Mathwiz

And of course it won't work with the lighter-weight NM/MyPal browsers.... Maybe it'd work a bit better on Serpent; IDK

And it's not just XP/Vista compatibility either. We went through the same thing when MCP yanked out Basilisk's WE APIs, for "security" they said (ironically that's what Mozilla said about the "legacy" APIs too), and more recently their decision to yank out container tabs support since there's one buggy add-on that tries to duplicate that function. This isn't about "misrepresentation;" that's a red herring. This is about ideology. I disagree with Mozilla's decision to yank out the "legacy" (XUL/XPCOM/etc.) APIs too; to me, that's exactly the same thing: intentionally making your product less functional just to make it harder on folks running software you don't approve of.

Thanks, @siria; that's a good start. But let me flesh things out a bit: for FF/PM/NM/Basilisk/Serpent, the preconfigured SSUAOs are found in <browser installation folder>\browser\omni.ja\defaults\preferences\<browser>-branding.js. The precise path is important because these browsers include two omni.ja archives, each of which contain too many paths to manually search. The branding file for FF 52.9 contains no SSUAOs, of course, since SSUAOs are disabled by default in FF 52.9. Oddly, the branding file for Serpent 55 is named firefox-branding.js, not basilisk-branding.js. I guess MCP dropped the Moebius branch before they got around to renaming the files. As with FF 52.9, Serpent 55 comes with no preconfigured SSUAOs.

The above applies even on Windows 7, if one's favorite browser happens to be Basilisk (or @roytam1's Serpent. You may recall I switched from Basilisk to Serpent - even on 7 - when MCP removed all WE support from Basilisk and we persuaded roytam1 to retain that support in Serpent). If MCP fails to pull off another miracle with Widevine 4.10 in the next five weeks, Vista users will presumably, like XP users, have to fall back to reliance on Silverlight. Windows 7 users do have other browser options, but it's annoying to have to change browsers, or to use different browsers for different Web sites. So here's hoping MCP does it again.

Wouldn't you know that the XP and Win 7 versions of these games use different servers and different protocols. It's almost as if M$ planned this from the very beginning

To create a SSUAO, just create a new string pref with the name: general.useragent.override.<site name> ... and then make the value the user agent string you want to send to that site. For example: general.useragent.override.instagram.com = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.9 This will send FF version 52.9 (on Win 7) to instagram.com, even if your default user agent is something different, such as FF version 60.9. Now you can fool whatismybrowser.com into thinking your browser is the latest, without breaking instagram.com!

You might ask @CoRoNe for help building ffmpeg.

Yes; I changed it to the latter UA in NM 28 and added the same UA to Serpent. (I wanted them to be as similar as possible.) And in Serpent I can sign on to web.skype.com fine, but NM 28 gives me the same sign-on error as the OP gets with MyPal. Web.Skype.com works fine in FF 48+ (with the aforementioned add-on) and Serpent (with the aforementioned SSUAOs), as well as Chrome of course. But NM / MyPal are lighter-weight browsers that run better on the OP's PC. I was trying to help because I suspect that's a common situation. Well, I doubt they estimate market shares based on UA's reported to skype.com, since that would be a very biased sample. ("How about that; 100% of the users of this Micro$oft site that requires Win 10 are using Win 10! Surprise, surprise!") So even if you did have to report Win 10 to skype.com, you could still report XP to everyone else.

That was a really good suggestion! So I tried disabling WebRTC by toggling media.peerconnection.enabled in Serpent to false. Unfortunately, Web.Skype.com still signed me in just fine, so I guess that wasn't it after all. I'm afraid I'm stumped on this one.

Well, I added one more SSUAO (for live.com) and Web.Skype.com works just fine with Serpent (with no add-on) but not with NM 28. I wonder if there's some obscure pref that needs to be toggled for NM 28 to work?

We just have to identify all the other places Skype connects to. It can't be that many.... Incidentally, why doesn't the add-on load in NM 28? It identifies as FF 60.9 in Firefox compatibility mode....

RAUE is an initialism for Reset Antivirus Update Engine.

A Firefox reset wipes out everything you did! Mozilla is way too happy to "suggest" a Firefox reset if you're having problems. But it resets everything; wiping out all your prefs and all your add-ons! Never do a Firefox reset except as a last resort if Firefox is completely broken and you need to start from scratch!

