rn10950

I'll look into it, but it depends on how new it is. The problem with the newer code, especially the Security code, is that it won't compile under VC6. The closer it is to Gecko 1.8.1, the easier it is to port.

Just a little status update: - I may release a 2.1 release before I start working on Gecko, to fix some minor annoyances I have come across in the past few days. Most notably that if you middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, it opens it in a new window, (at least add a pref for it) Disregard this, as I am an id*** and didn't see the checkbox in the tabbed browsing panel. (big surprise, I know) and I may try to resolve the 256 color transparency bug. (I looked into it for 2.0, for some reason NT4 wasn't affected, It seems that Win95 is though; I may be able to fix it by using PNGs instead of GIFs) I may also disable many of the security alerts that are enabled by default, as they can get pretty annoying pretty fast. - Regarding adblock, I downloaded an old XPI and noticed that it's pretty old and doesn't want to work with today's advertising networks, so I am going to either modify it or provide a host file-like solution (if it's possible with JS/XPCOM). I will release that at a later date, and its release cycle will be independent from the RZ release cycle. - If you wrote or converted an old extension to work with RZ, please let me know, I will make sure that it works and I will publish it to the RZ extensions page (Tools => Get Extensions)

Sorry for the delay, but here it is. RetroZilla 2.0 New Features New Home Page: about:home. about:changelog. Session Manager and Crash Restore system Updated internal URLs to reflect new website Added Get Extensions link to Tools menu and Contribute link to Help menu Bug Fixes More "M" logos replaced. Release Notes This should be our last major features-only and rebrand release. Starting with 3.0, we will upgrade the Gecko core to be more compliant for the modern web. We would like to thank the developers of the Crash Recovery and Session Manager extensions for a platform to build on for our new Session Restore feature. Users who already have any these extensions installed are advised to remove them. In the coming weeks, we will publish a few extensions to the new RetroZilla Extensions page. Such extensions include AdBlock and Greasemonkey. We may also provide extensions or GM scripts designed specifically to make newer websites compatible with the older Gecko version that RetroZilla uses. As always, if there are any issues or feature suggestions, let me know.

OK, I got the session restore feature added and working, and I was wondering if I should include an ad blocker, or just provide a download link for a version old enough to work with this Gecko version. What do you guys think?

I am pretty busy, and still trying to "figure out" the old Mozilla build system, as documentation is either limited or hard to find due to the new systems being so different. All I need to do to ship 2.0 is figure out how to merge a few extensions and then I can push it out. Edit: I forgot to mention that February and March are two of the busiest months of the year at work and had little to no time for stuff like this. Now that I have some more time, I can work on RetroZilla more. So no, it's not dead. I am extremely sorry for not keeping you guys updated though.

I highly doubt that Win32 will disappear anytime soon, if anything UWP will disappear long before Win32 will. Right now, Windows 7 still has the majority, and probably will for a long time, and even if a lot of people "upgrade", there will still be people on it until at least 2020, most likely longer. Windows 8.x will be supported until 2023, and even after that, there still won't be 100% of the user base on 10. Along with the fact that Windows 10 conveniently supports the same Win32 applications that XP/7/8.x support, developers will target Win32 because they can write just one application and target all versions of Windows.

US v. Microsoft, anybody?

The only one I can think of is Chrome OS, but that doesn't really count. Honestly, the Linux argument was made up by Metrotards just to "justify" MS' actions, but it really has no grounding in fact. I just brought it up because that is what these comments say. Most versions of Linux do present updates in pop-up form, closely resembling the old Windows Update model, but you can decline these if you wish. (Ubuntu does this)

One of the common themes I've been seeing in the comment sections of these articles is "OS X and Linux are forcing upgrades automatically, so why can't Microsoft?" There are two issues with that: first, they're not pushing updates with nearly the same force as MS is doing with Win10, some Linux distros don't even push updates automatically, and the ones that do can be turned off (the great thing about Linux is control over almost everything) and second, even if OS X and Linux are pushing updates like this, it doesn't justify Microsoft doing so. If all your friends are on top of the George Washington bridge about to jump, does that mean that you are going to as well?

I find this kind of ironic, Microsoft is promoting a story about two people that will "change the way people feel about bugs" with Windows 10. It's like they're asking for this to backfire. Well, if they really want to teach people about bugs, Windows 10 is a pretty good candidate.

That sounds great, I'm planning on building a PC with an i7 and about 64GB of RAM and putting 64-bit XP on there, have you had any luck with 64-bit XP?

Windows 10 Users Start Seeing Full-Screen Ads As Screen Savers Well, I doubt this surprises anyone here, but I'll share it anyway. This operating system disgusts me so much, I don't even know what to say anymore.

