Bruninho

Actually, I will try out all SM versions until the one that stopped working for me (because of address bar not working until I reset my profile every time I use) to find out the “sweet spot”. As for JavaScript, even patching Windows 98 to use more RAM, the patch alone won’t make things better. I believe the browser is having a hard time trying to deal with the amount of JS bs. Increasing the FF cache size isn’t helping either. (As a direct comparison, my RPi 3 has 1GB of ram at disposal for Raspbian and isn’t suffering that much to render them on latest FF)

I thought Rain or Waterfall were good enough? I have Rain on my Win 98 VM and I haven’t seen any side effects, all is clear.

I just have a DYI laptop stand for my rMBP. Now to tidy up the cables and find a way to keep it cool. 😎

Personal preference tbh. The SM UI is better for me. And I had resorted to SM when things went awry with FF. I personally don’t like FF at all, was my browser after Netscapes demise and IEs downfall when Google Chrome came. But I finally ditched it when MS Edge came in. But on older Windows, I’d rather go SeaMonkey since it has a similar netscape UI (nostalgia) and has been generally more stable than FF for me.

You might have better luck trying with a SeaMonkey build with an engine that matches FF24. SeaMonkey is slightly more stable than FF (hence why I use it instead of FF on Windows 2000, for example).

New Edge was running flawlessly here. I have even installed the macOS version on my rMBP. Unlike previous incarnations of the evil IE, Edge chromium does not mess with your operating system AFAIK, and its just a rebadged Google Chrome without all the creep “features” from Google, and has its own features. So far I’m pleased with this browser, but not enough to replace my Safari goodness on my Mac. IE11 as of today will not render properly most modern websites that make full use of CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid for example, unless they use the vendor fixed properties (unlikely now). I had to get rid of it, it was a dream come true to kill this bastard off my Windows. Talk about wanting to kill something for like 15 years and then finally you get your revenge... (that’s because IE6/7 made my web developer career a f***ing nightmare).

My dad still uses the brazilian government tax software to send ours. He has a VM with an exact copy of the XP install used on his old (we do not own it anymore) HP laptop. Early 2000 years. He is not using XP to declare actually - he just keeps snapshots of some years we declared the taxes for future reference. Now he declares it from a newer VM. Which Windows version hes using I can’t remember. We just got p***ed that there is no macOS version.

CSS3 did not kill the web. CSS3 SAVED the web. And is saving us from these evil JS frameworks. (jQuery is one of them) Now that most browsers are standards-compliant (Thanks for the new Edge, Microsoft!) we will almost not suffer developing the sites for everyone. I can do things like slide menu, modal, dropdown, carousel, all without JS thanks to CSS3 and some clever tricks. We should all go back to writing vanilla JS and forget about jQuery really... Another thing that is killing the web is Bootstrap and similar frameworks. People now forget how to code a proper website, they just throw a framework at it, a few tags and classes and it's done, call it a day. Now every site I visit was made with Bootstrap and there is simply almost no difference between them. Where's the creativity? CSS frameworks should still exist, but we should do ours not use someone elses framework. I like to think of myself as a creative UI/UX Designer.

If even Microsoft did not manage do that, we surely won't be able to do that. Just do like me: let Internet Exploder die. And laugh at it like Joker.

One Republic - If I Lose Myself

I actually managed to get around this and install. It took me four or more attempts. Now its working, I removed the bloatware, data collection, one drive, disabled cortana (I'd love to remove this **** too) and there was other thing I couldn't remove because otherwise the system would go caput in a cumulative update install. I can't remember what it was. Removed Internet Explorer (GOOD RIDDANCE, you were a good boi in 1995, but not anymore, evil plague) and installed MS Edge (chromium version). I managed to rename the Network icon to "Network Neighborhood" as seen in Windows 98. Disabled a few other "features" for more performance trade-off. I tweaked the file explorer, some icons and the desktop. And compressed the Windows install with CompactOS. Also using SDelete to help me shrink the VM image after usage. Windows is now around 9GB OS size. There are two more tweaks I'd love to do: one is classic start menu with the Windows 10 look (light theme) and the other is related to the "quick launch" taskbar. When I open any of these apps, instead of creating a new item on taskbar it uses the same icon. Classic Windows did not do that, I wanted the opposite.

