RetroZilla: An updated version of Mozilla for Windows 95 and NT4 [2.2 RELEASED]

[siria]

Another invaluable addon: a behind-the-scenes traffic checker.
Just tried httpfox (which of course will get deleted very soon too):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/httpfox/

Surprise:
so that's why the my system's network icon is blinking when opening Retrozilla (FF2) with an empty tab:
it's secretly connecting to 4 RSS feeds, from Mozilla and BBC!
(And as soon as Tools > Options is opened, then Feed-options, it loads a favicon directly from Google!)

I never had any feedreader installed in this, and the only installed addon during this test was httpfox itself.
Anyone can tell me how to stop this feed-checking at startup completely??
Or perhaps disable completely everything RSS/Feed related?

[roytam1]

4 hours ago, siria said:

Another invaluable addon: a behind-the-scenes traffic checker.
Just tried httpfox (which of course will get deleted very soon too):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/httpfox/

Surprise:
so that's why the my system's network icon is blinking when opening Retrozilla (FF2) with an empty tab:
it's secretly connecting to 4 RSS feeds, from Mozilla and BBC!
(And as soon as Tools > Options is opened, then Feed-options, it loads a favicon directly from Google!)

I never had any feedreader installed in this, and the only installed addon during this test was httpfox itself.
Anyone can tell me how to stop this feed-checking at startup completely??
Or perhaps disable completely everything RSS/Feed related?

 

bookmark toolbar has RSS of latest news, if you don't need it you can just delete that entry.

[siria]

roytam1 said:

bookmark toolbar has RSS of latest news, if you don't need it you can just delete that entry.

Incredible... I would never have suspected a bookmark (!) could be the culprit for secret background traffic! Actually it connects to Mozilla and BBC feeds not only at startup, but every 5 minutes, even when I don't touch the computer in the meantime.
And my bookmarks toolbar even isn't enabled, so the bookmark isn't even visible.

But this 'fix' works great - Thanks!

Just wish there were some normal setting available to disable RSS. It certainly should. Also slightly shocked, because such sneaky things which can't be disabled I might expect from a modern browser version, but definitely not yet from FF2 generation.

[cc333]

Finally gave this a try tonight, and it works nicely compared to IE 6!

My test environment is a VirtualBox VM running 98 SE.

Google seems to work well, as well as a few other sites, but several other sites seem broken, but that's due primarily to outdated CSS and JS I think.

I think the mobile versions might work better, but I'd like to maybe have the user agent set on a per-site basis. I can do this on modern FF just fine (lots of plugins), but are there any such plugins that are still available for something so old?

c

[siria]

cc333 said:

Google seems to work well, as well as a few other sites, but several other sites seem broken, but that's due primarily to outdated CSS and JS I think.

I think the mobile versions might work better, but I'd like to maybe have the user agent set on a per-site basis. I can do this on modern FF just fine (lots of plugins), but are there any such plugins that are still available for something so old?

About bad layouts, userstyles can help a lot. Would be really lost without them, adding new snippets to adblock.css all the time, but so far that's on a FF3.5 sibling browser (KM1.6). Didn't try them on Retrozilla yet, because so far it's only a backup browser to visit broken https-sites (10-20%), so haven't done much tweaking there yet, but expect css-tweaks will help a lot in RZ too.

Regarding plugins, if you mean addons, Firefox-addons for FF2 still work, am using 2-3 so far. There are still a few to be found on addons.mozilla.org. Am currently trying to grab together a little collection for personal use, in various versions for FF2, 3.5, 9, 24 etc., before they will not be accessible anymore. Like quickjava (JS-Toggle and others), user agent switcher (only global/ by Pederick), httpfox (traffic), Stylish (userstyles), and for slightly newer FF-versions "Block Content", PrefBar, Dom-Inspector, Greasemonkey etc.
No time to test them yet, just trying to hunt down and store some important ones. And perhaps can use them later as examples to copy and tweak myself, as already tried with quickjava.

