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Mathwiz

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Everything posted by Mathwiz

  1. Mathwiz
    Yes, same idea. The add-on I linked to only changes the fingerprint after a user-specified amount of time has elapsed. The idea is to guard against (say) Cloudflare gathering the fingerprint twice to see if it changes. With the add-on, it will most likely be the same, so Cloudflare won't block you - but tomorrow the fingerprint will be different, and Cloudflare will start from scratch, tracking what it thinks is a whole new browser.
  2. Mathwiz
    Folks, this post was asking how to solve a specific problem with Kafan MiniBrowser - not to start an argument over which XP service pack is fastest. I have the same question. Anyone have an answer?
  3. Mathwiz
    What if you change your fingerprint periodically: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fingerprinting/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search They can collect all the fingerprints they like, but they're quickly rendered useless.
  4. Mathwiz
    OMG. If you're gonna open 20 f'ing tabs in Serpent, please read: (You do need some "real" RAM in your PC, and an SSD wouldn't hurt....) BTW, my old work PC died this week. Kevin thinks its the HDD, but it won't even boot from a CD/DVD, so I think it's the SATA controller, which means the motherboard. So I'm using my laptop, on (ugh) Win 11. No more XP, for the time being at least.... I've noticed that Serpent (55, at least) is way faster on the laptop! If only I could ditch Win 11! I'd even settle for Win 10 at this point.
  5. Mathwiz
    Sounds like you just need a theme. Any SeaMonkey theme should work, although you'll probably need to modify the install.rdf file in the .xpi archive. I think instructions on modifying install.rdf are available in one of the earlier "parts" of this thread. Or you could try IceApe, whose default theme resembles the original one.
  6. Mathwiz
    Per Wikipedia: So it's an optional mode on "modern" browsers. Also, many sites specify "strict transport security," one effect of which is to automatically upgrade http connections to https on that site, once a successful https connection has been made.
  7. Mathwiz
    There should be an option for 2FA, particularly on email sites, but it shouldn't be mandatory. Let the users decide how much security they need. OTOH, 2FA would've saved Hillary Clinton a ton of grief when Podesta got phished back in 2016, so maybe 2FA should be "encouraged," at least on non-personal accounts. The email service could require more frequent password changes if 2FA isn't used, for instance.
  8. Mathwiz
    HTTPS Everywhere, perhaps? (After all, that's what it's supposed to do.) That extension is no longer developed. "Modern" browsers don't need it, but I think it's still useful on older browsers (or browsers based on them, like ours). Usually you want the https: version if available. Luckily, it can be disabled for specific sites like this one. And after a couple of reloads, it works! Strangely, though, HTTPS Everywhere didn't force an https: connection when using the IP address; only when using the host name.
  9. Mathwiz
    That's interesting. Https has become so ubiquitous I'm surprised there are any sites left that still support plain http. In fact I just tried it on St 55 and it immediately redirects to the (non-working) https: site here. Using just the IP address (http://37.230.96.101/ for me) did the trick though. FWIW, html5test.com's tests aren't always accurate. It says St 55 doesn't support WebP images, for instance, even though it does.
  10. Mathwiz
    That has to be it. Under Bk, html5.com just won't work; under 360Chrome, it does come up with an obvious "not secure" icon where the padlock should be: This was actually under Win 7, but it is one of NHTPG's versions. I couldn't figure out how to find out exactly what was triggering the "not secure" icon in Chrome, but an expired certificate seems like the most plausible cause. I guess since it's under Win 7, I could remove the --ignore-certificate-errors flag; but then html5test.com wouldn't work under Chrome either!
  11. Mathwiz
    I just tried html5test.com for the first time in several months and found it doesn't work any more! It just shows a spinning wheel that never stops. I tried St 55, 52, IceApe, clean profile, and versions as old as May 5 of this year. Nothing worked except 360Chrome. Perhaps they changed something. Maybe I'm not looking at it right but I don't see any JS errors. Wait - I think I see the problem. There's a message: api.whichbrowser.net uses an expired security certificate. Expired on 7/12. But why does 360Chrome work? Surely that certificate is expired on all browsers!
  12. Mathwiz
    I was going to ask if @roytam1 could do that, but I figured it wasn't worth the trouble - then, it turns out, he had already done so long ago! FYI, under Win 7, Widevine 1.4.8 is recognized and appears in the "plugins" section of about:addons under St 55, but it doesn't seem to work (Bitmovin's test page reports "No DRM" under the Media Source Extensions side of the page). I suppose it's a moot point, though, since 1.4.8 has long been blacklisted anyway.