Windows 10 Pro Build 1909 has an incredibly ridiculous bug with language packs. I downloaded the english international x64 iso and installed. But it came with british english language. I wanted the american english language, so I installed the american one, and after changing it system wide, I removed the british english language pack Minutes later, the whole settings screen for backgrounds, colors, and what more I don't know yet... had their texts randomly changed to something else unrelated to these settings. It's a language bug. Anyone had this issue? Since I cannot overcome his, which build should I use then? 1903? Or earlier?

BootCamp is my last resource, actually. So I want to try again. Turns out I was doing all that from my external hard disk (exfat formatted) which then went caput when VMWare rebooted my computer in the middle of a VM install all of sudden while I was out. I salvaged most of my data, then reformatted it has HFS+ (Journaled) this time and put back all my data including the VMs. Thanks God for my OCD pushing me to upload a backup to my Time Capsule almost all the time. I was using exfat so I could read and write between PC/Mac all the time at work. Since we are now under lockdown, I couldn't care less for PCs so I reformatted as HFS+. EDIT: This time the VM is now working. Until now. I have decided to configure the VM on VMWare with IDE for both hard drive and cd rom. And it paid off. Apparently VMWare SCSI is slower, much slower. Also, I created the VM outside my external hard drive, but when its all cleaned up and polished for usage, I will try to run it from the external hdd again, which was now formatted as HFS+.

Windows 10 is indeed the worst crap ever. I can't make the life of me a smooth Win 10 install on VMWare Fusion, it simply runs too slow even when I have sh*tloads of RAM and a tremendously big SSD. While my MacBook Pro 2013 13-inch runs smoothly on top of the latest macOS Catalina, Win 10 is irritatingly slower than Rubens Barrichello. I just started a Win 7 VM install and I am stuck on "Expanding Windows files (0%)". Jesus. Things like these reminds me of why I gave the middle finger to Microsoft and moved to Apple ten years ago. I was a happy customer until after Windows 2000, when XP came in...

Just an update, I gave up on XP. I did an Ubuntu Server 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) 32-bit install for my dad on his iPhone X (has more power than his 1st gen iPad Pro 2015 12.9 inch, actually). Runs smoothly on his iPhone X and he can SSH into it to work from his iPad Pro using the iSH app or any other app to access webroot such as Coda Editor. Practically a portable web server. As for XP, screw it. It's too slow, the more updates I install, the slower it gets. I had tried to make a NT 4.0 install, but even the SPx updates were messy to install and I lost my patience. Currently, we have the ubuntu on his phone and I have a MSDOS 6.22 + WFW 3.11 on my 2nd gen iPad Pro 2017 12.9 inch. I might recreate a Win 98SE VM or try again W2k, that was also slow as hell last time I tried. Actually, I want to put a lightweight linux distro with XFCE desktop, I tried many distros with bad luck. Even ReactOS I tried. So, in a word, if you want to run newer OSes such as Win 10, 7 or XP, try at least with an iPhone X, 11 or the 2020 iPad Pro, which has 6GB of RAM (supposedly) so you can double your RAM for the VM (from 1024 to 2048). I'd rather try elementaryOS or Win 2000.

Oi I missed this topic! Just had to read all pages to follow up. Any ideas on how to work around the profile issue for FF 3x?

That's the reason I refuse to go back to Microsoft and use Windows 10. Unfortunately for gaming reasons I need to do an install, but rest assured that I will try to remove as much as possible of their spyware/bloatware sh** before doing anything on it. I'm a mac user now (since 2010), and the last operating system I used was Windows 7, before that I used Windows 2000 for a very long period. Not even the 7 was able to captivate me. I run VMs of Win 3.x and 9.x just for nostalgic purposes and because I believe they were the best I have ever used. Now, Apple is also showing signs of bad decisions (well, that was expected, after Jobs death) and seems to be taking a quite bad route with the rumours of ARM based Macs and iOS/macOS convergence. That said, I also have a elementaryOS linux VM running, preparing myself to leave another ship to jump into other OS. But we always go back to Windows because of the games. Frankly, these games are not cheap, neither is a Windows 10 license; since linux is free, these lazy developers should also do a linux version of their games!!! That would bring some real pricing competition to Windows. But this will never happen. To be honest, I'm more scared of Google spying us than Microsoft. Hence why I avoid Google Chrome and all of their other products (I still own a Gmail account, but I am moving to another account this year)

Here: https://getutm.app

I already tried porting my Win 2000 SP4 + BWC VM from VMWare. Slow as hell too. I think Win 98 can run reasonably well - As well as Win NT 4.0. I tried several Linux distros and they are slow as hell too. I already know why all my VMs are slow - UTM does not have KVM and never will, because iPad does not have the requirements to do so. I might try out Win NT 4 this time as well as another Raspbian Buster attempt. The only VM I have running smoothly is MS DOS 6.22 + Windows For Workgroups 3.11. I have even networking and Outlook 5.0 working if I get stunnel working from another machine (or iSH on iPad). EDIT: Just came back to add to the list of VMs to try out: Win NT 3.51. With either 3.51 or 4.0, I want to try and install an old version of WAMP Server.

