rn10950
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Posts posted by rn10950
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Apparently, this wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has bullied hardware manufacturers. Check this out:
Manufacturers put a recovery partition on the hard drive for use when a Windows Installation fails.
They found that many users lost the disks and then expected the manufacturer to procure a recovery disk set years after the model had been discontinued. It was a system that wasn't working very well.
OEMs only done this because Microsoft forced them to. Dell were quite happy sending out Windows Reinstallation DVDs with all their systems and Dell customers were quite happy that they could readily clean install with this media. They were then not allowed to include the Reinstallation DVD with the system. To market it as an improvement they stated it was green policies not to send out discs with the system. However still send out a Dell Drivers DVD for some time which of course was useless without the OS Reinstallation DVD. There are far more customers complaining that they did not get proper installation media with their system than customers complaining they got too many discs and that it wasn't "green" especially on the home consumer market.
A UK PC chain company who tried to help their customers got sued by Microsoft so it is Microsoft who are making life difficult and not the OEMs[...]
--JorgeA
Really? That explains a lot. I thought the sudden disappearance of reinstall CDs after XP was just the OEMs being cheap.
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Microsoft expands Get Windows 10 program to domains, publishes opt-out instructions
As before, PCs running Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 8.1 Enterprise, and any embedded version of those operating systems aren't eligible for the free upgrade and thus will continue to be immune from the GWX update.
But domain-joined PCs running Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate, or Windows 8.1 Pro that are configured to receive updates directly from Windows Update will begin seeing the GWX taskbar icon shortly. Domain-joined PCs that get updates through another mechanism, such as Windows Server Update Services or System Center Configuration Manager, will continue to be off-limits.
This is really crossing the line, now businesses are subjected to this nonsense? I can only imagine how smoothly that will go.
(at least WSUS is safe... for now)
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Interesting ! Firefox 2.0.0.20 already had a sessionstore system so it should be possible to port it over, shouldn't it ?
I already got a working one based on an add-on in my development builds. Once I finish up on some other new features (may be a few weeks) it will be shipped out :-)
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I really do want to assert better control over name resolution LAN-wide, as that seems to be a sticky point with the my non-Windows systems here (well, one in particular: My wife's iPad 2 has grown nearly impossible for her to browse with since so many extra things are being done on virtually every web page).
-Noel
I have a jailbroken iPad 2 that I use when I don't feel like lugging my Laptop around, and I have a hosts file installed. One thing I will caution you about is, for some reason, the iPad browser stops loading the whole page occasionally when it can't connect to a XSS provider. For example, whenever my iPad tries to connect to googlesyndication.com, the entire page throws an error and I have to reload a few times to get it to display properly. I don't know if a network-wide blocklist will prevent this, but it's worth a try.
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I've considered building up from a newer Gecko, but the issue is that it won't build under VC6, and even if I can get it to build, it probably won't be compatible with 95/NT 4. For 98/Me, I recommend using 3.6 on KEx. One thing that I do want to clarify however is that RetroZilla is based off of SeaMonkey 1.1.19, which is the same Gecko as Firefox 2.0. If you modify the mozconfig file, you can build a version of Firefox 2.0 directly off of the RetroZilla source tree. (You can also build XULRunner, and if you add the Thunderbird code, you can probably build that too) I chose to build the Suite as default because it builds the browser and the mail application at the same time, so both can benefit from the enhancements in RZ-Gecko.
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Found this during a search for information about Mozilla's moving to force add-on developers to "sign" their code, something that Adobe has failed to do so far and which it's doubtful they will do for previous (non-cloud) versions of Acrobat. It's fitting on so many fronts:
I don't like the current model that software companies just continually change their products and we just race to love them. This model comes from apps - toys - on phones. It is not suitable for serious software, in which people might have been trained and need retraining. Not everyone learns by clicking wildly til they understand, though people young enough to have grown up with software cannot understand this (or don't care). And people with this world view are now senior enough to be pushing it. Everyone is on the bandwagon now: Microsoft, Apple, FireFox, Adobe are just four of them. Worse, as all the software depends on the other software, NOBODY can get off the rollercoaster.
