Vistapocalypse

Significant progress was reported on December 19: https://msfn.org/board/topic/181612-wip-windows-vista-extended-kernel/?do=findComment&comment=1192774

True, IE9 hasn’t been a good browser for many years and TLS 1.2 does not really change that. But some programs exist that use Internet Explorer’s engine to connect, so some Vista users might need TLS 1.2 enabled globally. There have at least been no issues reported with that update. Of course IE9 requires SP2 and certain Platform Update components (included in standalone installer), so those who prefer Vista RTM or SP1 obviously won’t be trying that update. I have never run Vista RTM or even SP1 since SP2 was released, nor run Vista without the “official” security updates. However, 2021 will arrive in a few days, and it is certainly absurd to think that having Vista “fully updated” to April 2017 ( or even January 2020) provides any real security advantages. For new Vista installations, updates are probably more trouble than they are worth now.

I understood Volume Z to say that Windows Update will not deliver SP1 (or anything else) to a new installation of Windows 7 RTM, i.e. SP1 would have to be manually installed in order to get Windows Update working now. (And it should go without saying that SHA-2 updates are only applicable to SP1.) An October thread about updates for server 2008 r2 suggests that the same is true for that version of Windows 6.1.

I cannot read the message, but it looks like a common “cannot display the webpage” error. Has the Windows 7 VM been updated? (IE 8 only supports TLS 1.0 and is not very useful.) Is that IE 11?

A post by loungehake in that thread states that non-SSE2 processors were still supported up to Avast 10 (2015).

For analysis of specific files, VirusTotal’s website would be my suggestion: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ Legacy versions of Malwarebytes Free are also good for on-demand scanning and PUP removal, however some very old versions no longer receive definition updates. Other XP users should not be alarmed, because the last version to support XP was actually Avast 18.8, which I have recently used on Vista and it still gets definition updates. IDK the last version to support Windows 2000 though; this might perhaps be bad news for that OS.

I hesitate to go OT over a parenthetical remark, but your MSE version number is 4.4.304.0, correct? (I wish there was a way to get 4.10.209.0 working on Vista again.)

It is based upon Pale Moon 28, which is ultimately based upon Firefox 52. No one has managed to backport Firefox Quantum AFAIK.

This is unrelated to Server 2012 R2, but might be relevant to someone running Server 2008 SP2. The best-known fork of Chromium 49 was Opera 36. Their support for XP and Vista consisted of one security update released in August 2016. The developers of Slimjet and Yandex managed to backport higher Chromium versions for the benefit of XP and Vista, but after 2017 only Chinese companies continued to pursue that.

Steam on Vista has been written about in considerable detail not very long ago: https://msfn.org/board/topic/181799-trying-to-get-modern-game-clients-steam-origin-and-others-to-fully-work-on-vista-extended-kernel/

Looks like Bandcamp Downloader 1.3.5 only requires .NET 4.5, but jns629 might perhaps have a higher version installed?

I only asked because a new member wished to login with a media player that uses Internet Explorer’s engine: https://msfn.org/board/topic/182100-windows-xp-system-web-browser/ I agree that @Andrey will almost certainly have to use a browser (other than IE8) for YouTubing on Windows XP. Perhaps OT, but my understanding is that the list of suitable browsers will become extremely short whenever YT deprecates Polymer v1 in favor of even newer iterations. (However, Andrey is already using Extreme Explorer 360.)

Would I be correct in guessing that one file is an h.264 decoder? I am not experimenting with the extended kernel myself (having only a Vista x86 system in need of refurbishing), but win32 mentioned in his November 23 post “an installer for Windows 7’s Media Foundation files, which are used by recent Firefox-based browsers.” Wouldn’t that suffice for Twitch and Twitter? I don’t believe there was very much code to remove, because Firefox never supported Vista’s system codecs in the first place. Firefox versions old enough to use on vanilla Vista (ESR 52 x86 and earlier) also supported Windows XP, which had no such decoders (notably for h.264), so Firefox provided its own decoders. There was never a version that supported Vista but not XP. (Well official Pale Moon 27 supported Vista but not XP, and the x86 version even used the h.264 decoder provided by Platform Update; but that didn’t work in the x64 version.) I don’t mean to sound critical: Just an old-timer trying to set the record straight.