  13. Mathwiz
    Sometimes it helps to review old history, so as not to relive it! What's relevant to this forum, perhaps, is that, for a Vista user, St 55 likely lacks Vista WMF support, while UXP browsers include it. (Both have Win 7 WMF support, but of course there are many other browser choices for Win 7.) It's probably not a huge deal, though, since both browsers already include extensive (non-WMF) media support for the benefit of XP users.
  14. Mathwiz
    Aaack!
  15. Mathwiz
    Sounds like they originally "targeted" Vista (didn't use any 7-specific functions) but changed it at the last minute. Did the alpha version (base for St 55) run on Vista? So it runs, but it runs like it runs on XP (if patched with, e.g., the old XomPie tool): no WMF support, so you Vista users are better off with FF ESR 52.9 than with "hacked' FF 53 (except perhaps for somewhat better WebExtension add-on support in 53).
  16. Mathwiz
    Doesn't FF 53 run on Vista? I actually do that intentionally with Serpent, in order to change the Help / About Serpent pop-up window. You can replace/improve the logo and text: I don't bother to re-optimize, which undoubtedly slows down launching the browser, but I don't do that often enough to care! (Image at left courtesy of @dencorso; unfortunately we couldn't confirm it was free of copyright restrictions, so it was never made generally available. But it looks cool so I'm using it on my own personal copy .)
  17. Mathwiz
    Yes, the Wayback Machine is an excellent resource. And thanks for finding it and posting the link. I'm still disgusted with dotPDN's attitude, though. Perhaps I'll have better luck with the above link, but I tried the portableapps version, but couldn't get the JPEG XL plug-in to work with it, even though I have a 64-bit system. Speaking of which.... I still rely on a few 16-bit apps, which of course don't work on 64-bit Windows, because Micro$not has decreed that only the two latest "bitness" levels shall be supported. The need for a 32-bit OS to run those apps was a major reason for installing "XP Mode" on Win 7 when I upgraded back in 2015 or so!
  18. Mathwiz
    Probably, the extension uses JavaScript to decode JPEG XL, which is probably a lot slower than a JPEG XL decoder written in C or C++. Yes, 4.3.12 was the version I was looking for. I did stumble across it at portableapps.com, and wondered if they had the full version vs. just an "online" installer that wouldn't work. But portableapps.com has their own "PortableApps Platform" which looked like yet another complication. Turns out you don't have to use it, but I also figured a "portable" app wouldn't upgrade my existing app or keep my settings. After all, by definition a "portable" app is designed to be installed on and run from a thumb drive. Besides, I was already disgusted with dotPDN's attitude. I didn't mind that they stopped supporting Win 7, but what really irked me was that they went out of their way to erase their last Win 7 version from as much of the Internet as possible, so if you didn't upgrade in the days between 4.3.12 and 4.4, you were SOL. Reminded me of too many folks' attitude towards XP/Vista: "We've decided not only to stop supporting it, but that you shouldn't be using it, so we're going to do as much as we can to pressure you to 'upgrade.'" Oh - and Paint.net 4.3.12 doesn't come with the JPEG XL plugin - you have to add that later yourself. Switching to Gimp was a lot less work.
  19. Mathwiz
    Serpent may be a somewhat different beast. It (well, at least St 55) has a second pref, network.http.accept.image (that I guess MCP added), but I don't know what it does as compared to the pref inherited from FF. But in any case, the FF 52 experiment showed that Bing isn't smart enough not to send WebP to a browser that indicates it doesn't want WebP. Extremely bad practice, indeed. Back to JPEG XL. I tried to update Paint.net on my Win 7 system last night to a version that supports JPEG XL (which happens to be the last Paint.net version for Win 7), and discovered the author meanly removed all but the latest (Win 10+) version from his GitHub page. I tried to find the needed version, but the only installer I could find is an "online" installer and it kept getting a stupid SSL error. I don't have time for that kind of nonsense, so I just uninstalled Paint.net and switched to Gimp. Gimp isn't as user-friendly, but it still runs on Win 7 and it includes a JPEG XL plugin. I loaded in a big 3.3MB .PNG image and exported it as .JXL. The two images look identical to my (admittedly untrained) eyes, but the .JXL one was about 1/4 the size of the .PNG. Wow - no wonder folks want to switch!
