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Firefox 24 - 52 for ME and 98


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You might have better luck trying with a SeaMonkey build with an engine that matches FF24. SeaMonkey is slightly more stable than FF (hence why I use it instead of FF on Windows 2000, for example).

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I think you misunderstood me a little. Now I'm running FF 31.8 fast, almost always stable, the pages are loading as fast as on XP. JS generally works, of course you find JS errors in the console. Errors also occur in Opera 12.02. I'm pretty happy with that. The problem I mentioned before is that the "Speed Dial" -  Opera calls it Speed Dial - can cause the crash. But, if I set "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to false, the "Speed Dial" isn't available. I also don't use this function in Opera. Yes, I already tried Seamonkey (...2.32, 2.33), but I don't see any advantage in comparison with FF here.

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3 hours ago, schwups said:

I think you misunderstood me a little. Now I'm running FF 31.8 fast, almost always stable, the pages are loading as fast as on XP. JS generally works, of course you find JS errors in the console. Errors also occur in Opera 12.02. I'm pretty happy with that. The problem I mentioned before is that the "Speed Dial" -  Opera calls it Speed Dial - can cause the crash. But, if I set "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to false, the "Speed Dial" isn't available. I also don't use this function in Opera. Yes, I already tried Seamonkey (...2.32, 2.33), but I don't see any advantage in comparison with FF here.

Personal preference tbh. The SM UI is better for me. And I had resorted to SM when things went awry with FF. I personally don’t like FF at all, was my browser after Netscapes demise and IEs downfall when Google Chrome came. But I finally ditched it when MS Edge came in.

But on older Windows, I’d rather go SeaMonkey since it has a similar netscape UI (nostalgia) and has been generally more stable than FF for me.

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Actually, I will try out all SM versions until the one that stopped working for me (because of address bar not working until I reset my profile every time I use) to find out the “sweet spot”.

As for JavaScript, even patching Windows 98 to use more RAM, the patch alone won’t make things better. I believe the browser is having a hard time trying to deal with the amount of JS bs. Increasing the FF cache size isn’t helping either.

(As a direct comparison, my RPi 3 has 1GB of ram at disposal for Raspbian and isn’t suffering that much to render them on latest FF)

Edited by Bruninho
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1 hour ago, Bruninho said:

Actually, I will try out all SM versions until the one that stopped working for me (because of address bar not working until I reset my profile every time I use) to find out the “sweet spot”.

I don't need to reset my profile. Did you try that - FF28+ (Seamonkey 2.25): With the first run remove Google from the search engine Manager list, maybe more engines you don't want and set the search.json file quickly to read only. Then add your favorite engines. It's a little bit tricky. This may not work on the first try.

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I have 2 and 3.5 GB Ram here (real machines), but I guess 1GB is sufficient for FF and SM of that era. Mozilla specifies 512MB. My systems: 1. Win ME, G41, Core2Duo, 3,5GB Ram, NV7800GT; 2. ME, i915, Pentium 630, 2 GB Ram, NV7800GT; 3. Win ME, G31, Core2Duo, 3,5GB Ram, NV7900GS

I let FF manage the cache.

Edited by schwups
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Surprised I've found I can start roytam's KM76 on Goanna 3.4.5. It remains offline and the submenus are mainly unreadable - Questionmarks and boxes. I guess a missing font.  Goanna 3 based on Gecko 38esr platform code..............

K_Meleon 75.1 goes online, but has already the submenu font issue. 75.0 hasn't the font glitch and is also 31esr based. It runs but seem to have similar quirks as KM74.

Edited by schwups
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On 5/6/2020 at 12:02 PM, schwups said:

I don't need to reset my profile. Did you try that - FF28+ (Seamonkey 2.25): With the first run remove Google from the search engine Manager list, maybe more engines you don't want and set the search.json file quickly to read only. Then add your favorite engines. It's a little bit tricky. This may not work on the first try.

That does work! However SM still crashes A LOT with JS enabled. I have even disabled hardware acceleration for the browser, no luck. So I disabled JS for now.

I was testing SeaMonkey 2.32, quite stable if you ask me now. Just don't run JS. For me this is strange. I know the browser can understand the jQuery calls (most of them) and modern JS. I still think it's a caching related problem, either that or the OS can't handle the amount of scripts involved in any website.

I loaded VOGONS forums, MSFN forums, I just didn't attempt to login or post. And FF 31.8 ESR works the same way as SM 2.32. No JS.

I am starting to think that Netscape 9 with roytam1's NSS updates is better even thou it's outdated. FF 3.6 and K-Meleon are also on the same boat as Netscape 9.

