Jump to content

Backporting newer browsers to Win9X with KernelEx


Recommended Posts

Never saw a KM74-version "for windows9x", only KM74-goanna "for win2000"
It should run well there. Didn't hear about black screens, but perhaps a compat-setting? Or hardware acceleration?
pref layers.acceleration.disabled (try true), or layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled (try false)? No idea, just guessing ;-)

On Win98SE KM74-goanna also "starts" yes, but only unofficial, and only with advanced KernelEx-version and compat-setting for Win2000. And yes, on win98 I also have the same bookmark- and history bugs as Firefox9, as described on this KernelEx wiki page:

http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox

Firefox 4.0 - 9.0.1 (KernelEx 4.5.2 required):


Notice: Recently visited addresses, history and bookmarks don't work. For using bookmarks it's possible to install the add-on PlainOldFavorites latest version 1.2.1 (now compatible with Firefox 5-9). Restart Firefox twice and allow the installation of the add-on. There is another add-on HyperBK with bookmark functionality and history. You have the possibility to hide the Firefox bookmarks menu.



Haven't tried the addons yet, but planning to. Must at least download them before all traditional Firefox addons get deleted around Oct.5

Access to https-sites work well for me, after having copied over 3 *.db files from another (older) geckobrowser profile. And then deleted as usual the StartupCache folder and restarted. This https-security bug makes that "key3.db" cannot be created. My impression is that prob isn't caused by the browser itself, but by KernelEx17, because my other (older) browsers started having that prob too, but only since that KernelEx update.

Webpage access and display I find quite good, but the browser itself very buggy yet on Win98, crashing every few minutes :( It gets a bit better after switching on the menubar, and switching to the Klassic skin, but still crashing far too often. Usually when just moving the mouse, and the error reports mostly something with "MSVC...dll"
And it has another weird and annoying bug: for each and every link that is contained on a page, it waits a bit, and those meditation-breaks are cumulative. My local homepage contains about 100 links, and all other browsers load it in 1sec, but KM74-goanna needs forever - loading time grows parallel to the number of links. All prefetch-and preload-settings I could find are long since switched off. And even if the whole browser is set offline, it doesn't make any difference.

@cov3rt
If you have Win2000 with kernelex wrappers, did you also try roytams KM77/KM76-goanna?
Someone said it works for him on such a system. May be a bit heavy though, don't know. This is currently the most advanced K-Meleon version for any system, if I got it right with the similar or same engine as in NewMoon27

Otherwise, in Win98, one of the best browsers until recently was Opera12.02. Runs very stable, needs only basic KernelEx, and compat set to Win2000 too. In its time it must have been one of the most advanced engines, because it contains quite a few html5 features, and even today it can still solve reCaptcha monsters! It also could load many more sites as other old browsers which long since produced only "cypher errors", but meanwhile Opera is failing too, the TLS1.2 probs are growing, sigh...

As for "weird characters" showing up in pages, do you have an example page? Suspecting those hundred prefs with "charset". Heard that today UTF-8 is mostly used, older european pages also like ISO-8859-15
Link to comment
Share on other sites


@diamant: K-Meleon bookmarks are implemented as a plugin, so quite modular. Try using bookmarks.dll from an earlier version of KM.

@siria: Try reverting each of the KernelEx .17 kexbase* DLLs to .16 (one at a time).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, cov3rt said:

i had the same issues you had pretty much, i was using firefox 9.01 earlier on 98SE when youtube was also working not too long ago but not only does youtube not work anymore but also those other issues you mentioned started showing up, basically making the web browser almost completely broken, i do not remember the exact functionality, but one huge problem was the "encoding" that causes letters to be typed in strange characters in certain sites such as youtube, i was told to check if one of the settings was set to true and it was, yet i still had the strange character problem. 