Something I always do to every system I have to ensure that if something goes wrong and there's a remnant of the bootup process in place, I'll be able to take control and use WinRE or whatever... I enable the boot menu. Though shown above for Win 8, this same tweak works on Win 10. This shows every time... -Noel Is it possible to enable this from the WinPE command prompt on the install DVD?

Today, I had some more personal experience with Windows 10, and I don't even know how to put in words how horrible this operating system is. A friend of mine tried to install a free trial of office 365 in his MS Account enabled Windows 10 installation (upgraded from Windows 8.1 w/ MS Acct) There was an issue with the installation, so MS telephone support instructed him to use system restore. Apparently, in doing so, his MS Acct password was corrupted, so he couldn't log into his account. So he calls me and I come over with my "NT Password Reset" CD that I use to get into locked accounts, and has worked all the way through Win8. I boot from the CD and it refuses to mount the NTFS volume because it thought it was hibernated. (most likely the fast boot) While working on that, I had another PC, so I Googled how to get to the WinPE command prompt, as with a UEFI box F8 doesn't work well. (I have gotten Win10 into WinPE on BIOS computers before though) After a little bit of searching, I found out that you can get into the advanced boot menu by SHIFT-clicking on Restart on the login screen. So I eventually get to the elevated command prompt... but the keyboard doesn't work. I tried numerous times, and got the same result. By this point, I was getting really pissed off, so I decided to try the NT Password Reset CD again, and this time it mounted. I go in, clear the password for the MS account, enable the built-in Admin account for good measure, and reboot. Naturally, the MS Acct PW wasn't cleared, but at least I had the Admin account to log into. I log into the Admin account and reset the MS account password online (what the login prompts told us to do) and tried logging in with the new PW, but this time the error was that the PC was offline and we had to use the last good password. (NOTE: The PC WAS online, I had Firefox open with a webpage loaded in the Admin account) I was getting tired of this, and started backing up all of his files for a reformat. While the files were copying, I needed to use the Calculator for something, so I run calc.exe from the Run dialog, and what do I get? "The Calculator can not be started from the built-in administrator account, try logging in as a different user" (I ended up copying calc.exe from the WinXP box sitting next to this one) This is when I decided to just go home and get my Windows 7 DVD and install that instead. I think I spent 6 hours fixing an issue that wouldn't exist in Windows 7.

OK, I can probably do that, I just won't set it as default, as users can set custom OS colors in Windows and this will override those.

--JorgeA The comment section on that article is GOLD. All of the MS fanboys getting offended at the harsh (but true) criticism of their precious Windows 10. One of my personal favorites: So THAT'S why it's called Windows~BT, it's all making sense now.

Introducing, my latest project: I REALLY Don't Want Windows 10. This is similar to 'I Don't Want Windows 10", but it is more effective in disabling the prompts and preventing the "upgrade". This method works by adding the registry tweaks suggested in this KB article to prevent the Windows 10 installation. I made this program to make it easier for the average user to prevent the installation. >> Download Here <<

Huh, so that's how software publishers make programs "incompatible with old, obsolete OSes" -- simply by changing the value on the minimum version? --JorgeA In some cases, yes. I'm pretty sure that's what allowed programs to run on Win98 but not Win95. (that or a VS redist wasn't created for 95) In other cases, this being the most common, developers start using APIs that don't exist in later versions or switch to a version of VS that doesn't support said OS. For example, Win2k and WinXP are very similar under the hood, but most devs dropped support for 2k because VS did. (actually, I think it even divided XP SP1 and XP SP2) The API issue was big during the switch from 9x to NT. In the case of the Mozilla applications, the 32-bit version is fully supported on XP/Vista and the 64-bit version isn't, so the program is using almost the same code and APIs whether it be 32- or 64-bit, the deciding factor just being which compiler you use. So for this, we can just decrease the minimum version (which was actually put in by VC++ itself and not Mozilla, I checked the code for this. It's probably just MS trying to kill off old OSes for no good reason, business as usual I guess.) and it will run fine.

I believe you! Who or what, then, accounts for these unwelcome changes? Another thing to note is, if XUL and XPCOM were to be removed, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and ChatZilla would instantly be killed. The only way to save them would to be to rewrite the entire thing, and that will be a lot of work for the limited set of developers on each of these applications. (I contribute to SeaMonkey, and we have been discussing this on IRC over the past few months) By the way, when will an x64 official build of Seamonkey be in the works? The ability to run on Vista and XP x64 edition would be nice. I don't think we will have official builds for a while, as we currently have difficulty with getting the 32-bit builds out on time. (It's a long story) There are unofficial builds however, in fact I was doing it for a while. I posted a thread over on MozillaZine about it, (I saw you posted there, but if you need the link here it is.) but I haven't updated it for a while. Once the SM RelEng team gets around to pushing out 2.40 in the coming days/weeks, I will probably do a 64-bit build that *should* be compatible with XP/Vista x64. (There is a way to modify newer Geckos to run on XP/Vista, I've done it, even on the newest Nightlys. You just have to take a PE editor to the executable and change the minimum version from 6.1 to 5.2. The installers/ZIPs I push out have this change already.)