Edited by Bruninho
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Bruninho said:
> However SM still crashes A LOT with JS enabled. I have even disabled
> hardware acceleration for the browser, no luck. So I disabled JS for now.
> I was testing SeaMonkey 2.32, quite stable if you ask me now. Just don't run JS.
> For me this is strange. I know the browser can understand the jQuery calls (most of them)
> and modern JS. I still think it's a caching related problem, either that or the OS can't handle
> the amount of scripts involved in any website.

If that means you can't enable ANY javascript at all, it might be worth testing some partial blocks, not only all-or-nothing. Yes I know that will also partly kill functions, but better as none at all.

On about:config page, would start with toggling off prefs containing:
"jit" (for older engines until 26)
".ion" (younger engines since 27, note the dot to reduce hits)

and all "workers" prefs

Further tests perhaps try blocking:
default content block permissions are hidden out of box, must be created manually on aboutconfig (as INT).
Values are 0 or 1 (all allowed), 2 (all blocked), 3 (only same domain)
permissions.default.script (only affects external scripts, loaded from a "src" link)
permissions.default.xmlhttprequest
permissions.default.xbl
permissions.default.indexedDB
or same prefix for ...object...ping...beacon...font...

dom.storage.enabled
svg.enabled

indexedDB reminds me that SQLITE is completely broken in my KG74, absolute KILLER for history and lots of other crucial stuff. But my main KG74 version is probably not the latest one by RT, only tried newer ones shortly and found they don't help, so postponed due to time probs.

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On 5/8/2020 at 10:31 AM, siria said:

Bruninho said:
> However SM still crashes A LOT with JS enabled. I have even disabled
> hardware acceleration for the browser, no luck. So I disabled JS for now.
> I was testing SeaMonkey 2.32, quite stable if you ask me now. Just don't run JS.
> For me this is strange. I know the browser can understand the jQuery calls (most of them)
> and modern JS. I still think it's a caching related problem, either that or the OS can't handle
> the amount of scripts involved in any website.

If that means you can't enable ANY javascript at all, it might be worth testing some partial blocks, not only all-or-nothing. Yes I know that will also partly kill functions, but better as none at all.

On about:config page, would start with toggling off prefs containing:
"jit" (for older engines until 26)
".ion" (younger engines since 27, note the dot to reduce hits)

and all "workers" prefs

Further tests perhaps try blocking:
default content block permissions are hidden out of box, must be created manually on aboutconfig (as INT).
Values are 0 or 1 (all allowed), 2 (all blocked), 3 (only same domain)
permissions.default.script (only affects external scripts, loaded from a "src" link)
permissions.default.xmlhttprequest
permissions.default.xbl
permissions.default.indexedDB
or same prefix for ...object...ping...beacon...font...

dom.storage.enabled
svg.enabled

indexedDB reminds me that SQLITE is completely broken in my KG74, absolute KILLER for history and lots of other crucial stuff. But my main KG74 version is probably not the latest one by RT, only tried newer ones shortly and found they don't help, so postponed due to time probs.

I tried to apply that with most of what I could find in about:config. It did improve browsing on certain pages. Except for the main brazilian news site, Globo.com, It hang up (I bet they rely too much on a JS framework, because I was interviewed by them for a job there last year and they did ask about it). I'll check now on FF, I was testing SM

EDIT: The browsing experience did improve a bit. I'm impressed. Maybe, with actually a good write-up of about:config tweaks (maybe it deserves a topic?) for older browsers, maybe opening up an excel spreadsheet containing the tweaks for each version to make public available? Then browsing on Win 98 + KernelEx could be better. I am just missing the video plugins used by Youtube. The most interesting thing is that maybe if I install the same version on Windows 2000 I should get them. Currently My Win 2000 runs a tweaked SM 2.46.5 to look like Netscape, and the browser works great in 2020.

Edited by Bruninho
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14 hours ago, Bruninho said:

The browsing experience did improve a bit. I'm impressed. Maybe, with actually a good write-up of about:config tweaks (maybe it deserves a topic?) for older browsers, maybe opening up an excel spreadsheet containing the tweaks for each version to make public available?

Something akin to @looking4awayout's UOC patch, perhaps.

It could even be something based on it directly, but tweaked to be more suitable to Windows 9x/ME.  It's open source I think?  Maybe with looking4awayout's blessing, it could happen with some research.

c

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1 hour ago, cc333 said:

Something akin to @looking4awayout's UOC patch, perhaps.

It could even be something based on it directly, but tweaked to be more suitable to Windows 9x/ME.  It's open source I think?  Maybe with looking4awayout's blessing, it could happen with some research.

c

It's for 38 ESR based browsers, but very likely many of the prefs are also suitable for FF31 or 35.

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