UCyborg

You eventually have to make a connection to the outside world for those to work. I find the idea of fussing about that INTERNAL connection funny because logically, if someone's worried about it, then they should also be worried about other communication between components that is not so obvious. Those sockets are local and connected to each other, 'been there for over 2 decades, (browser itself didn't have the search bar back then if I'm not mistaken), something to do with pollable events in the internal library that couldn't be implemented any other way on Windows.

How is browser talking to itself "privacy risk"?

It's from Scary Movie.

MTube

roytam1 and Chrome. Should've saved it for 1st April.

When did those 3 years pass? One constant I'm experiencing with Win10 regarding memory usage, memory leak in kernel space especially apparent when not rebooting in months. Seeing it on different computers. Though I really only tried to analyze it on my home desktop and that didn't lead me anywhere. Another laptop at home is running 1903, I just rebooted it recently, last fresh boot was about 1 year and 4 months ago. Pagefile accumulated almost 5 GB of data if I remember correctly. Don't quote on exact GB regarding pagefile, but one svchost.exe hosting multiple Windows services was showing about 9 GB in Process Hacker's Private Bytes column. OK, that was user space, but regardless, non-paged pool was over 0,5 GB, it's about 0,1 GB on fresh boot. The laptop has just enough memory below the default threshold that makes Windows group multiple service in single process rather than split them in multiple processes, so didn't get to see the exact service that accumulated as much as it did. The only other instance when I've seen crazy values in Process Hacker relative to the actual available memory was when running games specifying 6 GB of minimum RAM in system requirements on a 4 GB system.

Do you think they also test on Win98? BTW, it's known as Retrocycles on Steam (SteamDB page).

Ungoogled Chromium claims to have flags/command-line arguments to disable user data encryption (--disable-machine-id --disable-encryption), so they're not tied to the specific user profile/machine anymore. I have not personally verified these claims, but I imagine transplanting those patches, if they work, to closed-source browser discussed here could take quite some effort or at least be annoying to do, if possible to implement.

I've not seen anyone else distinguishing between "portable" and "standalone" (I've seen definition of standalone in different context), but people in general seem to agree "portable" programs do not write to registry and leave registry entries/files on the system. Well, the forensic evidence that 360chrome.exe was run may remain regardless, but in this case, there will also be evidence left that something was written in registry of current logged in user by the application. The launcher doesn't overwrite application's entries in registry with junk before deleting, does it?

A truly portable program would not write anything on its own in the registry in the first place, though. And naturally, it's expected you can put a portable program on a USB flash stick, launch it on any computer while retaining all user data.

@msfntor Where do you keep finding all these thing you post? Regarding the last one, it's terrifying how meat sacks we're trapped in can fail us at any time.

I still fancy Aero era aesthetics, so my system looks similar to this. Precisely, most GUI controls use images exported from Win7's default Aero theme (so have rounded buttons among other things), but I use square window caption buttons, using an image that someone posted few years back in Aero Glass subforum. I think DWM expects those to be certain size. I remember sagorpirbd's theme also using a huge image for window borders, which technically isn't required, so I replaced it with a smaller one from another theme that has square (non-rounded) window borders. It's needed to have that white line around. It's a lot of clicking to replace all the images, and to make the whole thing proper, a number of images would have to be redrawn in a bigger size to properly support higher DPI settings that Win10 supports, but not Win7. Not good with drawing. I managed to do few simple ones like some arrows, which is just some lines. I resized the rest with an algorithm in Paint.NET (or was it GIMP, I know I toyed with both) and didn't dare to look how it actually looks in practice, it introduces blurring, so quite unprofessional. The linked themes from sagorpirbd's are for older Win10 builds and glitchy on newer ones as Windows' msstyles files weren't designed to be an universal format, for that, I presume a dedicated skinning application would be required. I guess it can be OK if you don't upgrade OS often and can live with some limitations that come with editing msstyles.

Apologies, it's VP9 in the browser. I guess the app defaulted to h.264 and I thought I was checking in the browser, which was a while back. It's possible that user agent doesn't determine anything except default setting whether to pick mobile/desktop site. Search for any Android user agent, eg. https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent/android.

