Firefox 23 on Windows 2000

[ppgrainbow]

Has anyone installed Firefox 23 yet on Windows 2000? It was on Mozlla's FTP servers hours ago.

Firefox 23 does work with the current revision of UURollup v11 (released on 2013-02-23). However, what I'm seeing is that the Firefox icon logo now has a black background surrounding it. In Firefox 22, the background used to be transparent.

Also, when you select Help > About Firefox in the menu, the Firefox text no longer appears.

Is there a way to fix the issue with the black background surrounding the Firefox logo?

By the way, I might have to provide screenshots for proof...

Edit: I checked the website where it has the daily updates and found that Windows2000-UURollup-v11-d20130616-x86-ENU.7z is the latest daily UURollup release. However, I don't know if it's stable enough to use.

Also, I checked the release notes and found that Mozilla developers updated the Firefox logo to use alpha transparent true colour icons for Firefox 23 and beyond, for which it displays a black background instead of a transparent one.

I'm wondering if there are anymore updates to UURollup, btw.

Edited August 6, 2013 by ppgrainbow

[tomasz86]

Hey ppgrainbow,

Check the Hotstream forum for all updates related to my unofficial packages (specifically the Unofficial SP 5.2 for Microsoft Windows 2000 topic).

UURollup-v11 is being updated but only through the daily channel so I can't guarantee stability. You need to check it yourself. At the moment I'm fully focused on updating my website and preparing USP5.2 so there won't be any new stable versions released of the other packages. UURollup-v11 daily is going to updated until USP5.2 is ready.

Firefox has changed the logo (the new one looks horrible ) and I don't think you can easily do anything to fix it. The same thing happens with Skype whose icon also has such a black background.

[ppgrainbow]

Hey ppgrainbow,

Check the Hotstream forum for all updates related to my unofficial packages (specifically the Unofficial SP 5.2 for Microsoft Windows 2000 topic).

UURollup-v11 is being updated but only through the daily channel so I can't guarantee stability. You need to check it yourself. At the moment I'm fully focused on updating my website and preparing USP5.2 so there won't be any new stable versions released of the other packages. UURollup-v11 daily is going to updated until USP5.2 is ready.

Firefox has changed the logo (the new one looks horrible ) and I don't think you can easily do anything to fix it. The same thing happens with Skype whose icon also has such a black background.

Thank you for telling me. I will be testing the latest version of UURollup in a VMware VM to make sure it at least works.

As far as I know, a temporary workaround would be to use a icon editing utility and remove alpha transparency, which only works on Windows XP and above and then save the file as a ICO extension. I'm also looking into other clever ideas to get alpha transparency removed also.

Edited August 6, 2013 by ppgrainbow

[blackwingcat]

Umm? It seems to show no problem.

https://twitter.com/mofooter/status/364918922379673601/photo/1

Also, when you select Help > About Firefox in the menu, the Firefox text no longer appears.

[ppgrainbow]

Umm? It seems to show no problem.

https://twitter.com/mofooter/status/364918922379673601/photo/1

Also, when you select Help > About Firefox in the menu, the Firefox text no longer appears.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm currently using the UURollup and might want to investigate what could be causing the title bar to not display...

[tomasz86]

a temporary workaround would be to use a icon editing utility and remove alpha transparency, which only works on Windows XP and above and then save the file as a ICO extension.

That's why I wrote about fixing it easily At the moment I myself would just use the broken icon...

[ppgrainbow]

Good point. A good workaround was to use a icon editing utility such as IcoFX 1.64. I did the following:

1. Go to File > Open and select firefox.exe, select Icon 1 to extract the first icon.

2. Right click and select New Image, select 256 Colors (8 bits). Apply the same for 256 x 256, 48 x 48, 32 x 32 and 16 x 16 icons.

3. Save the file as firefox.ico that doesn't contain true colour+alpha transparency.

4. Reboot(recommended). With that in mind, the Firefix icon should be retroactively affected by this change.

I already have the latest revision of UURollup v11 applied right now and I can't seen to fix the no Firefox text in the About box, btw.

[tomasz86]

Hmm, only now I've had a chance to actually check the icon on a Windows 2000 computer and also in a VM, and there's no black background in both cases. The background is black only if UURollup is not installed.

The icon looks like this:

The About box is also displayed properly.

What's exactly the configuration you're using? What other packages have you got installed there?

Edited August 7, 2013 by tomasz86

[ppgrainbow]

The background is often black if you don't have the firefox.ico installed in the \Firefox directory. I installed the latest version of UURollup in VirtualPC for testing and found that the black background was still present, because of the logo change.

In Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, the Windows 2000 SP4 VM has a 12 GB virtual disk with 9.25 GB of disk space remaining, 256 MB of system memory allocated to the VM and 16 MB of video memory. The VM doesn't even have the unofficial Service Pack 5.1 nor the stable version of UURollup v10d installed.

I'm guessing that applying SP 5.1 and UURollup v10d might have caused the Firefox text in the About box to not display properly, but I could be wrong here.

Edited August 7, 2013 by ppgrainbow

[tomasz86]

UURollup-v11 requires both USP5.1 and Update Rollup 2 (in other words - SP4 and all official updates). IE6 is also included in USP5.1 but UURollup-v11 should work without it. I'd still recommend to always have IE6 installed.

[ppgrainbow]

I applied all of the official updates including Update Rollup 1 for SP4 and applied USP5.1 as far as I know. Then I applied the stable version of UURollup v10d and the latest daily version of UURollup v11. But I agree that UURollup v11 should work without problems as I ran it in VPC.

(I hate having to uninstall the current daily version of UURollup v11, reapply Update Rollup 2, UURollup v10d and the latest daily version of UURollup v11.)

I think that it would be best to try to dig deep and look for modified system files to see what could be causing the title in the About box to not display.

[Phenomic]

I'm getting the black background in the taskbar, but About Firefox dialog looks fine. Must be a transparency issue, a trivial matter considering FF 23.0 works just fine.

BTW, Firefox Auto-update works, so you don't have to download and install manually.

Edited August 7, 2013 by Phenomic

[tomasz86]

I applied all of the official updates including Update Rollup 1 for SP4 and applied USP5.1 as far as I know. Then I applied the stable version of UURollup v10d and the latest daily version of UURollup v11. But I agree that UURollup v11 should work without problems as I ran it in VPC.

(I hate having to uninstall the current daily version of UURollup v11, reapply Update Rollup 2, UURollup v10d and the latest daily version of UURollup v11.)

I think that it would be best to try to dig deep and look for modified system files to see what could be causing the title in the About box to not display.

You shouldn't apply both UURollup-v10 and v11. If you're going to use v11 then v10 is not required

In my test machine the About box is displayed normally. I can confirm that the new Firefox icon has black background in taskbar. Now the question is - does it really matter? I think that it's the price to pay for using Windows 2000 today. Of course you can manually modify the files, etc. but I myself am not going to spend any time on this. As long as the application works then such small graphical glitches are insignificant. Just my opinion

[ppgrainbow]

Thank you for telling me. Right now, UURollup v11 isn't 100% stable despite that the glitches that it may occur. As for the black background in the taskbar, it doesn't matter, but there are workarounds to fix it and it must be done in my own risk.

Unfortunately, while there is a option to uninstall the latest daily version of UURollup v11, uninstalling UURollup v10 is not a option unless I take the risk to reinstall Windows 2000.

As far as I know, Firefox 23 is working "as is".

[tomasz86]

Right now, UURollup v11 isn't 100% stable despite that the glitches that it may occur.

What exactly are the instabilities? So far there's been only one problem reported here.