UCyborg

Fixed. For how long is another question. palefill-1.26.3.xpi

Perhaps one could define static methods (functions?) back then, but not properties. This works in UXP: class TestClass { static shoutHello(num) { alert(`Hello! You've passed the number ${num}.`); } } TestClass.shoutHello(123); This doesn't: class TestClass { static num = 123; static shoutHello() { alert(`Hello! The number in here is ${this.num}.`); } } TestClass.shoutHello(); And this does: class TestClass { static shoutHello() { alert(`Hello! The number in here is ${this.num}.`); } } Object.defineProperty(TestClass, "num", {value: 123}); TestClass.shoutHello(); But gets messy.

I ran DiskFresh on the disk with oldest stuff on it, it's a WD WD5000AADS, which was bought in July 2010. The program is simple and should run on every Windows from XP to 10 at least. It also reports bad sectors, have two of those, which I knew about for quite some time now (just that they exist, I haven't found the time to investigate when I saw for the first time that they exist in the S.M.A.R.T. data, which must have been months ago), but only encountered one file several weeks back that could not be read. I've got the file back from backup copy and ran 7-Zip's CRC32 check through remaining files just to see if they're readable. They are, so I guess should run some other program that would write zeroes to unallocated clusters to get the drive to remap bad sectors. Whatever processes might be occurring, they should be very slow, it doesn't seem like leaving some files on the drive for 10 years will surely change them. So one might just wear out the drive faster by refreshing it regularly. Spinrite...beware of that program, especially if the disk is going wonky.

I'm not aware of any reason to run my CPU permanently at max frequency, which is what even Performance plan does. Why should it run at 100% while typing this? Or staring at the wall of text. Didn't see the need to change default plan even when I played games, but then I'm not picky and maybe I'm not detecting everything. My hardware is old anyway, wasn't on the blazing fast side when new, more on the economical side and takes longer to crunch through certain things as it is, the default plan bumps up the frequencies when needed anyway and using performance plans all-the-time hardly does much in the grand scheme of things.

https://text-compare.com/ broke recently due to detroitchicago scripts, like the ones on https://www.winhelponline.com/. Updated palefill-1.26.2.xpi. Needs support for defining static stuff inside the class. Not sure if this is anywhere on the horizon at this time.

What? It is perplexing to me. Putting code together is tricky. BTW, I got Ant Video Downloader 2.4.7.50 working on YouTube again: /chrome/content/grabber/prov/yt.js Line 547: Remove checking of channel.requestMethod - it bails out if method is not GET, but YouTube uses POST now (HTTP Request Methods), so I guess pointless if it could be either. This was the actual showstopper. Line 396: change the expression /id=([^&#]+)/i to /id=([\w\-_]+)/i - at least that's what updated extension for Chrome / Firefox uses today. One oddity I've noticed, it can happen that the video does not show up on the dropdown when you navigate to the video page directly from another video page, but that video shows when you navigate to another YouTube page. Extension also alters tab bar styling (may not be noticeable if another extension alters it) and seems to have effect on browser's back-forward cache, some pages that may be reloaded instantly (fully pulled from the cache) when navigated with back/forwards buttons will experience reloading when the extension is active.

I suspected once a year may be overkill. HDDs can be robust at data retention it seems. I don't keep my computer on 24/7.

@Mathwiz Aye, supporting convoluted web as-it-is is a daunting task. I'm just curious what would happen if you threw a huge budget at the project and get the army of engineers working on it while keeping the existing philosophy. Judging from SeaMonkey, it may be possible to push just a bit more snappiness out of a single-process browser at least. The single-process vs multi-process is delicate matter as it would immediately increase base resource footprint. I see why they're against multi-process, I would likely stay with single-process even if Pale Moon supported both modes and multi-process worked with all extensions. @RamonUn Agreed, cache management must be difficult to keep track of. I have to say I'm a bit envious of what some people manage to consider fun.

Fixed, accidental copy-pasta...

Any examples of finicky applications? There is (was?) one specific bug in WOW64 in newer systems as well. http://zachsaw.blogspot.com/2010/11/wow64-bug-getthreadcontext-may-return.html

I do have the feeling they're just piling up features for web compatibility on top of the old codebase that needs radical refresh. But could that refresh be done differently than Firefox's? Or it just has to stay that way because there is no other way and that's just how it is? Relevant discussion I found.

