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Internet on W98 Today


Fredledingue

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What about Pale Moon (specifically the older version, built from FF 3.6 code base) ? Will that run on 98 SE using Kernel ex ?

If so, Is it worth going from FF 3.6.x to PM ? As in, will it be visibly faster/lighter than plain FF (Athlon XP, no SSE2).

Any return of experience will be greatly appreciated...

I suggested Pale moon in my earlier posts however it appears no one on Windows 98 has given it a try.

Pale moon is a scaled-down version Firefox (in appearance) that performs well on Windows 2000. Like all Mozilla platforms, Pale moon takes some time to load the first time, which, speeds up the second, third, and fourth time around.

If you like the simplicity of the older Firefox ( 2.0 – 1.5 ) you will find Pale moon offering similar results.

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With the amount of animation you do not want, you should try an old version of Opera. I've used Opera 8.5 for the exact reasons you listed above.

Oh no! I'm sworn not to touch Opera ever again and I mean it. I did try a few versions over the years and could never find the experience I needed. It's been quite a pain to switch from SlimBrowser to K-Meleon, then briefly to Firefox and finally to SeaMonkey and I've had just about enough of switching browsers just because of a bunch of [...] that changed standards so that more and more advertising could be shoved down our throats.

As for all those variations of Firefox - no matter their name - they're all built upon the same Gecko engine and that engine itself is the problem for us 9x users, so no matter what else they take out or put in, it still won't work correctly as long as the engine is the same. All those Bookmarks not working are a result of engine updates. Since SeaMonkey 2.1a3 is the last version where Bookmarks work correctly under 9x, just check the Gecko engine version it's been built upon and then cross-reference with any other Gecko-based browsers/variations you might find - if any other has a newer version, Bookmarks won't work and so will be with any other issues that have been reported around. Except maybe when some team has actually reverted any of those changes, but chances for that to happen are very slim.

Personally I suspect they started to use Unicode strings and functions that are buggy or not supported/existing under 9x; haven't looked at the sources and probably never will as I'm way too busy with other things and not that knowledgeable in C/C++ (or Delphi, or whatever they may be using).

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I suggested Pale moon in my earlier posts however it appears no one on Windows 98 has given it a try.

Pale Moon has been mentioned long before on rare occasions; there are some old threads on this. However, very, very few people on this part of the forum use it.

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I use Pale Moon 3.6 with Kernelex in XP2 compatibility mode (as per Kex wiki) and it works fine. I also use Opera (always latest release), Kex 2000 mode, and that works fine. With Flash player 9.0.47 installed I can view Youtube videos very well as well.

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With the amount of animation you do not want, you should try an old version of Opera. I've used Opera 8.5 for the exact reasons you listed above.

Oh no! I'm sworn not to touch Opera ever again and I mean it. I did try a few versions over the years and could never find the experience I needed. It's been quite a pain to switch from SlimBrowser to K-Meleon, then briefly to Firefox and finally to SeaMonkey and I've had just about enough of switching browsers just because of a bunch of [...] that changed standards so that more and more advertising could be shoved down our throats.

Fair enough!

I am very content using Opera and, rarely use anything else for the past 7 years. Previous to Opera I was a Netscape 7 user. I would imagine our surfing habits differ greatly why our primary choice of browser are not the same.

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Primary browser: latest Opera with a few carefully selected extensions such as the superb NoAds Advanced with which you can permanently and easily remove any type of ads on a per site basis, best browser for 98/ME, and by a far stretch IMO.

Rarely used secondary browsers: Firefox 8 for WebGL content and K-Meleon 1.6.0 Beta2 for java applets.

For those who hate flash, javascript and so on, you may want to have a look at Dillo, a super small, super secure and super fast browser without plugins, javascript or html5 support.

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Seems that no matter how fast the CPU, lazy and incompetent programmers can figure out a way to use up the cycles. Ditto for memory use. Add in Microsoft creeping 'extensions' that are proprietary to Microsoft products, and you have the 'need for the latest and greatest' created to order.

I have multiple machines, running all the way from w95 to windows 7, and various Unix/Linux versions. All the 'improvements' that have been worked on have led to nothing more than more glitz.

I get more and more warnings about 'unresponsive scripts' than ever before. I have a 400Mhz celeron that I thought was broken because of how long it took to render HTML pages. Turns out the pages would render, after 10 minutes or so of 'doing something' that didn't look a bit different from when the page was first displayed. It would take that long for the mouse to become responsive again.

I vote for less. Less complexity, and the option to turn off things I don't particularly want. Next Tuesday, right?

tom

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For those who hate flash, javascript and so on, you may want to have a look at Dillo, a super small, super secure and super fast browser without plugins, javascript or html5 support.

Using Dillo-Win32 for this post. MSFN is nearly unreadable because of poor css/frames support. FAQ acknowledges that HTML 4.01 support is still behind Netscape 4 circa 1997! (And development has stopped :( )

User Agent:

 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Dillo 3.0)

Any ideas for a better User Agent string?

Tabbed interface uses FLTK. Looks okay with panel size set (in Tools button) to tiny with small icons.

Only 1.3MB, so I'll keep it and continue testing for awhile. I'll report back if I'm still using it next week.

No javascript, so reply edit menus don't work--must type smiley codes manually: :o:lol:

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Loblo, you don't need a no-javascript browser like Dillo or another not bad, OffBy1.

If you disable script from the browser it has the same effect.

I have Kmeleon 5.x installed as an alternative browser when a website refuses to show up with Maxthon(IE 6 interface).

(I still use Maxthon+IE6 despite increasing failures on famous websites because I'm used to it, have no time to change my habit right now, and use two or three plugins which would take a lot of time to port to a FF based browser)

It seems that it's not this or this browser that is better to render most pages, it's that webmasters accept anything but IE6 (or IE6 core based) browsers.

One good way to kill scripts (when not disabled entirely) is to keep your mouse on the red cross button (the buton to stop loading the page). When you see that the main content of the page is on the screen, press quickely multiple times on the stop button. You need to press as many times as possible during 2 or 3 seconds and the scripts will stop.

Your clicking on stop will take effect during the fraction of a second a script has not made your entire resources too busy. It's a race against the script if you will.

it won't work on scripts programmed to run at intervals or on on-click events but most of them will be killed this way because some scripts may haven't been downloaded at all. It doesn't only stop scripts, it also prevent them to be downloaded.

This oblige you to watch and control evey page loading. You can't load multiple pages in the background. You need to control every tab one by one. But it's worth it.

I do it on Facebook for example.

To download multiple tabs in the background, disable script completely especialy if you open pages from diferent domains.

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I've been using palemoon 3 it is optimized for older CPUs specifically. my problem random crashing not sure if that is the unofficial service pack or kernel ex or the browser?

EDIT: sounds like the "no script" addon for firefox may help.

Edited by cdoublejj
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  • 4 weeks later...

Facebook became unusable on my w9x machine two days ago, neither in K-Meleon nor in Maxthon.

I need to switch to the w7 laptop next to me. What a shame.

Even on w7, Facebook managed to dance the Polka for one minute...

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