Hear, hear.
--JorgeA
Absolutely. These major companies just want to "make it more simple for users", but they are in fact doing the opposite. Mozilla Co. uses malware as an excuse for the add-on signing, saying that it will make it more simple and easier to use, when it just makes it more complicated. I know first hand from helping out in Firefox support forums that more people are actually having issues with the signing than without. In the past few weeks I saw at least 20 different threads asking why their add-ons were removed and how to restore them, while previously we received about one or two a month involving an infected install. As the user from Adobe's support forums said, this also creates major problems with backward compatibility and software interdependence.
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Okay, thanks :-)
So is there an exact file containing the browsing history then? I think I've established that "Cookies.txt" contains the cookies, correct? I've already added that file to CCleaner's custom list of items to delete, and it seems to have worked. Therefore, all that remains is figuring out a way to wipe the history.
Found it. In your profile folder (%appdata%\RetroZilla\Profiles\<folder x>\<folder y>\), you will see a file named history.dat. Delete that whenever you close the browser, and you will be fine. (You can even write a batch file to do it for you)
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re: CCleaner - the answer is yes. I use it to clear out *all* UserProfile TEMP content as well as *all* Temporary Internet Files (IE folders used for Googling).
Are basically all the files in Application Data\Profiles\ folder disposable? It ain't going to ruin the program if I clear out everything in there? Well, except the Cache, I want to keep that. Thanks.
NO. All your bookmarks, add-ons, settings, etc are kept in your profile folder. You can trash the folders after you use them, but you will have to create a new profile every time.
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Thanks, I'll just have to deal with it. Not a big issue, I have learned to improvise. What about a fork version of Pale Moon?
Did PM ever support Windows 9x?
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I have found a couple of (M), also a small bug. When you select Pictures and Text options, you get no text, only pictures. I use the text only option.
After further investigation I discovered that this is not a bug in RetroZilla, but it is in fact not possible to display text and images at the same time with the modern theme enabled. This is a screenshot of the modern theme from Mozilla 1 (2002):
It is the same with NS6 and the latest versions of SeaMonkey. One thing that can be done is enable the Classic theme (view => Apply Theme => Classic), but by doing this you lose the blue/gray theme and get a standard gray Windows interface.
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I'm glad that you guys like it, and I hope it works well for everyone. It will hopefully get even better, as my ultimate goal is to get RZ to pass ACID2. (By that point, most rendering issues should be fixed, Fx3 passes it and it's a world of difference from Fx2 and RZ)
Very cool project !!
I especially like the idea that the profile is now located within the actual app folder. Otherwise when testing diff. versions of SeaMonkey you'd have to very careful that your regular profile is not changed that much that is 'unusable' afterwards.
Installing the German language pack worked also great.
But it is kinda weird to use a browser again that does not save opened tabs/sessions for the next use. Do you plan to port this feature ?
And an add-on manager is also needed.
2016 starts great for us 'oldies'
It's great that you like the separate AppData folder, that was a decision that I had a hard time making and thought would be unpopular. By adding my own folder instead of using the Mozilla one, RZ would be incompatible with old Mozilla Suite profiles that people have been using for years, but taking my long term goals into consideration, RZ may not be compatible with the old Suite for long. (I may add a custom build that uses the old Suite folder, if people want it)
Regarding the language packs, I have no idea how long they will continue to function, I am working on a lot of UI enhancements for 2.0.
The tab sessions feature I will have to look in to. I may have to write a new system entirely, as SeaMonkey's frontend went under a total rewrite between 1.1.19 and 2.0. If an add-on exists for SM 1.x or Netscape/Mozilla and it's MPL'd, I will integrate it into RetroZilla.
An add-on manager is one of my plans, if I can find an existing add-on for Mozilla/NS and it's MPL'd (same as above) I can integrate it into RetroZilla.