Are you able to login at Google/YouTube with IE8 using ProxHTTPSProxy (assuming you have an account)? If so, this might be a solution for @Andrey‘s issue: https://msfn.org/board/topic/182100-windows-xp-system-web-browser/

Welcome to MSFN. As mentioned, you have posted in the Vista section rather than the Windows 10 section. It is odd that you are getting the same error code as Vista and XP, and I haven’t seen any similar reports involving Windows 10. This Microsoft link purports to explain why Vista and XP get that error code, but states that Windows 8 and later are “not affected”: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4569557/windows-update-sha-1-based-endpoints-discontinued

Why did I buy a 32-bit Vista System in the spring of 2008? I wanted a more powerful PC by the end of 2007 and was aware of the theoretical advantages of 64 bit - but as you probably know, Vista was a big flop. I was hearing many bad things about it, and was even advised to replace Vista with XP after buying a PC! That sounded like a waste of money, so I decided to wait until Microsoft released a service pack for Vista. While waiting, I learned that software makers were very reluctant to develop 64-bit products because a large majority of XP systems were 32 bit and Vista was a failure. In early 2008, the best selling point for Vista x64 seemed to be, “You can still run 32-bit software on it.” Well you could also run 32-bit software on a somewhat less expensive Vista x86 system, so that was my decision at the time. (It was not until Windows 7 became the success that Vista never was that x64 really came into its own.)

Welcome to MSFN Andrey. Unfortunately the release notes for CherryPlayer 2.5.2 (January 2019) suggest that it was hard coded to use Internet Explorer’s engine for login to YouTube and Twitch (having previously relied on an old WebKit engine). That was probably a better solution for Win7+ with IE 11 than for XP with IE8 (or Vista with IE9), although YT doesn’t claim to support IE at all these days. CherryPlayer adopted a Chromium web engine beginning with 3.0.0 in November 2019, but unfortunately that was the end of support for XP. It might be worth mentioning that the release notes for 2.5.3 mention a YT login error being fixed.

The situation hasn’t improved since your June 17, 2019 post on the same topic.

Malwarebytes Free has no real-time protection, but was probably the world’s best PUP removal tool. IDK if that’s still true, since my brain (with a little help from VirusTotal) became very effective against PUPs years ago. I never paid for MB Premium, which has real-time but does not score very high in independent testing (and 3.5.1 isn’t very current).

No it doesn’t seem likely, because roytam1 makes builds of Firefox-based browsers that could have supported Windows XP if the upstream developers had deemed it worthwhile. Chromium is another kettle of fish. In another year or so, the Chromium Project may expunge support for Windows 7 (and perhaps 8.1 at the same time) just as they did for XP and Vista in April 2016. When that day arrives, some browser developers will swing into action because Win7 will still have many users and Chrome is more popular than Firefox.

Yes, those discussions are mostly buried in the lengthy sticky thread about “last versions of software for [vanilla] Vista.” I don’t recall any issues being reported there either. Personally, I never used a version higher than 4.6.0 on Vista because I never especially wanted to run a program that required a higher .NET version. In fact I only have one program that needs 4.6, or else I might still use the 4.5.2 that Windows Update gave me before the apocalypse. But in these post-apocalyptic times, running software that officially requires Win7 is all the rage, and some such programs naturally need newer .NET versions. I wonder if the OP was trying to use a web installer, and wouldn’t be surprised if M$ has blocked those for Vista and XP by now. The OP started another thread on October 27, but hasn’t visited MSFN since then and may have given up on Vista.

Have you ever tried Yandex 17.4.1? It’s a March 2017 version based on Chromium 57 with backporting for XP and Vista. It is fast enough for me on a Vista system with pretty high specs, but it might be interesting to hear your opinion of it.

Like user Marc before him, JD is writing about Upgrading IE8 to TLS 1.2 (an old MSFN thread on the same topic). IDK about Outlook Express 6, but analogous procedure for IE9 on Vista can benefit Windows Mail. But as Marc pointed out, only a limited number of cipher suites are provided, so this solution might not be ideal.

My guess is that those certificates have sha2 digital signatures only.

Is this the “manual update” you have done? https://msfn.org/board/topic/181375-certifacte-trust-provider-error-installing-updates/?do=findComment&comment=1179898 If “the browser” is IE9 or Chrome 49, then lack of systemwide support for TLS 1.2 might be the problem.