Dave-H

I use two graphics cards on my triple boot system, because one of them has no Windows 98 drivers, and the other one has no Windows 10 drivers! I use the very wonderful Nirsoft's Multi-Monitor Tool to switch between them on Windows XP, which I can do at will. I have shortcuts set up for that, and it might be possible to run a shortcut on startup to always select the right card via the tool. Just a thought, it does seem a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it might just work!

@heinoganda has built a more up to date version of HTTPSProxy that works on XP. A lot of us are using it. PM him to ask about it.

It seems to be fine. IE8 with HTTPSProxy.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Although the article doesn't specifically mention Vista, it does say that only 8.1 and 10 aren't affected.

The only symptom of the problem in 52 ESR seems to be that if you look at the add-ons list it says that they can't be verified for use in Firefox. They carry on working just fine! In Firefox 66 they actually all stopped working as they had been blocked!

I suspect they're the same thing, I downloaded the two files, and they are only 4 bytes different in size!

Thanks!

@heinoganda I did a check today on Microsoft Update just on the off-chance that there might be something offered, and the only thing offered was a definition update for MSE. I tried installing it and it failed of course, and when I looked in my update history there was a long list of similar update failures. Also I'm still getting error messages in my Windows event logs all the time about failed updates and MPSampleSubmissions. Sadly your previous fix seems to have only been temporary. I noticed in the registry an entry at HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\MICROSOFT ANTIMALWARE\SIGNATURE UPDATES called "ForceUpdateFromMU". It was set to "1", I've tried setting it to "0". Do you think that will help? Basically I want it to stop checking for updates by the normal route. I'm actually a bit surprised that MU is still offering definition update for MSE on XP at all!

I don't see why you have problems with Firefox sync. Mine works fine with default settings, and always has done. Is this a downside to setting a global user agent string? I use an add-on to change the string just on troublesome sites, and have left everything else well alone!

I know I promised i wouldn't mention it again, but just quickly for comparison, Firefox 66 on Windows 10 managed it in 44.79 seconds. Much much better than FF 52 on XP, but still pretty bad compared with it seems all other browsers! So, it looks like a general problem with Firefox, all versions seem to underperform badly on these tests compared with other browsers.

FWIW, today's update KB4464567 is safe, it doesn't replace MSO.DLL.

I've had an Office 2010 update (which didn't break Office again thank goodness) so I guess that's it!

Try - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 That's my custom user agent string of choice at the moment (which I got from a post on MSFN needless to say!) Give that a try.

Interesting test. Google Chrome 49 managed it in 11.16 seconds. Opera 36 managed it in 11.76 seconds. Firefox 52 ESR managed it (eventually) in......... wait for it......... 380.18 seconds!! I thought it was never going to finish on Firefox. It took over six minutes! Something must be seriously amiss here surely?!

Well I tried Firefox 66 on Windows 10 again, and still get only 60fps on the test. It's set to its default automatically determined configuration, with hardware acceleration on and a maximum of 8 processes (which is the default). It's still massively out-performed by IE11 and Edge. Off topic for this thread of course, but a very strange anomaly. EDIT: Actually I've now done some more tests, and sometimes FF 66 on Windows 10 goes as high as 170fps, but I'll then try again and it's around 40fps! No consistency to it at all. Anyway, off topic so I'll concentrate just on FF 52 on XP from now on, I promise!

Indeed it will, I have the British English one installed!

No problems seen here on Firefox 52 ESR with Flash or any other plugins or add-ons (touch wood!)

As far as I'm aware, KB4462223 is the only update which should be avoided, as it contains the latest incompatible version of MSO.DLL. All the others should be OK.

Any update on this @jumper? I realise you're working on many other things too, but I just wondered if this is going to go any further. Cheers, Dave.

Great, glad it worked!

It should be this - P&n"y9j5V23Khb1%vA7vM9CreU3BYzI429TD$h6K§ The passwords have always worked for me by just copying and pasting them, so I don't know why this wouldn't work. Your string starts with a lower case "p", which won't work as the passwords are case sensitive. Welcome to the forum BTW!

I tried the acceleration test which @mockingbird linked to, and my Firefox on XP only makes 20fps! I guess no hardware acceleration then! As an off-topic aside, I tried the test in Windows 10 as well, and was surprised that 64 bit FF 66 only made 60fps. IE11 and Edge both made well over 200fps on the same test!

Is that the "Use hardware acceleration when available" option that's in the options? I take it that is doesn't do anything on XP systems then?

Opera 12 does have a custom user-agent spoofer, it always had to because so many sites didn't acknowledge it! Right click>Edit site preferences>Network tab. Set Browser identification. The default strings offered are very out of date as you can imagine, but it's possible to have whatever string you want by manually editing the site's entry in the override.ini file.

Glad you fixed it @mockingbird! Having assessed things for a day or two, I can report that the performance of Firefox 52.9.1 ESR on my system is now vastly improved since I finally managed to enable multiple processes. On script-heavy sites like Facebook and YouTube, it was always quite slow and hesitant loading and updating pages, with scrolling being jerky and inline Facebook videos stopping and starting. Now it's much faster and smoother, in fact I would say it's pretty much as good now as the "latest and greatest" 64 bit Firefox 66 on Windows 10! It is now a bit of a RAM hog, it's sometimes using nearly 1GB of RAM with two processes running, but as I only very rarely use it with loads of other stuff running as well, it's not a problem for me, although it might be if you have less that 3GB of accessible RAM. I've not had any stability problems (touch wood!) and all my add-ons seem to be performing normally, despite me getting an add-on compatibility warning when I first tried the tweak. I have dom.ipc.processCount set to 4. All in all, I would personally well recommend doing this tweak. YMMV of course, but it's definitely been a great performance improvement on my system!