For me, youtube is still(!) working in FF 9.0.1. A general problem seems to be that youtube (and other sites with videos) have started to "eliminate" Adobe's Flash player, which worked fine. Howewer, fullscreen mode in youtube doesn't work, but that's better than nothing. As far as I remember I had changed something in Firefox' about:config regarding media(?) to prevent videos from jerking, but I'm not sure.

Regarding to the "strange characters problem":

I had have exactly the same problem with Firefox 9.0.1, too. If I remember correctly (I'm not sure whether I will now forget something):

My solution was to copy the font-file MICROSS.TTF (Microsoft Sans Serif Standard v1.33) into the Windows\Fonts folder and to add the following into the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Fonts]
"Microsoft Sans Serif Standard (TrueType)"="MICROSS.TTF"

That was the most important thing what made FF9 usable (even more than FF 3.6) for me. For bookmarks functionality, I use HyperBK. It works almost exactly like original Firefox bookmarks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, siria said:

Never saw a KM74-version "for windows9x"

I got a version from here k-meleon-74-windows-9x-edition from roytam.

I'll try your tip with the db-files. Maybe some files from firefox are working(?).

21 hours ago, siria said:

https-security bug makes that "key3.db" cannot be created. My impression is that prob isn't caused by the browser itself, but by KernelEx17, because my other (older) browsers started having that prob too, but only since that KernelEx update.

I also found out a strange behaviour. For tests I wanted to create a new firefox 9.0.1 profile. But it didn't work; I got the same error like with Kmeleon:security_component.png.08b9ec0ca957ed8fdd3e3a4269a05fea.png

However, my "old" firefox 9.0.1 profile did still work.

After downgrading KernelEx from 2016.17 to 4.5.2 that strange "security-component"-error was gone away!

So I suppose it has something to do with 2016.17-version; maybe only one file. Also with an older version 2015.xx(?) from KernelEx I had tested with new FF-profiles and had never have such security-component-errors.

Presumably KMeleon 74 won't work with any older KernelEx version than 2016.17, but I'll try to change every *.dll from it separately.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

So I suppose it has something to do with 2016.17-version; maybe only one file. Also with an older version 2015.xx(?) from KernelEx I had tested with new FF-profiles and had never have such security-component-errors.

Presumably KMeleon 74 won't work with any older KernelEx version than 2016.17, but I'll try to change every *.dll from it separately.

 

@diamant: I already testet it in June (see my post of 12 June). Downgrade the Kexbases.dll to version 16. We'll see, if you get the same result. 

 

Edited by schwups
Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, diamant said:

For me, youtube is still(!) working in FF 9.0.1. A general problem seems to be that youtube (and other sites with videos) have started to "eliminate" Adobe's Flash player, which worked fine. Howewer, fullscreen mode in youtube doesn't work, but that's better than nothing. As far as I remember I had changed something in Firefox' about:config regarding media(?) to prevent videos from jerking, but I'm not sure.

Regarding to the "strange characters problem":

I had have exactly the same problem with Firefox 9.0.1, too. If I remember correctly (I'm not sure whether I will now forget something):

My solution was to copy the font-file MICROSS.TTF (Microsoft Sans Serif Standard v1.33) into the Windows\Fonts folder and to add the following into the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Fonts]
"Microsoft Sans Serif Standard (TrueType)"="MICROSS.TTF"

That was the most important thing what made FF9 usable (even more than FF 3.6) for me. For bookmarks functionality, I use HyperBK. It works almost exactly like original Firefox bookmarks.

this is interesting, makes me want to reconsider testing 98SE again with firefox 9.01 and the font-file modifications you mentioned, i made a mistake though on mentioning youtube playback not working, video playback still works as you mentioned as i just tested firefox 9.01 on windows 7 64 bit, however, because i had those earlier font problems on 98SE, this made me not use firefox 9.01, even though the video playback did still work.