The big problem:
as far as I know Mozilla is going to DELETE all own addons in just a few days (Sep.5), unless they have changed the date again? Am not quite uptodate on the matter, anyone know more details?
Or about any rescue attempts for the tens of thousands "Legacy Addons" for Firefox?
Yet even if they get all saved, am afraid they probably only backup newer ones, hardly all versions way back to FF2.

[M()zart]

There is a project to "save" old addons:

https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive/

Currently they are only catalog of addons with links to AMO and webarchive, but they promise to run their own repositiry in future.

[siria]

Thanks. Let's hope it works, just wish I could be more confident. It's such an enourmous workload, and also have read somewhere that MTobin is involved. But at least the deletion date of all traditional FF-addons is now set a few weeks later, at October-5:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/177521-reminder-firefox-52-esr-goes-eol-september-5-2018/?do=findComment&comment=1153562

Another prob, if someone can help:
how to get this tiny cute mousegestures addon installed in Retrozilla?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microgesture/

Tried v1.0 and 1.4, but RZ complains that "signing could not be verified".
First attempt was adding "xpinstall.signatures.required=false", but has no effect
Then tried deleting the META-INF folder in the xpi, and in install.rdf removed the "-signed" in the version-em.

Now RZ2-FF accepted it, but has zero function. As soon as I press the right mousebutton, the contextmenu pops up.
And RZ2.2-SM still doesn't install it, instead reports "install script not found"

Next attempt, added Target Seamonkey in install.rdf, but still same result. No install script.
Also confused: how are addons managed in RZ2.2-SM? Find no menu, and "about:addons" is invalid?

[jassenna]

On October 8, 2017 roytam1 said:

>New build which is working in Win95 OSR2!
>http://o.rthost.cf/gpc/files1.rt/rzbrowser-tls12-20171008.7z

>Updated files are available here: https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla/issues/7#issuecomment-334985097

 Congratulations.

It worked fine in Windows 98SE without any extensions, smoothly displacing Firefox 2..0.20.

All options, history, bookmarks and extensions were kept.

There are still some problems:

1) With very long webpages, it sometimes stops responding, and has to be killed.

 I first noticed this when looking at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

2) I could not post this comment sooner because Retro garbles the msfn login page

and other msfn pages are also poorly rendered.  So I had to use other computer.

This is not worse than with FF 2.0.20, but a newer version of Gecko would be nice.

 

 

The github site link names a .zip file, but the file the link points to

has the extension .docx.  Is this right? 

 

 Machine: 300MHZ Pentium 2, with 288MB of RAM.

 

[roytam1]

2 hours ago, jassenna said:

On October 8, 2017 roytam1 said:

>New build which is working in Win95 OSR2!
>http://o.rthost.cf/gpc/files1.rt/rzbrowser-tls12-20171008.7z

>Updated files are available here: https://github.com/rn10950/RetroZilla/issues/7#issuecomment-334985097

 Congratulations.

It worked fine in Windows 98SE without any extensions, smoothly displacing Firefox 2..0.20.

All options, history, bookmarks and extensions were kept.

There are still some problems:

1) With very long webpages, it sometimes stops responding, and has to be killed.

 I first noticed this when looking at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

2) I could not post this comment sooner because Retro garbles the msfn login page

and other msfn pages are also poorly rendered.  So I had to use other computer.

This is not worse than with FF 2.0.20, but a newer version of Gecko would be nice.

 

 

The github site link names a .zip file, but the file the link points to

has the extension .docx.  Is this right? 

 

 Machine: 300MHZ Pentium 2, with 288MB of RAM.

 

thats the old build, newer build is here:

 

[siria]

Jasenna said:

300MHZ Pentium 2, with 288MB of RAM
(...)
I could not post this comment sooner because Retro garbles the msfn login page
(...)
and other msfn pages are also poorly rendered. So I had to use other computer.