I have found a couple of (M), also a small bug. When you select Pictures and Text options, you get no text, only pictures. I use the text only option.
I will try to fix the M's that I didn't find before. I will also look into the modern theme bug. To make it easier to reproduce, what OS are you running and in the case of 98/Me does it have KernelEx?
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I have been working on an updated version of SeaMonkey 1.1.19 (Firefox 2) for Windows 95 and NT4. I plan to backport CSS features over from newer versions of the browser, as well as modify the browser to work better with the modern web and improve user experience on older OSes. (I plan to include an optional hosts file that blocks Facebook and Google Analytics URLs, which will speed up the web greatly.)
Right now, it is just a rebrand, but I am working on newer features and I do accept contributors.
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I have also noticed this trend in the last 5 to 10 years, and I believe there's a combination of reasons:
- Google - This is the obvious one, Google Analytics is on almost every webpage, and it causes many slowdowns. (Look at your browser status bar when a page is loading, and 90% of the time, you will see Google Analytics there, and usually it takes the longest to load)
- Facebook, Twitter and other social buttons - This is another common one, every site you see a "Like" or "Tweet" button, external Facebook or Twitter code is being loaded, which I also presume is being used to track for advertising purposes.
- The rise of the mobile web - As cell phones get more popular, more and more websites "optimize" their pages for mobile, often to the detriment of desktop users. This usually involves an unhealthy amount of CSS and JavaScript, just to allow the same page to be rendered on a 4" screen and a 27" screen. (This also caused a major downfall in UI design)
- Front-end frameworks (Bootstrap) - Tons of extra CSS and JavaScript that slows down webpage rendering and adds more things to be downloaded
- Scrolljacking, custom scrollbars, sticky headers, and webpages that have huge background images and very little text - These are just visual gimmicks that serve no practical purpose than to allow the page developer to say "Look at what I can do!" (Sticky headers also get really annoying on mobile and 1366x768 laptop screens)
- News pages that use a million lines of JavaScript just to add features like "endless scrolling" and slideshows, when all I want to do is read the news story that I clicked on.
- Lazy developers in general - I can imagine in the last few years, as Internet speeds have increased for most of the world and computers have gotten faster, that developers have gotten lazier and left more stuff in their webpages, or didn't optimize their JavaScript enough. I also imagine that they took high-resolution images and downscaled them in CSS to half of their original size, instead of resizing the image beforehand to reduce file size. Of course, these developers forget about the people still on dial-up, on metered connections or slower computers.
As I previously stated, all of these changes are purely for aesthetics or surveillance purposes, and serve no practical use. However, I did find a solution to some of these issues. Over the last few years, I have noticed that more and more sites are becoming incompatible with Firefox 3.6 on Windows 98SE, and the sites that still are have gotten much slower. I added all Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter domains to my hosts file, and I noticed that everything is faster, with some sites loading in half the time. This has prevented numerous rogue scripts from actually crashing the browser.
I also imagine that Firefox extensions like NoScript and RequestPolicy prevent much of this XSS from happening as well.
Edit: I just did a test with a cacheless load of the MSFN board homepage. (Windows 98 SE, Firefox 3.6, 256MB of RAM)
Regular someonewhocares.org hosts file: 37 seconds
someonewhocares.org hosts file with Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter URLs added: 31 seconds.
That's a full 6 seconds shaved off of load time just because of Facebook, Twitter, and Google Analytics.
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I'm sure I count as a Win 10 user, inasmuch as I have it running on a VM under the real OS being run - WIn 8.1 on the host. I also run Win XP, 7, and 8.1 VMs. One device, multiple Windows systems to support whatever stats they want to push. Imagine that.
I also doubt that the published stats reflect any reversions. If you've ever installed/run Win 10 your stats are no doubt logged and used in Marketing hype forever.
-Noel
I wouldn't be surprised if they count each individual startup as a new install.
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Installed Foxit Reader on the Win10 test machine today, and noticed something peculiar.