You probably could, but performance would be impossible and terrible. iPad Pro has only 4GB and UTM app does not let you use more than 1.5 GB of RAM dedicated to the virtual machine. It's better to install 32-bit old OSses or even 16-bit old OSes. This one is XP 32-bit and is already a little bit laggy. iPad Pro has 4 cores, one is already dedicated to the VM, I have to try out with 2 cores yet if it improves anything. Also, I'm looking forward to trying Lubuntu 32-bit edition. There's no point in trying x64 if you can only have 1.5GB of RAM. https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

I had to delay my plans - I am currently installing a Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit VM for my dad on his iPad Pro (using UTM, ofc). It's ridiculously easy so far.

No, just, no. I want something 100% portable, so without a "man in the middle". That's why I ditched the Rasperry Pi - I did not want to carry with me the iPad + rPi3 wherever I go. I can just run stunnel + wrp from my mac when I am at home and run the VM, wrp and stunnel on my mac when I am not.

Runing iSH on my iPad Pro 2nd gen, I can sort of have a stunnel set up to allow Gmail working in WFW 3.x Outlook 5.0, so far so good. Now, I have been trying to set up a squid HTTPS proxy with no success, for the browsers on WFW 3.x (could be used for those who want to use "extreme" vanilla Win 9x solutions). Just to bump HTTP to HTTPS. iSH is based on 32-bit Alpine Linux, and I have installed squid, when I try to run it just complains about squid.pid not being able to flock, or having a bad file descriptor, or... I have no idea, how to fix it. Also, since iSH is 32-bit linux, there's no way to run the Web Rendering Proxy script (since it needs Google Chrome). Back to square one. WRP is great for those who want to use their favorite browser without being arsed to look for newer browsers or hacking them (non-vanilla). It just renders a PNG/GIF browsable version of the websites. It's a bit difficult to use first time, but when you get used, makes for easier browsing in older devices. It just does not render animations or videos. I'll just put it aside for a while and check some things on Windows 9x now.

@ABCDEFG and @schwups: Excellent! Does it give you any problem with the profiles? Try to install an extension, change some settings. The worst case scenario is the address bar not working again if you close it and reopen, forcing you to delete the profile and start over again. I don't know, but previous Firefox versions had the ability to let you use the tabs below the address bar, not on top. Apparently, around v3x.x they stopped it? That could fix the problem with the rendering of these tabs.

This is an example how I do the falback for SVG images. As explained here (https://css-tricks.com/a-complete-guide-to-svg-fallbacks/) under "Fallback for SVG as <object>". And here is the reason why some "page section" divs do not have background images with JS disabled. I use a data-attribute for Parallax effects. The div should be transparent (no background-image with CSS) for it to work. The only browser that do not support it at the moment is the Safari iOS, and the script has a fallback - not written by me, though - to show them as background images instead on my iPhone. And here is the reason why for some people page load may be slow even with JS disabled. That's a CSS trick used to pre-load images. so pages don't flash white on load. Here on my macbook the site is lightning fast, thanks to Amazon Web Services. I probably shouldn't preload them like this - but its only an issue on older browsers so no problem. There are only 2 ways to fix it and both will not work for 9x systems: reduce the image size each (and they will still be too big for 9x) or use a CSS media query to detect the resolution (@media (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), (min-resolution: 192dpi), for example) but these old browsers wouldn't understand it too. The only things I can do is reduce weight of images and minify both CSS and JS (JS is already minified though). I am currently working on a V3 of my website just to add dark mode support. Not much will change anyway so problems for old devices will persist. Currently the target is Win 7+, macOS 10.1x and iOS 12.x, latest Linux and Android operating systems, Edge Chromium, Safari 12.x, last 10 versions of Firefox and Chrome. No IE/Edge Trident support, no Win XP and below support.