NotHereToPlayGames

The same thing has happened here in the Midwest USA. American Water is the quasi-monopoly that supplies water/sewage services to California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinios, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. For those counting, that list is 16 states. 16 out of 50 is 32%. But thanks to the Electoral College, we have an easy way to look at that based on POPULATION. 538 total Electoral College votes -- CA 55, GA 16, HI 4, IL 20, IN 11, IA 6, KY 8, MD 10, MI 16, MO 10, NJ 14, NY 29, PA 29, TN 11, VA 13, WV 5. That's 257. 257 out of 538 is 47.77%. So I am in the same boat as basically 48% of the entire population of the USA -- recent changes on their website forces me to use 360Chrome v13 or v13.5. Can no longer use v11 or v12 as of about a month or so ago. Also cannot use St52 (so I suspect that St55 will not work either). edit - my solution, they now use the US Post Office to send me my invoice - I will not use bloated v13 or v13.5 all on account of ONE billpay website!

I use a freebie called doPDF for this. And my version from June 2014 works perfectly. My guess is that the "newer" versions have basically suffered the same demise as MS Office - newer is not necessarily better.

Totally agree! I actually run MS Office 2003 at work from a USB stick (excluding Outlook) and it still loads faster than Office 365 and LibreOffice (the only two options available on company computers). But only "mid-level" (and higher) associates are granted permission to use USB sticks. So even with the popup nag requesting my USB-access password, I can load my Excel 2003 spreadsheets from a memory stick in less time than it takes Office 365 or LibreOffice to load from SSD. I even keep a version of WordPad on that USB stick but it's more for Excel and spreadsheets than anything else.

The "logging" CAN be prevented! BUT it is BEYOND the scope of this website. You will need to use a local proxy "filter" called Proxomitron. From the best I can get without spending an enormous amount of time on it, you would need to "edit" MSFN's ckeditor.js file "on-the-fly". What Proxomitron can do is intercept the ckeditor.js file and EDIT it BEFORE the web browser ever sees it. But there is a very steep learning curve behind doing this type of "filtering" and is way waayyy beyond the scope of this website.

Your answer is in this thread/post -- https://msfn.org/board/topic/182647-my-browser-builds-part-3/?do=findComment&comment=1207849

I do not use "web portals" (HTML) to access email. I use POP3 or IMAP.

All 8 have been updated. I've always had crashes with v13 and v13.5 on Dropbox. Not with "every" visit, but definitely a majority.

Both. I can't block "as much" of Google though. I do have to allow "some" of Google maybe 10% of the time or so, but otherwise it's blocked as much as possible.

I've been quite pleased with v11 and v12. I've not been nearly as satisfied with v13 and v13.5. But I've also learned to "never say never". I vowed "never" to touch a Chromium build when they got rid of the "title bar". Then Firefox Australis followed their footsteps. I really really really HATE not having a "title bar" with 'standardized' "buttons". So it was Pale Moon and Mypal for years - but they simply have fallen behind, WAY BEHIND. So I had to break my "never" vow and here I am on a Chromium build - but it has a standard title bar and buttons

Updated links in first post. This rolls back the data-write-prevention scheme but keeps a minor XP Theme skin change discovered while creating a dark theme as a low-priority side-project.

Sounds great

ps - I should point out that prior to this little field test, my test has always been regarding file size. If a file is created but the file size does not change with a thousand browser launches, then the file doesn't need to be deleted.

I don't have a MEGA d/l to test. I do know that v13.5-r4 makes a gstatic connection with EVERY LAUNCH. A thousand launches = a thousand gstatic connections. Whereas v13.5-r3 makes that same gstatic connection only ONCE, with the very first launch when all of the files and folders are created during first run.

I definitely apologize for any inconvenience.

I'm going to revert back to the previous editions for now. Advanced users can alway opt to have their own local versions perform the data-write-preventions. I think we have a Law of Unintended Consequences going on and too many UNKNOWNS. I did suspect this, but wanted to see what others encountered also. To me, I see too much of the possibility of "memory leak" - since we can't write to the hard drive, the data resides in RAM instead. In-process of reverting changes. It is something that the advanced users can decide for themselves if they wish to have their own local copies prevent data-writes.

It's a matter of perspective. MOST users that I encounter see this as "value ADD" because they typed something and they don't have to type it AGAIN if they accidentally close the tab or their browser crashes and they lose the tab. edit - but I agree, I kinda find it disturbing and I myself would rather retype content that was accidentally lost.

v13.5 V3 does this connection also. But only on FIRST RUN. Since v13.5 V4 prevents various files from being written, it performs the connection with EVERY LAUNCH because it doesn't have the logged record that it already made the connection once. Still digging... Leads me to believe that v13.5 branch requires some additional telemetry removals that were not discovered until just now. I'd kinda recommend v13.0 branch until further notice (unless of course the possible telemetry doesn't concern you until resolved).

I'm leaning towards v13.5-r3 also (at least as far as 13.5 goes, v11 remains my default). Law of Unintended Consequences. Such as the two IP Addresses found by @IXOYE.

Thanks. Digging into root cause.

I actually use TWO loader.ini files - one for "during" installing extensions because "some" extensions require this .log file in order for the settings to apply with the NEXT launch. I use this for "during" installing extensions -- FileDelete=%Profile%\Default\Local Storage\leveldb\LOCK;LOG;LOG.old Then I use this AFTER my extensions are installed -- FileDelete=%Profile%\Default\Local Storage\leveldb\LOCK;LOG;LOG.old;*.log The only difference being the ;*.log at the very end.

Feedback appreciated on which of the two you end up sticking with.

Very possible! I did some testing on about 40 different web sites and the .log file does NOT log username and password input fields so that alleviated most of my concern (especially since I delete the log file on every exit).

I have a dark theme I've been playing around with. But it is specifically tailored to look like XP. A very dark XP, but still XP. I really do have an immense hatred for 99.99% of my programs having the default XP "buttons" but "new" Chrome/Chromium/360Chrome/Firefox-Australis not having that XP "look". But I'm sure the same goes for you, you run Vista and you wanted an aero theme, so that makes perfect sense to me. I wouldn't mind having a copy of the Vista aero theme if you are allowed to share it. EVENTUALLY my skin folder will have options for end-users to pick from.

v13.5-r4 should have added 23 empty folders and 21 zero-byte files. Windows will not allow a file and a folder to be the same exact name in the same exact folder so by having an empy folder with a certain name prevents 360Chrome from creating a file with the same name and vice versa for creating a folder when the same-named file is already present. Windows does allow copy-paste a folder and overwrite a file, but will throw an error if you try to copy-paste a file and overwrite a folder.

The files replacing folders is to prevent telemetry "writes". We have prevented them from being sent to any Chinese IP Address but now we go one step futher and prevent them from being written even "temporarily". There was a minor XP Theme skin change for bookmark "padding", but other than that there was no major changes. Will revert the "File System" tweak, many thanks! Please let me know if you encounter anything else.