for the font related problem, i did not find that "MICROSS.TTF" file in my windows 7 system, even though youtube worked just fine, maybe that's a 9x specific file or something? i guess i'll just have to test a 98SE system hopefully in the near future. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cannot tell anything about youtube text, but if you want that micross font, this is what I just took from my 98SE files. The file is dating from 2006, font version 5.0
http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=18277447285122980066

As for the kernelex drivers, not sure how to go about testing, but glad diamant is volunteering, will wait for his result :)

Regarding KM74-Goanna, someone figured out a few weeks ago that the SQLITE-version in it was wrong, didn't match. No wonder bookmarks and history etc. are completely broken, everything which is stored in sqlite files.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On Montag, 3. September 2018 at 11:17 AM, schwups said:

@diamant: I already testet it in June (see my post of 12 June). Downgrade the Kexbases.dll to version 16. We'll see, if you get the same result. 

 

I've downgraded all KernelEx-files to version 16. Result: The security-component-errors don't occur again.

Even Kmeleon does (principially) work with that version of KernelEx, but it's a little bit buggy, and e.g. youtube doesn't work properly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On Montag, 3. September 2018 at 7:43 PM, cov3rt said:

for the font related problem, i did not find that "MICROSS.TTF" file in my windows 7 system, even though youtube worked just fine, maybe that's a 9x specific file or something? i guess i'll just have to test a 98SE system hopefully in the near future. 

As far as I remember correctly it's a font file from WinXP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Same result here. It seems they've changed something regarding HTML5(?). Although Firefox 9.0.1 is principially able to play HTML5-embedded videos, youtube is no longer working.
A current workaround: You could create a so-called bookmarklet (i.e. a bookmark) with the following URL:

javascript:(function(d){d.PwnBkmkVer=3;d.body.appendChild(d.createElement('script')).src='https://deturl.com/ld.asp?'+1*new%20Date;})(document);

You have to call this link while a youtube video is "playing" (better: is not playing) and you will get some links with the video in several file formats.
It's advantageous to have the addon HyperBK installed to have bookmarks in FF 9.0.1.
Maybe it's possible to associate the file extension "mp4" to any media player of your choice directly in firefox; if you don't want to save the video, but only to view it.

The mp4-files from youtube work even with the good old MCP (Media Player Classic) 6.4.9.1 revision 82.

Disadvantage: You have to wait until the video is fully downloaded. I.e. a video doesn't start immediately, because the videos in mp4-format are not streamed in real time.
Any ideas how to achieve that?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The same applies to roytam's KM74. Youtube doesn't work. The booklet workaround is Ok, but it takes to much time. For some reason I can't install HyperBK (0.5.3 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hyperbk/) on FF9.0.1. Maybe I have a wrong setting or I've forgotten a trick. Firefox reports it isn't compatible.

 

Edited by schwups
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Managed to get HyperBK installed on 9.0.1 after manually downloading it, opening the package in WinRAR and editing maxVersion in install.rdf. Seems to work OK on 9.0.1, although I had to do a lot of messing around to get the JS bookmark added. Had to create a normal bookmark, export it, edit the URL in a text editor, then reimport it. After all that, it doesn't seem to do anything.

Was thinking it was maybe something to do with missing codecs, however the YouTube HTML5 test is reporting both HTMLVideoElement and WebM VP8 as working on Firefox 9.0.1. I tested Pale Moon 26.5.0 on an XP VM which has the same combination, and it seems to be playing videos OK.


 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

awww, wow, just when i thought youtube would have worked properly in a straightforward manner on firefox 9.01, now apparently it requires all sorts of other complicated / custom modifications, excluding the font fix which i have not tested yet, hmmm...., i may have to just go directly to using windows 2000 but i'll have to see.

i still don't understand this whole compatibility thing, like why do they have to change all these browser settings, why can't they leave an option for backwards compatibility? is it simply a security reason or more important reasons, like d***, i still can't get over when youtube still worked on windows 95, even though i believe it was limited to 240p quality.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...