I upgrade the OS if I spot a killer feature or characteristic I must have. So far, I seem to have always fallen for something, long before new application compatibility became a concern. For Win10, it was paging algorithm, how notifications work, I also noticed web browsers are a bit more responsive (I spend a lot of time in a web browser) and using Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 with surround option enabled doesn't silence Windows' "Navigation Start" sound (though I've since re-configured sound settings and I don't use that option while on the desktop anymore, but it's good to know that part works more correctly). Win11 currently doesn't have anything I must have right now and my current stance is "they're gonna have to pry those window borders from my cold dead hands". OK, I do use the customized theme for those borders in Win10 so they're not just 1px, which I've put some work into and I'll enjoy it for as long as possible. Perhaps switch to Win11 or future Win12 may be necessary at some point, but I won't ponder on hypothetical future. May not even be alive by then.

Read this thread on VOGONS a while ago, also found this article. Now I'm considering running the process on one or two of my disks (HDD) that have the most data that haven't been touched for years. And I wonder if there are any benefits in the long run or is it more dependent on the external factors like hot/cold temperatures and humidity, which isn't an issue here. They're not stored in the closet, but plugged in the computer and have data read or written to occasionally, they're used as data disks. Seems like that kind of topic that it would be difficult to give unbiased advice. What's curious to me about that article, it says to run it once a year, assuming normal conditions. Obviously, the process logically results in some wear and tear. I did check few of the old files that were on the drive as-is for over 12 years and their checksum matches. Most stuff was downloaded from the internet, that's how I checked those few. And the first guy on VOGONS did say mechanics will probably fail earlier (presumably before one has to worry about data getting scrambled). Thoughts?

Memory management topic popped up on Pale Moon forums recently. I've always assumed the browser's codebase has memory leaks, but they say it's caching and by design. Strange design... And that thing about Gmail (or any site leaking memory) doesn't compute in my head. Last time I checked, you don't do mallocs and frees in JavaScript, so how can you "leak" memory as a website? Isn't that what garbage collector is for? It seems this design can lead to browser eventually hanging, at least or especially 32-bit versions, presumably due to all gunk hanging around, plus extensions also pollute process' address space, can't tell whether the impact is significant. At least those that aren't unpacked, its XPI file is mapped in the process' address space. So more RAM and running 64-bit version may prevent the gunk from killing the browser, but it won't prevent sluggishness that occurs over time, for which the only cure is restart of the browser. From my experience, I wouldn't say heavy "Googlized" sites alone are the factor.

iPhone's going to be expensive, supposedly being status symbol or some crap like that, or so I've heard. If you want less pricey, but still iPhone, probably the older model is the only option.

Just food for thought, given my past experiences with Windows and occurrences of certain oddities at times. I thought my main Win10 installation works properly until I realized some parts do not. WER dialogs don't show despite DontShowUI=0 setting because some flag that is supposed to be set only under specific circumstances is always set for unknown reason, weather widget from ExplorerPatcher brings down Explorer for unknown reason, crashes after some time with no prior warnings signs, different DLL every time, Process Hacker upon inspection while the crashed process was being held showed USER handles reached the default limit of 10000, who knows why, they're not even increasing at some crazy rate during runtime, they just explode at random. I've had some different sort of crap with XP as well back in the day and while I've probably forgotten about some oddities, one of my "favorite" ones was Explorer opening folders with delay. Or inability to open Effects dialog from Display properties, just nothing happened while clicking. WinXP x64 install on my desktop and Win10 install on my laptop...I haven't detected anything...yet (with exception of one incident several months ago when I was using Explorer on WinXP x64 and suddenly memory usage spiked and consumed over 95% of available RAM (4 GB)), but they're not used as much, which probably helps. I thought about using DeepFreeze at some point, but it seemed too much of a hassle due to having files spread-out throughout the disks. ASUS laptop from 2018 at work somehow works, mostly, but TPM broke several months ago and I get an endless spam of TPM errors in Event Viewer. I don't really have the need to start things with delay, but I tried using VBS script once for the purpose. Because T-Clock Redux on XP x64 would refuse to replace system clock 3 out of 4 times when starting up the computer and logging in. But it still happened even if I put 15 seconds delay, so ended up having to restart Clock64.exe process manually... Seems there was a better chance of working if computer was already warmed up by the time I logged in.