  20. Mathwiz
    It probably works for the very specific case of Bing on IE, because Microsoft wrote IE and knows what will (and won't) work with it. As for FF 52, by default it just sends Accept: */* for images, which just tells the Web page to send whatever it thinks is best, so Bing sends WebP which doesn't work. There's a pref in FF-based browsers to control what image formats it tells the Web page to use: image.http.accept. Perhaps changing the pref from */* to something like image/png,image/jpeg,image/*;q=0.3,*/*;q=0.1 would get Bing to send FF 52 the correct format. In the latest Serpent 55, that pref defaults to image/webp,image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.1,*/*;q=0.1 (Note that image/jxr is JPEG extended range, not a typo for JXL.) So if @roytam1 adds JPEG XL support to Serpent, he should probably add image/jxl to the front of that default value string. Reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_negotiation/List_of_default_Accept_values#values_for_an_image
  21. Mathwiz
    Yep - same goes for me. Just as a reminder, the "web" doesn't use JPEG XL because Chrome pulled support for it, and no Web designer is going to use anything Chrome doesn't support. And Chrome pulled support for it because Google has their own alternative they want the Web to use instead. It's the "not-invented-here" syndrome.
  22. Mathwiz
    To be fair, MyPal 68 is still in beta, and its author lives in a country at war, so I'm not surprised that 68 still isn't very stable. It's stunning that it works on XP at all, given that Rust was supposedly fundamentally incompatible with XP. My comments were merely to express surprise that it's more stable in single-process mode, and to wonder whether that applies to Windows 7 or only to XP.
  23. Mathwiz
    @chermany4ever said he doesn't have enough RAM for multiprocess mode, so he should definitely make the settings changes to disable it, whichever FF-based browser he ultimately chooses. But my experience with using multiprocess mode in Serpent 55 has been generally positive. Besides higher RAM usage, it does have downsides I mentioned earlier, but instability hasn't been one of them. I haven't noticed an increase in crashes, and if a tab does crash, it rarely takes the whole browser down. Instead, you just refresh the crashed tab. I haven't tried MyPal 68, but I would've expected multiprocess mode to be even more stable by the time Mozilla got to version 68. Perhaps multiprocess mode has grown less stable on XP since Mozilla obviously doesn't test on XP, but I'd expect it to be OK on Win 7 if you have enough RAM. Make sure you get Waterfox Classic. AIUI, at some point "Waterfox" got sold to some corporation that wasn't committed to the original spirit of the project, so fans of the "original" Waterfox resurrected the original project as Waterfox Classic. Where it "comes from" is kind of complicated. AIUI, originally it came here from China - via Russia - but our own @NotHereToPlayGames made extensive improvements, removing telemetry, creating an "unGoogled" version, rebasing to reduce RAM use on XP, etc. It has a pretty good reputation on MSFN.
  24. Mathwiz
    Good suggestion. Lots of CSP errors helped me figure it out. Github now requires service workers merely to load its CSS! I use CSP to block service workers except when needed for a site to function. Had to add github.com and githubassets.com to the list of exceptions. In some ways I think M$ is worse than Google. Google just provides the rope; M$ actively uses it to try to hang you! Service workers just to load CSS. Sheesh. Could they possibly come up with a more complicated way to perform a simpler task? They must pay their Web developers by the number of lines of code they write!
  25. Mathwiz
    Well. Setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to false is the "traditional" (FF vers. 54-67) means of disabling multiprocess mode. In FF 68+ this no longer works (at least not by itself), hence the article I linked to. I can think of a couple of reasons why it may still work in MyPal 68: @feodor2 intentionally re-enabled the setting in MyPal The other settings you listed in your post allow the "disabled" setting to work anyhow. If it's #2, the combination of four settings you listed may work in Firefox itself as well as MyPal 68. Should be worth a try, at least! Of course, if you're lucky enough to have the RAM (physical, or virtual via, say, a fast SSD) you should probably leave e10s enabled for better security and crash resistance. That advice doesn't necessarily apply to Serpent, though, where you have to forcibly enable e10s. (There's a pinned thread explaining how.) Many legacy extensions won't work correctly with e10s enabled, so you need to balance what you gain against what you lose.
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