Indeed, light GUI doesn't help if videos don't play smoothly. I'm a minority with my 8 years old smartphone, but in my case it's h.264. I think most mobile users access it via dedicated app, though it probably doesn't make a difference by default, compared to the mobile website. From a bit of searching, selected codec is device dependent. It wouldn't surprise me if AV1 is picking on steam (wasn't sure how to put it, hopefully it's understandable) on smartphones since saving bandwidth is one of the key characteristics and you usually don't have unlimited data through mobile carrier. Also considering the short time most people keep their smartphone for. https://bitmovin.com/av1-playback-support/ The thing with browsers forked from older Firefox, at least Pale Moon or more accurately UXP platform, AV1 support is disabled by default, but even if you enable it, it won't work on YouTube, though it may work on other sites (I only remember encountering test site to test AV1 support). I believe not working on YouTube is the result of the browser not doing something that mainstream browsers do and I seem to remember reading Pale Moon folks disabled it due to other more problematic issues related to it (would have to dig out that thread on their forum to know the specifics). Same, but it's also important to look at the platform (UXP), upon which application (Pale Moon) is built, The whole thing was forked off Firefox version that is indeed old, but there was some work put into it so the resulting browser is not old, looking at the age at least and it does things these days old Firefox didn't. It's just not enough for a number of messy websites. If you want an extreme example...Links...not old, but good luck using it in practice. Best case you get a readable site with images and messed up layout. Bonus points if you can do some interaction. I've read you can actually post on this forum with it.

Some time ago, Windows bugged itself with time and qwinsta is showing two sessions in a "Down" state. There are also associated csrss.exe processes that can't be terminated even when running under system account (access denied error). Running rwinsta on those sessions is not effective. Any other tricks?

True, it doesn't have that option, you get 60FPS if available. Yup, also would be interesting seeing someone duplicate YT's stats for nerds. I wonder about the percentage of YT users whose hardware actually runs AV1 at decent resolution well in the browser.

And I'm posting CPU % from Win10 in a thread where most post about legacy OS experiences. OK, I dusted off XP installation today, relative difference is about the same I think, though the process CPU usage % is a bit higher. Maybe just Win10 taking more for itself or other under-the-hood differences causing different readings, though I did run the browser with above normal priority, so it was the only process with higher priority on both systems. Who knew, Pipe doesn't work on St52 from January 2022 because of one of those famous JS operators. I updated St52, still have to bring my extensions' settings and user scripts on par with Pale Moon on Win10, but that's for another time. Interesting how some of these front-ends for YouTube are less backwards-compatible than actual YouTube. I'll write remaining thoughts in the following days, really have to sleep now. Good night!

I recently bought a SanDisk 128 GB flash drive, it came formatted with FAT32 file system, with SanDiskMemoryZone.apk (Android app) + PDF about it in the root directory. I reformatted it to exFAT on Windows 10 through Explorer, works fine on Windows XP besides all newer OS. Since you have Linux, maybe you can show us some information from GParted or some other utility, both device information and partition layout, perhaps we can spot something fishy.

You, sir, are defying laws of physics. My test was VP9, 1080p@60FPS, I'd say % are hovering between 28% and 37% for Piped and between 36% and 47% for YouTube. Got an old quad-core from AMD (Phenom II X4 920 with slightly bumped frequency - 3 GHz). Also our configs on YouTube differ. Interestingly, that older script you suggested some time ago - YouTube CPU Tamer, can't say it still reduces CPU usage, adds a bug with spinning circle if you switch away and video starts again and you come back to it.

I've had the impression over the years that there's less interest for theme making. I guess frequent updates could be a discouraging factor. Interestingly, using Win11 RTM based visual style file doesn't seem to be causing apparent issues on Win10 versions down to 1809. Edit: I forgot, there is another forum focused on such themes - Virtual Customs, maybe you can dig up something there.

This year just keeps being awful. Had no idea of the weight of the baggage he was carrying. May he rest in peace.

I'm most happy right here in silence with my peace Lilly. The weekend was peaceful (and rainy). To be fair, some customers are OK, but they seem to be a minority. @msfntor That site where the images originate shows "access denied" page here.

Oh I'm aware, I stuck with desktop site to be able to tinker with it with other scripts. BTW, the preference for mobile/desktop site can be stored in a cookie with a bunch of other data, user agent just establishes the default selection. I put together a script some time ago to switch between desktop/mobile, this one still works. https://gist.github.com/UCyborg/754fe319866a7f126ec1d074ed922b37/raw/YouTube_layout_config.user.js I can sort of work with regular YouTube desktop site as long as I don't use it on my low-end laptop and don't do multiple YouTube tabs.

After a good night's sleep, I see what the issue is. That link is not direct, but goes through another site, should read like: https://img.picturequotes.com/2/52/51597/how-i-feel-when-my-computer-is-broken-quote-1.jpg