My apologies; apparently it takes (at least) two SSUAOs: When you browse web.skype.com, the add-on changes your user agent, but keeps it changed for every site connected to thereafter, so there may be more I haven't discovered yet.

Took a look inside; AIUI, the add-on is basically nothing more than a SSUAO: (Edit: My apologies. Apparently it takes at least two SSUAOs! Sneaky devils) general.useragent.override.skype.com = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.86 Safari/537.36 general.useragent.override.skypeassets.com = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.86 Safari/537.36 Try those on MyPal.

Yes, it breaks all Office 2010 apps on XP; not just Excel and Word. Even breaks free 2010 apps like the PowerPoint Viewer. I don't think it breaks any earlier versions of Office though. Well, the update you linked to is 4494528! The support page explains that it fixes a problem with an earlier update, 4486464. But AFAIK you still need to run regsvr32 MSI.DLL after installing it; I haven't heard that M$ re-released it with that mistake fixed. (Even if they did, it won't hurt to run that command anyway.)

It may not have worked because of having to use the web proxy. If an add-on filters according to where the content is coming from, everything "looks" like it comes from the proxy, so nothing gets filtered. uB0 seemed to work; it's filtering works differently.

Beware any time you see that - it's a deceptive advertisement! If you "update" you will get a PUP I recommend you install an ad-blocker add-on, so you won't see those deceptive ads any more. If you have no favorite, try the one I use: uBlock Origin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

To be fair, that was in 2009. I haven't seen a recent ranking; it may have improved since then.

The preference name is just general.useragent.override, not "general.useragent.overridepreference." I don't know where you got that. You are correct that it is a string. The format of a Firefox user agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT %OSVersion%; [WOW64;] rv:%BrowserVersion%) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/%BrowserVersion%. Note that everything has to be exact, including the spacing. That's tripped me up before. Type everything in bold exactly as above. Replace %OSVersion% with: 5.1 to report XP 6.0 to report Vista 6.1 to report Windows 7 6.2 to report Windows 8 6.3 to report Windows 8.1 10.0 to report Windows 10 You can include the WOW64; to report a 64-bit Windows version (usually not necessary). Replace %BrowserVersion% with the version of Firefox you want to report. Note that versions 57.0 and above will break Instagram, as reported in that thread. However, anything below 60.0 will cause WhatIsMyBrowser.com to report an "obsolete" browser. The only way to fix both issues is with "site-specific " user agent overrides, so that you can send different user agent strings to Instagram.com and WhatIsMyBrowser.com. Please read @VistaLover's post above for the instructions on enabling those.

Which one? @roytam1 maintains several web browsers: New Moon (2 versions), Serpent (2 versions), FF 45, & Navigator.

If you did a Firefox reset, you'll probably have to recreate your userContent.css file again (or copy it from the other PC). As I understand it, a Firefox reset wipes out all customizations in your profile.

I think a batch file like this will get me by for a few days: @echo off net stop MsMpSvc echo Please ignore "At Risk" pop-up from Microsoft Security Essentials while the latest definitions are being installed cd %TEMP% if not exist mpam-fe.exe "%ProgramFiles%\HTTPSProxy\wget.exe" -O mpam-fe.exe http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/^?LinkID=121721^&clcid=0x409^&arch=x86^&eng=0.0.0.0^&avdelta=0.0.0.0^&asdelta=0.0.0.0^&prod=EDB4FA23-53B8-4AFA-8C5D-99752CCA7094 cd "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Definition Updates\Updates" "%ProgramFiles%\7-zip\7z.exe" x -y "%TEMP%\mpam-fe.exe" *.vdm del "%TEMP%\mpam-fe.exe" net start MsMpSvc 7-Zip and wget required. Note: this is specific to my system; you'll probably need to adjust some path names, depending on where 7-Zip and wget live on your own systems.

I used to use ClamWin. It wasn't bad; my only complaint was, it's only an on-demand scanner (like MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware Free). So you have to schedule a scan every day, and there's still a chance malware could get into your system and do a lot of damage before the scan caught it. I think MSE is one of only a few free real-time AV products left for XP. That's why we're jumping through hoops trying to keep it alive. There have been occasional outages before, and IIRC it takes 3 days before the systray icon turns yellow. So you could update every other day and never see the yellow icon.