Dave-H

I've noticed that GIF animations don't work in my Facebook newsfeed on Firefox 52 ESR on Windows XP. They work fine (of course) on Firefox 55 on Windows 10. On XP I just get a white rectangle where the animation should be in the newsfeed, but if I click on it and it opens up bigger it then plays. I read somewhere that the Facebook animated GIF player needs the H.265 codec. Is that so, because if that's the case presumably it can never be made to work in XP. Do inline GIF animations work for anyone else with this configuration?

Oops sorry, yes I was! What I said does apply to @killabud if he has any relevant add-ons installed of course.

Ah, well if you're using add-ons that relate to YouTube that could be part of the problem. A friend to mine is using the latest Firefox 55 on Windows 10, and he told me a while ago that YouTube clips embedded in Facebook pages had stopped working, just producing an error message that no codecs could be found to play them. Why this should happen was a bit of a mystery for a while, on what should have been a state of the art system. He was also getting errors shown on two of the items here, the H.264 one and the WebM VP8 one. To cut a long story short, it tuned out that he had several add-ons installed relating to YouTube. Running Firefox with add-ons disabled seemed to make no difference to the problem, but when they were all actually uninstalled, everything came good! Worth a try to see if this has any bearing on your problem, you can always re-install them again (make a note of what they're called before you uninstall!)

If it says "stats for nerds" I've always assumed that means it's using HTML5 and the plugin is working OK, but whether it's using H.264 or WEBM I don't know as i don't normally look in that detail. Even very new videos are using H.264 for me as far as I can see.

The right click pop-up should say "stats for nerds" at the bottom if it's using HTML5, and the Flash Player version at the bottom if it's using Flash.

Do YouTube videos actually work, and if they do, are they using HTML5 or the Flash Player? Right clicking on them should tell you.

Assuming that the plugin is in the plugins list and showing no errors, is it set to "always activate"?

No good on Windows XP though, as IIRC the Widevine plugin doesn't work on XP.

Of course, silly me! MOM.exe is the AMD/ATI Catalyst Control Center monitoring program.

I never worked out what @Roffen meant by "MOM message" either, but as this is all from over a year ago now anyway, presumably he got things all sorted!

Something just doesn't like vertical lines closely together, you can see a strange effect on the "ll" in "small" in my screen grabs, and on the Opera one only, the "it" in "Capital" and on the Firefox one only, on the "al" of "Capital"! Weird indeed........

This is what they look like here in Opera 12.18 (top) and Firefox 52 (bottom). What's bizarre IMO is the apparent greeny/purply (depending on the zoom) tinge to the pipe symbols in Firefox, and browny tinge to the next three lines in both!

Strange how your lines appear to be of different lengths, as if the characters are spaced differently. I don't see that on any of my browsers.

OK, now on Windows XP. IE8 drops into compatibility view, and then looks an awful mess (not unexpected!) Firefox looks fine, although the lower row appears to have a slight purple tinge to it for some reason. Opera 12.18 both rows have the apparent purple tinge, and the top row has marginally less contrast than the bottom row. Google Chrome both rows are lacking contrast, but the top row is worse than the bottom one. Opera 36 pretty much the same (not surprisingly). Safari looks like Opera 12.18. HTH.

Looking at the board in Opera 12.18 (admittedly on Windows 10) I can see some of the effects jaclaz has pointed out, such as "I" (upper case i) looking a bit dimmer than "l" (lower case L), but the difference is not huge, and everything still seems to be pretty legible. I will try later on using Windows XP and see if that looks different.

Of course you were quite right to report the problems jaclaz, I wasn't saying that you shouldn't, whatever browser you're using. The fact has to be faced though that Presto-based Opera hasn't been properly updated now for over four years. The last 12.18 update was over two years ago, and was only to help with security protocol compatibility, it didn't do anything to help fundamental site compatibility, which had always been a struggle with Presto Opera anyway, as nobody coded for it as its user base was so small. Opera always had to put loads of workarounds into the browser, like browser.js, which had to be constantly updated as sites changed their coding. With no updates for so long, inevitably sites were going to start to malfunction, and the browser is now crawlingly slow on javascript-heavy sites like YouTube and Facebook. Sorry to be blunt, but even I had to bite the bullet eventually, as much as I loved Opera 12. Frankly it's like wondering why MSFN doesn't work properly in IE8. I wouldn't hold your breath for any fixes if they're only affecting Opera 12, whose user base must now be minute. Cheers, Dave.

jaclaz, your problems are I'm afraid almost certainly being caused by using an old version of Opera. I adored the original Opera, and used it as my default browser for many many years, and was horrified when they replaced it with something that was Chromium-based and stripped out all the customisation options that I used fully on the old version. I kept Opera 12.18 (the latest and almost certainly last version) as my default browser until literally a week or two ago, when I had to accept that so many sites were now not working properly in Opera 12 that I had to admit defeat and move to Firefox as my default. Not only do many pages display wrongly in Opera 12 now, javascript links often don't work, which is really annoying when you spend ages filling in a form and then the "submit" button does nothing! I'm sure the problem with the MSFN site is nothing to do with the coding, I'm sure it works fine in current browsers, it's Opera 12 that's the problem I'm afraid.

Xper, I really hope this means that you're considering keeping the board open now. Why would you do a software update a couple of days before closing it?! Looking at other threads, you will have no shortage of support from your members, to whom this board has come to mean such a lot. Cheers, Dave.

All four updates installed fine here. Scan took about 10 seconds on my main machine, and less than a minute on my very slow netbook. That's more like it! There seems to be no update for IE11 this month either.

Slim pickings compared with last month! At least with no Office updates this time we should get a fast update scan. Nothing here in England yet, at least no yellow shield has appeared in the system tray.

Thanks, I'll hold fire for a while then.

I'm only really interested in the possibility of memory-hungry programs like Adobe Premiere Pro being able to use more of my available memory when running on XP. However, as the program itself is 32 bit, would it be able to access more that 3GB of RAM anyway, even with the operating system patch applied?

Thanks, I hope Dibya will come back and say exactly what has to be done with his patch. I use USB a lot on my system, so I don't want to risk anything that might compromise the stability of that function, and Dibya reckons he's cracked that issue.

So, I have a server motherboard, with dual Xeon processors. Do you think I should give Dibya's patch a shot? I have a full backup and can easily repair Windows XP using the other operating systems I have installed as regards substituting system files. I've downloaded the package, but it's a bit vague about what I actually have to do to try it. Is it just a matter of substituting all the system files with those in the package, or do I have to edit boot.ini as well? I have 8GB of RAM installed (for 64bit Windows 10) and it would be nice if XP could also use it all.

@Mac I was just thinking that the "will be installed shortly" message meant that it was pending download, which would now never happen.