Foxit offers the choice of using the ribbon UI or a traditional drop-down menu system. The ribbon was a complete mess whereas with the classic menus I instantly found every feature and command that I wanted, but more directly relevant to this thread is that with @bigmuscle's Aero Glass installed, if I use Foxit's ribbon UI then the title bar is opaque like that of a Win10 Universal app, while if I select the classic menus then the title bar shows as expected with Aero Glass:
Foxit Reader ribbon not Aero Glass.jpgFoxit Reader classic Aero Glass.jpgSo by disabling the ribbon UI you get a "two-fer", as Aero Glass then works.
--JorgeA
I suspect that has to do with when the ribbon is used, the application draws its own titlebar, while when dropdown menus are used, the application doesn't need to add icons into the titlebar, so it just uses the system one.
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Trust me, most of Firefox's user base feels the same way, in fact, most of the contributors do.
I believe you! Who or what, then, accounts for these unwelcome changes?
It's mostly the people inside of Mozilla Corporate that make these decisions. The Mozilla Foundation (the third party open source contributors), the add-on developers, and the userbase usually have no say in this matter. If we did, many of the unwelcome changes that occurred or have been proposed in the last 2 years (Australis [Chrome-lookalike], Pocket & Hello [bundled software], the changes in the add-on ecosystem [removal of XUL; potentially very dangerous], and add-on signing) would be off the table.
One big example of this is when they announced last August that they are planning on removing XUL and XPCOM support from add-ons to closer model Chrome. This would require all add-ons to be re-written entirely, no exceptions. Rightfully so, almost all of the add-on developers were infuriated. If they, or the FOSS contributors, had a say in the matter, the add-on ecosystem would have been left alone.
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)
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Not quite OT, actually fairly well related to the topics in this thread from a number of different angles:
I don't like the current model that software companies just continually change their products and we just race to love them. This model comes from apps - toys - on phones. It is not suitable for serious software, in which people might have been trained and need retraining. Not everyone learns by clicking wildly til they understand, though people young enough to have grown up with software cannot understand this (or don't care). And people with this world view are now senior enough to be pushing it. Everyone is on the bandwagon now: Microsoft, Apple, FireFox, Adobe are just four of them. Worse, as all the software depends on the other software, NOBODY can get off the rollercoaster.
I got there while researching changes in the latest FF update that disabled my Adobe Acrobat "Create PDF" plugin.
(I did find the way to re-enable it, but unless Adobe gets around to signing the plugin's code for my version of Acrobat, I'll be staying on FF 43, or switching to Pale Moon.)The Firefox people can prattle all they want about how this is protecting me, but in effect what they have done is acting like malware by depriving me of established functionality. So it's either facing some theoretical, indefinitely small chance of being affected by whatever vulnerability they're patching -- or a 100% probability of losing the ability to convert a Web page to PDF.
--JorgeA
Trust me, most of Firefox's user base feels the same way, in fact, most of the contributors do.
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... Microsoft has really got to integrate into the UI the ability for users to pick and choose updates ...
If anything expect from them the disintegration of such ability in W7, "to ease the upgrade experience to Windows 10" ...
At least, if they try to do this on 7 or 8.1, all that it will take to prevent that would be to not install that update in the first place. (or just uninstall the update after it gets installed)
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And for some reason Internet Explorer shows up under Start > Programs > Apps. It's not an App.
-Noel
Didn't you hear? Everything is an "app" now! Glorious innovation from the geniuses at Microsoft! /s
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BTW I ended up reinstalling Windows 10 because of the dreaded "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED" error.
(emphasis added)
What's ironic is that before I expunged that crapware from my system, Microsoft wouldn't let me even try to run it with UAC turned off. Assuming that's an indication that Microsoft doesn't trust it's own Metro/Modern/Universal/XAML Apps... Why? Maybe because at some point it could deliver adware?
this is actually interesting thing to tinker about
either they want to impose people to use UAC (or you get no metro crap)
or either .NET or UAC itself is now a real security risk
by that I mean the whole backdoor s*** and data mining
I see this as an upside... you can kill two birds with one stone. Disable UAC and take Metro with it.
