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KernelEx Apps Compatibility List (New)


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Uhm, dunno about that - I hate toolbars with a passion, never let any of them display, other than the strictly necessary one. I'll look into it sometime later, when I get some spare time.

Later edit:

Well, I've looked through the profile, searching for the string "Getting Started", one of the only three I got in my standard bookmarks toolbar menu. One place to find it is in the bookmarkbackups folder in all those json scripts and the other place is in... places.sqlite.

So I'm not sure how this all works but the latter seems to be the central place to store bookmarks. If I add a bookmark to the bookmark toolbar, it will be added to places.sqlite with parent ID=3 (I have a SQLite3 viewer script).

I have however noticed a dramatic increase in the size of places.sqlite on the 98SE machines as compared to the original profile on XP (10.4MB vs 2.0MB). Seems there's a lot of garbage at the end of the file. Please keep that file under observation.

Edited by Drugwash
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I've tested yesterday an older version 1.3.5 and latest (at the time) 1.4.4, both being portable versions of QupZilla.

While 1.3.5 appeared to crash a little later after fiddling with compatibility in various dependency files, 1.4.4 was fairly prompt in crashing.

Some days ago I searched for older versions of QupZilla, but I didn't find any useful windows version.

Only current versions 1.3.5 (one year old) and newer. I also had no success to run it.

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From a sugestion by Drugwash, I copied my 'places.sqlite' from a Win2k working enviroment (FF23)
to a FF9 profile on Win98SE. This gave Firefox 9 Bookmarks and, I only realized later, History.
The Bookmarks Toolbar however displayed nothing. This was do to retension of an old file named
'localstore.rdf', as I did an upgrade installation from Firefox 3.6.28. Copying over the 'localstore.rdf'
fixed the problem. There is no problem if you completely remove all Firefox preferences and settings
and do a clean install.

The History part is not just a leftover, it keeps going until you clear history. Bookmarks can be deleted or edited, but not added. You can add new bookmarks to PlainOldFavorites addon.

Also: copying these files from a Linux installation works. You don't need another Windows
installation. Just a live CD.

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Not all entries in that new rdf are useful for this particular purpose. If the new file is copied over to an old installation, it will add unnecessary entries and will also change certain current settings. There should be only a few bookmark-related entries in the rdf that would be beneficial for a 9x setup.

The rdf file can be opened as a regular text file, provided the editor can handle an eventual UTF8-encoded file. A few copy/paste operations should do.

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You're right about that, but it doesn't appear to be a problem here. FF9 on Win98SE can
edit the .rdf and .sqlite files, but cannot create them properly once the history or bookmarks
entries are completely deleted. I don't know the exact cause of this, but it seems like it might
be fixed with kernelex or a kstubs hack. What do you think?

Something else: while experimenting, I saved my profile from Win98SE after copying the files
over from Win2K and then uninstalled everything. After a clean install, I copied over the
places.sqlite and localstore.rdf from the saved profile. It didn't work.

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We're kinda shooting in the dark here. What we know for sure is that 9x cannot create certain entries in settings file(s) such as localstore.rdf but it can and will read/modify them once they exist. We still do not know which entries exactly pertain to which setting and we also did not find a way to enable bookmark addition. But we know the SQLite3 database(s) can be edited in 9x.

Thing is, the SQLite3 library that comes with Firefox9 is custom built and we don't know if all of its functions work correctly under 9x. Some appear to work - since we can modify and delete bookmarks and history. Bookmark addition does not, although there are at least three ways:

- click the star in the address bar

- use main menu: Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page (which should open a folder selection dialog)

- main menu > Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks --> right-click in empty space > New bookmark

I believe this tells us there's more to it than just some missing entry in a configuration file, although I may be wrong. So far I could not test the custom SQLite3 library since my wrapper is far from being complete. And checking all the sources would require knowledge and a lot of time. In the end, the answer may be: modify this/that and recompile OR it cannot be done.

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I actually had no idea you were working on a wrapper when I first posted. I was just excited that later
version of Mozilla browsers would work. I have now read the recent posts in this thread. Here is my
situation. I have no problem with Firefox 3.68 on my regular machine (Pentium 4, AGP). A couple of
years ago I built a modern AMD machine (Pci-e video, Athlon X2) and with the help of rLoew's patches
installed Windows 98SE. Eveything works fine except Mozilla browsers made with Gecko engine 1.9x.
After browsing for awhile video distortion sets in. It starts with just a few white lines in images but
quickly degenerates into total video distortion. I've tried many strategies to correct it, all to no avail.
Is this what you mean by Firefox breaking your video driver?

The good news is that browsers like Opera 12 work O.K. and Firefox 2 or 4-9, work without this problem,
presumably because they use different Gecko versions. Firefox 2 is too old and it's not getting any
younger and Firefox 4-9 were kludgey without native History and Bookmarks.