@Jasenna
From your post it's obvious to me that the msfn-layout is the same desaster for you as for me, due to old OS+browsers.
And those iframe-links are the worst failure, not displaying anything at all, only empty white space - for you too?
If so, this is the link:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/174987-retrozilla-an-updated-version-of-mozilla-for-windows-95-and-nt4-21-released/?page=15&tab=comments#comment-1150700
(I had to dabble with inventing userscripts to get access in old KM1.6)

PS: bbcode tags work here too. For quoting it's possible to manually add [_quote] around some text [_/quote] (without underscore)
And in general it helps a LOT to kill the page style, that makes lots of inaccessible forum links appear again (in FF: View>PageStyle>No Style). And do you have Opera12.02 too? Edited September 21, 2018 by siria

[Nomen]

I downloaded this (Retrozilla-2.1 with TLS 1.2 support: https://o.rthost.cf/gpc/files1.rt/rzbrowser-tls12-20180504.7) and unpacked it and ran it.  It appears identical to my FF 2.0.0.20 version except that it calls itself "Firefox community edition" or something like that.  I think it says version 2.0.0.2.  I don't see TLS 1.2 in the security options.

 

[roytam1]

6 hours ago, Nomen said:

I downloaded this (Retrozilla-2.1 with TLS 1.2 support: https://o.rthost.cf/gpc/files1.rt/rzbrowser-tls12-20180504.7z) and unpacked it and ran it.  It appears identical to my FF 2.0.0.20 version except that it calls itself "Firefox community edition" or something like that.  I think it says version 2.0.0.2.  I don't see TLS 1.2 in the security options.

 

Because it is my own build, not official build.

There is no option to set, just try the sites that is requiring TLS 1.2.

[Nomen]

Here's what I found.

FFCE = Firefox Community edition (Roytam's version)
FFBE = Firefox Bon Echo edition aka 2.0.0.22pre (what I've been using for years)

Differences and similarities (FFCE / FFBE)

TLS 1.3 no / no
TLS 1.2 yes/ no
TLS 1.1 yes/ no
TLS 1.0 yes/yes
SSL 3   yes/yes
SSL 2   no / no

Server Name Indication (SNI) Yes/Yes
Secure Renegotiation     Yes/No
TLS compression     No/No
Session tickets     No/No
OCSP stapling     No/No

Signature algorithms (FFCE):
SHA256/RSA, SHA384/RSA, SHA1/RSA, SHA256/ECDSA, SHA384/ECDSA, SHA1/ECDSA, SHA256/DSA, SHA1/DSA

Signature algorithms (FFBE):
none listed?

Named Groups (FFCE same as FFBE):
secp256r1, secp384r1, secp521r1

Next Protocol Negotiation No/No
Application Layer Protocol Negotiation No/No
SSL 2 handshake compatibility    No/No

Cipher Suites (in order of preference)

Both list same ciphers, but different order

[jassenna]

@siria
You said:
-->From your post it's obvious to me that the msfn-layout is the same desaster
--> for you as for me, due to old OS+browsers.
I don't know whether it is the same, but it is certainly a disaster.

--> And those iframe-links are the worst failure, not displaying anything at all,
--> only empty white space - for you too?
No, I think both FF2.0.20 and Retro support iframes, but never
really checked by comparing the page source to the display
in this case.

--> (I had to dabble with inventing userscripts to get access in old KM1.6)
Would you please explain better what you mean by this ?

--> And in general it helps a LOT to kill the page style, that makes lots of
--> inaccessible forum links appear again (in FF: View>PageStyle>No Style).
Some pages appear better without style, some with basic page style.
Anyway, I could login at MSFN using Retro without style, but could
not post.
I am using FF27 under Linux in this same machine to write and post this reply.

--> And do you have Opera12.02 too?
No, and I thought that the last version of Opera that
worked under Win98 without extensions was 9-something.

Edited October 24, 2018 by jassenna
typos

[Nomen]

Regarding Retrozilla-2.1 (Firefox Community edition) - is it just me, or has the DOM inspector been removed?