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I am trying to disable Windows automatic updates on a family member's PC who insists on using Windows 10. I disabled automatic updates in Group Policy and everything was fine and good, but he wanted to use the Windows Store (why? I don't know) and the store kept crashing until I re enabled Windows Update. Is there a way to disable OS updates without breaking the store?
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I haven't seen any reason to think there's been a significant kernel change. I wonder what they're talking about.
- The file system implementation seems as slow as in build 10240.
- An idle system seems to need about 1 GB and roughly the same processes.
- Picky programs all still run, implying no change to Win32.
Anti-malware authors, who may use undocumented interfaces, might be especcially sensitive to system changes, but that's nothing new. Even our own Big Muscle has a version of his software working fine with build 10586.
Frankly all I see they've changed is some window dressing, and only a little at that (ooh, colored title bars!)
I did see one improvement so far that stood out. The small dialog you used to get with a one line text field for building the system path is now a multi-line dialog so you can see the individual folder paths more easily. Nice feature, but did it really need an entire OS replacement?
-Noel
I find it hilarious, yet satisfying, that MS didn't try to replace this with a Metro "app". They seem to really be pushing that lately (as we all know) and they also seem to want to kill win32 at their earliest convenience.
he wrote biggest kernel change SINCE VISTA
6.0 to 10.0
to us ordinary users thats nothing
to devs, its new driver type (since number changed as it didn't follow up 6.x numbering), and probably some API hooks beneath
Yes, but the new driver model and the NT major version change have been in Windows 10 since RTM. What I got out of this is that the "biggest kernel change since Vista" happened between 10240 and 10586, and if that is the case, I am really curious into seeing what it is. (they probably integrated telemetry into the OS at a kernel level)
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Yes, the Windows 10 build 10586 in-place upgrade to 10240 DOES:
- Revert many settings, including privacy settings
- Reinstall / re-enable features you have specifically removed or disabled, including Apps, services, scheduled tasks.
- Break selected 3rd party productivity or usability improving accessories.
Anecdotally, when Aero Glass was young, I got great pleasure from creating my own theme atlas graphics, so I could have the shading of the title bars, the buttons, the borders, and the drop shadows just as I like them. All that's been reorganized AGAIN with 10586. I'm losing the will to continue making new graphics atlases to match and haven't bothered yet doing so.
Keep in mind I'm only running Win 10 on a virtual machine without any significant purpose other than to test on.
Meanwhile my 8.1 desktop has remained stable and usable all throughout this Win 10 madness.
So let's see... Constant Win 10 upgrades that make you spend literally days or weeks to reconfigure and get just right, settings reversions you have to keep on top of, and nothing new or interesting to offset that pain; all the while the older operating systems just run and run stably.
Yeah, let me get right on making Win 10 my chosen desktop system. NOT!
-Noel
When you install the "upgrade" from 10240 to 10586 do you get the setup screens like you would have gotten during the initial "upgrade"?
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bit off topic, but are there any alternative UIs that don't rely heavily the ever changing/degenerating defult Windows UI?
There are individual components, but I doubt that there's a full shell replacement. Explorer++ is a good clone of the 98-XP Explorer for later versions of Windows. The guys working on the ReactOS project are cloning the XP explorer, along with the Desktop and Taskbar, but I haven't got it to run successfully on Windows 10. Some people on the thinkpad forums have gotten the real Windows Classic theme to run on Windows 8 and 10, but there are bugs, particularly with Explorer. Right now, I'm experimenting with Linux to have a failsafe once developers drop Windows 7 support from their applications.
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(I did find the way to 
Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions
in Windows 10
Posted
This always confused me. They decided to go with the "major.minor" versioning scheme with Windows 8 instead of the "Version SPx" scheme they have been doing since NT, so why do they have "Windows 8.1 Update 1"? Why didn't they just call it "Windows 8.2" or "Windows 8.1.1"? That would have made things much easier for the average consumer to understand.