I have been thinking about Windows 10 and its 'apps' lately, and I recently came to a conclusion: this is just history repeating itself. In the 90s, Microsoft wanted to dethrone Win32 with ActiveX, Active Desktop and embedded IE engines. Some developers bought into the hype and released their new ActiveX-inspired software, but most just kept using Win32 like they have been always doing. Shortly after, Active Desktop was killed off and ActiveX is on its last legs, while win32 is still around. I see the same thing happening with Metro, right now it's the "in" thing and the "trendy" devs are using it, while all the developers that produce software that actually gets work done are still using the tried-and-true Win32. I can predict the same thing will happen to Metro in the near future. Whenever it isn't trendy anymore, people will stop using it, while the real applications will still be using win32, and rightfully so.

You know, this is kind of ironic. In the 80s and 90s, the Mac really did have an advantage in media production, but in the past 10-15 years, Adobe caught up and now OS X and Windows are pretty much equal, it would be sad to see all of the progress made just vanish overnight.

Reading that article that TELVM posted a few posts up, I found something interesting: So their reasoning for dropping security updates is the device driver model? That's it? I kind of understand why they wouldn't want to update the driver model on a 7 year old OS, but not updating the rest of the OS up until the date you set for OS support is ridiculous. Once you install drivers and get them working, since when do you need to replace them again? If I got working drivers for my hardware, why would the OS need to stop working? How can security updates break working drivers? Oh wait, it just pushes their Windows 10 agenda, and I have a feeling that those three years of security updates will be "ported" to the "unsupported" Windows 7 PCs by someone on here, just like Windows 98 USP, Windows 2000 Extended Kernel and Windows XP SP4.

[emphasis added] --JorgeA I can't tell you how credible this is, but I have heard that Windows 7 won't be getting new Skylake features backported, but it still will run. For example, I have XP SP3 x86 and XP x64 running on my Arrandale Core i3 laptop from 2011 with no issues. I personally don't see how MS could restrict installation of Windows 7 without crippling the processor itself, therefore restricting Linux and other OSes from running on the CPU. If these new processors are valid x86 and x86_64, Windows 7, along with all previous releases including MS-DOS boot disks, should install and run with no issue. If these new processors are NOT valid x86 and x86_64, we have bigger problems we have to worry about... @JorgeA: Sorry that I couldn't help you with your PDF issue in SeaMonkey, but if you can't get Acrobat to work, I did find an alternative that works. It looks like it can screenshot whole web pages into a PDF (as well as popular image formats) You can look into it more here. You can also try modifying the Acrobat XPI yourself. If you need help, you can always PM me, as this is kind of OT for this thread.

Thanks, that does look interesting. I had heard of SeaMonkey in my travels, but I didn't know it was associated with the Mozilla Foundation. It's a well-hidden secret. The most important browser add-on for my purposes is Adobe Acrobat's "Create PDF." That's not merely a "print to PDF" function, it converts the whole Web page to a PDF file. This is important because it seems like websites are increasingly rigging things such that if you print an article, all sorts of formatting problems crop up to make the printout useless: banners that cover chunks of text, text missing around the page breaks, and so forth. Acrobat's Create PDF extension somehow gets by these hurdles to produce a file that contains and shows the entire text. So for me the question would be, can SeaMonkey handle the Create PDF add-on for Firefox? I know for example that there's a method for installing it in Pale Moon. --JorgeA Can you send me the XPI? I can try to get it to run in SeaMonkey, or modify it if it doesn't.

Yeah, there are no perfect solutions unfortunately. Look at Mozilla -- a non-profit foundation, and yet they're every bit as contemptuous and disregarding of their users' preferences as Microsoft ever was. Their share of the browser market is (IIRC) hovering barely above 10%, and still they keep plowing ahead with unwelcome and constant changes. --JorgeA Mozilla as in Firefox may be like that, but their other, lesser-known project, SeaMonkey, doesn't have half of the lockdowns that Firefox has, and in my experience, it's also lighter. (which is ironic, since Firefox was originally created to reduce the bloat of the Mozilla Suite) As an example of how customizable SeaMonkey is, this is the latest version with a custom Navigator 4 theme applied. I highly recommend it, it has all the capabilities of the latest Gecko, with the much less locked down nature of the old Mozilla, while preserving compatibility with many of the newer Firefox add-ons, such as uBlock (ABP shown here) and Greasemonkey.