I've now installed Pale Moon 8 and SeaMonkey 2.61 with success. SeaMonkey worked by copying over
the places.sqlite file from Firefox 23. No localstore.rdf needed. This didn't work with Palemoon. I had to
install it on Win2K and copy over both files. I installed Palemoon 11 at first, but got random freezes just
like Firefox 10.

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The symptoms you describe regarding video distorsion seem to match mine. There may be a (video) memory leak that quickly brings the system down. Are you by chance using an nVidia video card as I do? In this case it may have to do with the driver; I always get a crash in nvdisp.drv if I let the machine go on instead of rebooting a.s.a.p. There is a chance - at least theoretically - that something in KernelEx leads to that kind of crash; could be a stub, could be a bad/incomplete wrapper,a bad return value... Or it could well be the dreaded .NET that's linked dynamically to the VC8 runtime (msvcm80.dll -> mscoree.dll). Just dunno...

I've noticed the video breaks on certain sites such as the AutoHotkey forum board if the CSS is enabled. When disabled (through the Quick Java add-on), there is no crash.

I also installed the Web Developer Tools add-on in Firefox 9 and it almost always catches js/css/etc errors such as unrecognized commands or unexpected values.

Another problem is with web-loaded fonts. Right on Mozilla's web site where the browser goes on first launch after installation, certain text strings appear garbled if "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..." in Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & colors is enabled. But even so, Unicode characters do not always render correctly, at least not on my system (for example in the Wordpress toolbar and its new replies panel, when logged in).

A few times in my life I tried Opera but unfortunately it never managed to grow on me and got to a point where I swore it will never get on any of my machines ever again. I'm a man of my word (most of the times, at least). As for older versions of Firefox, I haven't tried any, not recently at least. I believe they wouldn't be much help anyway nowadays, considering where HTML5 and all other web languages go. Apparently even Firefox 9.0.1 (installed yesterday over 9.0 beta1) lacks a lot of knowledge in recognizing commands and parameters. Had similar video crashes with SeaMonkey long time ago and I just can't remember if I ever tested any Palemoon version altough I do have a few (with sources too) in a folder, somewhere. Anyway, if I got it right, Palemoon is just a fixed/tweaked version of the same Firefox version, so there shouldn't be much to expect from it in terms of 9x compatibility or anything.

Almost forgot: don't get any hopes about that SQLite3 wrapper - it's only intended for use in AHK scripts. The wannabe-editor I'm building can only display DB tables and their contents, currently - no editing yet (if ever). And those SQLite3 library versions are quite different, it's hard to keep track of what commands work with which version, not to mention the Firefox library is custom built and if replaced with an official library, it will crash the browser instantly at start. I've just tried to load mozsqlite3.dll in my editor and it failed, therefore I won't be able to test its exported functions. :(

(it's msvcm80.dll that's linked to mscoree.dll, not msvcr80.dll - edited to correct that)

Edited by Drugwash
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Sherpya's MPlayer build has crashed since version svn-r36443 (2013-Sep-14) on my Win98SE + KEx system with the following error:

MPLAYER caused an invalid page fault in module MPLAYER.EXE
The last sherpya version to work was r36349 (2013-Jun-14).

However, i just discovered Redxii's compilations, which continue to work! The 'original' MPlayer (version at the time of my original post svn-36496-4.6.3, 2013-Oct-28):

http://code.google.com/p/mplayer-for-windows/
and the 'new, improved' MPlayer2 (version at the time of my original post git-6ce3c2a, 2013-Feb-22):

http://code.google.com/p/mplayer2-for-windows/
- Doug B. Edited by DougB
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The symptoms you describe regarding video distorsion seem to match mine. There may be a (video) memory leak that quickly brings the system down. Are you by chance using an nVidia video card as I do? In this case it may have to do with the driver; I always get a crash in nvdisp.drv if I let the machine go on instead of rebooting a.s.a.p. There is a chance - at least theoretically - that something in KernelEx leads to that kind of crash; could be a stub, could be a bad/incomplete wrapper,a bad return value... Or it could well be the dreaded .NET that's linked dynamically to the VC8 runtime (msvcm80.dll -> mscoree.dll). Just dunno...

I've noticed the video breaks on certain sites such as the AutoHotkey forum board if the CSS is enabled. When disabled (through the Quick Java add-on), there is no crash.

I also installed the Web Developer Tools add-on in Firefox 9 and it almost always catches js/css/etc errors such as unrecognized commands or unexpected values.

Another problem is with web-loaded fonts. Right on Mozilla's web site where the browser goes on first launch after installation, certain text strings appear garbled if "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..." in Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & colors is enabled. But even so, Unicode characters do not always render correctly, at least not on my system (for example in the Wordpress toolbar and its new replies panel, when logged in).