Downloading goes really slow, about 25 KB/s.

Perhaps your Windows installation is simply borked in a way that would make it difficult to diagnose. Crashing in ntdll.dll doesn't say much, you'd have to use the debugger to maybe have the chance to figure out what goes wrong.

Impossible to tell without actual setup file(s) at hand. .NET 1.1 may be installed following the procedure described here. If you don't have linked setups, put those links in Wayback Machine, it's where downloads remain archived. There are number of reasons why something may not work, from relying to 16-bit components to convoluted copy-protection either relying on 32-bit kernel drivers or some specific undocumented APIs, old CrypKey is one example of such protections. The copy-protections are big compatibility killers. Sometimes things can be fixed by DIY methods, eg. debugging, but we're talking about old (obscure?) business app (booooooring), so chances of someone helping you with the problem is very low, especially since there's not much information to go from, so unless some random person shows up and guesses what you're dealing with, it's all just a pointless guessing game. Generally, well-written programs from over 20 years ago may work fine, others relying on obscure specifics from the operating systems of the era may not. And compatibility modes activatable from .exe's properties' compatibility tab are just collections of specific compatibility shims dealing with specific issues, that's why they're not the magic cure for everything. Worse, it seems most people don't even know they can be deployed in controlled-manner with Compatibility Administrator, part of Windows ADK (Assesment and Deployment Kit). Plus, some shims aren't documented or may support undocumented command-line parameters, which may or may not help. In the world of old games, one such compatibility shim is DXPrimaryEmulation and a popular command-line parameters that goes with it is -DisableMaxWindowedMode. You will likely only find out about it on community forums. Again, we have games doing strange things or things that don't work like they did on old graphics drivers, so may not work properly or have visual glitches, but for those, we have for instance whole old DirectDraw/Direct3D APIs up to version 9 re-implemented on top of Direct3D 11/12 and game-specific patches, all community work. Business apps on the other hand...yeah, good luck with that, they're not Mozart's symphonies or DOOM. There was a time I used one such app, Perftech ERGO, version 1.39, updated in 2003-2004 era, uses InterBase 6.0 SQL server and a licensing system by CrypKey. From what I remember, there were some delays when ran on Windows XP, I clearly remember startup delay, but it's possible there were also delays when opening forms. But it worked fine on Windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE.

Aye, seems that wasn't the scope of XP's File types GUI either, it's a separate thing that was added to default programs editing GUI, but then they made dumbed down version and put it in Settings app. They also make sure you go through that UI to set defaults as certain manual changes in user side (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) of the registry are invalidated as the entries specifying user defaults are protected by some hash value, which has to be correct for entry to be considered valid. At least I assume that's how it is when you have multiple programs for the same file type. Admittedly, I never studied those registry entries deeply. There's also the concept of having registered applications (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RegisteredApplications) and while not necessary to use to be able to open some file from Explorer, it makes those applications visible from default programs editing GUI. Perhaps this is relevant when it comes to new behaviors since Windows 8 when it comes to associating programs with file types. I remember there was something written by MS about random programs hijacking file associations and they wanted to make sure settings that user explicitly consciously selects apply. Though there are cases where the effect is the opposite.

Scripts that load comments aren't included in the head tag. That's technical explanation from what I can see from inspecting, but "why is that" is the question for people running the site.

Agreed, and they took it further in Windows 10 where you can't associate one program with all types it opens, have to do it one-by-one. How crazy is that? What app do you use to edit those? I think there'd have to be zero users for it to be truly dead. But its user base is a drop in the ocean compared to Windows 10 or, well, while mostly not a desktop OS, Android. And the policy "If Microsoft won't support it, we won't either." is VERY POPULAR among developers for some reason.

Still doesn't show on Pale Moon with both CSP disabled and allowing active content from HTTP on HTTPS sites.