I've posted elsewhere, I personally prefer the legacy version, since on these browsers, a few features are only available with that version. Regardless of which version you choose, uBO comes with four filter lists of malware domains. I enable all four in my browsers.

Despite the cautionary note I posted above, I still use Avast Free on my XP VM myself. However, my browser of choice is @roytam1's Serpent, which Avast doesn't appear to recognize, so it doesn't set the SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable. That would normally leave me without browser protection. Luckily, Avast has another, more transparent way to monitor browser traffic: an add-on, a la uBlock Origin. But since Avast doesn't recognize Serpent, it didn't install its add-on into Serpent either! Luckily, that's easily fixed: Start Firefox 52 Go to about:profiles or about:support (either will work) Open your profile folder (you can now close Firefox) Navigate to the "extensions" subfolder Start Serpent Go to about:addons Find Avast's .xpi file in your Firefox profile's extensions folder from step 4, and drag it onto Serpent's about:addons page Accept the prompts, and Serpent will copy the Avast add-on into your Serpent profile and install it. The drawback to the add-on (vs. SSLKEYLOGFILE) is probably speed; Serpent seems to use quite a bit more CPU with the add-on installed - and of course, I'm sure Avast is monetizing the data it collects this way too. So not a perfect solution, but the security vs. privacy trade-off may be acceptable: just remember to disable the add-on if you need to do any truly "private" browsing. Note: When I installed Avast, it also installed a second add-on into Firefox: a "comparison shopping" add-on. I didn't feel I needed its help, and the privacy implications of that one were obvious, so I removed it, but I kept Avast's main add-on installed.

Works in Serpent 55 for me but not in New Moon 27. However I just tried a straight download of NM 27 without any additional filters/codecs/etc. so that may be why.

A word of caution about Avast: https://textslashplain.com/2019/08/11/spying-on-https/ TL;DR: Avast uses an obscure feature of Chrome and Firefox, an environment variable called SSLKEYLOGFILE, to spy on https: traffic. Using Process Explorer, I confirmed that it also does this on XP with Advanced Chrome and Firefox 52.9. Note: it does not appear to do this with New Moon or Serpent. It probably looks at the name of the .exe; basilisk.exe is probably too obscure, and it wouldn't surprise me if MCP removed this support from Palemoon.exe (and hence New Moon), since it could obviously be easily abused. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The whole idea of AV software is to scan everything coming into your PC for malware, so scanning https: traffic could just be Avast doing its job. However, the article's postscript is cause for concern: But if you think about it, what else would you expect? Avast itself is free; they have to make money somehow....

I agree with @win32; they're probably sniffing the OS version in the user-agent string. Why they suddenly think that matters is beyond me. "Not supported" should merely mean, "if it doesn't work, don't call us;" it shouldn't mean "we're going to deliberately lock you out." In FF 52 or one of its derivatives, go to about:config and try setting general.useragent.override to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:60.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.9 That will tell them you're using 32-bit Firefox, version 60.9, on 64-bit Windows 7.

I don't think it will work if you install it now. Google has moved up to Widevine version 1.4.10. I think version 1.4.8 will still work if you started using Netflix while it was supported, but they won't issue new licenses for version 1.4.8 any more.

Check out this plugin: https://firefox.maltekraus.de/extensions/add-to-search-bar

Not positive but I think those *xp.dll files were from @Dibya's Extended XP kernel, not from One-Core API. You might PM him, but I haven't seen him around lately.

Just FYI, here's the author's Web page: http://www.gerhard-schlager.at/en/projects/ctfmonremover/ Has info on what CTFMon does and whether you need it. Bottom line AIUI: you need CTFMon if you use Speech recognition Handwriting recognition Multiple keyboard layouts (e.g., for multiple languages) (Probably) Asian languages/character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) If you use none of the above, might as well get rid of it! AIUI it should prevent the vulnerability, which is caused by the CTFMon.exe service not validating requests from clients. The CTFMon remover appears to replace CTFMon with a dummy program that doesn't actually handle client requests, so I'd think it can't be used to compromise your system like the "real" CTFMon can.

Unfortunately, for what Dave is doing - blocking a few Web sites in the hosts file, then bypassing those blocks for a particular browser - he needs a proxy server that's outside of his own PC, where it won't be affected by the hosts file. The Proxomitron might actually work, but it'd need to be on a separate system (although I suppose a VM might be made to work).