A few times in my life I tried Opera but unfortunately it never managed to grow on me and got to a point where I swore it will never get on any of my machines ever again. I'm a man of my word (most of the times, at least). As for older versions of Firefox, I haven't tried any, not recently at least. I believe they wouldn't be much help anyway nowadays, considering where HTML5 and all other web languages go. Apparently even Firefox 9.0.1 (installed yesterday over 9.0 beta1) lacks a lot of knowledge in recognizing commands and parameters. Had similar video crashes with SeaMonkey long time ago and I just can't remember if I ever tested any Palemoon version altough I do have a few (with sources too) in a folder, somewhere. Anyway, if I got it right, Palemoon is just a fixed/tweaked version of the same Firefox version, so there shouldn't be much to expect from it in terms of 9x compatibility or anything.

Almost forgot: don't get any hopes about that SQLite3 wrapper - it's only intended for use in AHK scripts. The wannabe-editor I'm building can only display DB tables and their contents, currently - no editing yet (if ever). And those SQLite3 library versions are quite different, it's hard to keep track of what commands work with which version, not to mention the Firefox library is custom built and if replaced with an official library, it will crash the browser instantly at start. I've just tried to load mozsqlite3.dll in my editor and it failed, therefore I won't be able to test its exported functions. :(

(it's msvcm80.dll that's linked to mscoree.dll, not msvcr80.dll - edited to correct that)

Somehow I missed your post of last week. I only noticed it Saturday when I was looking at

DougB's post about mplayer.

I only use Nvidia cards. On this machine, PCI-e cards. I've tried several but the 'distortion' never

went away. This week I tried a new one with a big heat-pipe on the backside. When I installed

it, the heat-pipe blocked the PCI-e 1x slot where I had my network card. So I moved it to the

4x slot. At first Windows seemed to have no problems accepting the change. Soon their were even

more display problems that had nothing to do with browsers. So I had to revert to the previous setup.

The problems continued even then.That's when it occured to me that the ethernet card might be

causing the distortion. I installed an old Linksys PCI 10/100 card and that seems to have solved the

problem! The network card presumably caused problems because of a lack of support for the PCI-e bus

in the OS. To test, I opened seven tabs in Palemoon 3 with the same multi-image views that precipitated

the distortion and left them open all day. So far, not a hint of a problem. It's early, and only time will tell.

I could live with only Opera as a browser but I prefer any Mozilla browser. I really don't think

kernelex had anything to do with my issues because there is no problem in browsers using other

layout engines.

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For me the video issues appear mostly when scrolling a web page up/down, but some pages get broken when loaded, appear unscrollable (no scroll bar) and may trigger corruption if scrolling is invoked through hotkeys.

None of my machines has any kind of PCI-e slot and the one in question is a VIA chipset with AGP 2x max. while the video card can take AGP 8x. It's difficult if not impossible for me to swap cards around in that machine; for one because of the physical configuration and then for fear that changing IRQs, DMA channels and other settings might trigger a software incompatibility (registry, private app settings and so on) that may even lead to system lock up or worse. I've had this machine working 24/7 for seven years and I'd hate to break it know despite those browser issues.

Edited by Drugwash
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For me the video issues appear mostly when scrolling a web page up/down, but some pages get broken when loaded, appear unscrollable (no scroll bar) and may trigger corruption if scrolling is invoked through hotkeys.

None of my machines has any kind of PCI-e slot and the one in question is a VIA chipset with AGP 2x max. while the video card can take AGP 8x. It's difficult if not impossible for me to swap cards around in that machine; for one because of the physical configuration and then for fear that changing IRQs, DMA channels and other settings might trigger a software incompatibility (registry, private app settings and so on) that may even lead to system lock up or worse. I've had this machine working 24/7 for seven years and I'd hate to break it know despite those browser issues.

Next day I turned it on the 'distortion' returned. Oh well.

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  • 2 months later...

Well, it seems my post (above) was short lived....

It looks like the last version of Redxii's "MPlayer-for-Windows" that works under Win9x was svn-r36563 (2014-Jan-01). The next build, svn-r36568 (2014-Jan-05), crashes with an invalid page fault (as does the next).

So now i don't know of any current-ongoing builds of *raw* MPlayer (mplayer.exe) that work under 9x.

Here's redxii's archive: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerwin/files/MPlayer-MEncoder/

- Doug B.

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I've just downloaded the MPlayer source for these two versions and will look for changes that might have caused the page fault.

Update: In r36568, 101 (of 5870) files were changed. In "Changelog" this line looks like the likely culprit:

* Updated build environment to GCC 4.8.2 and MinGW-w64 v3.

Edited by jumper
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