Firefox 24 - 52 for ME and 98

[tyukok]

Here's something I've noticed while going through old Firefox release notes:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/44.0/releasenotes/

Quote

Enable H.264 if system decoder is available

Enable WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don't support MP4/H.264

I know that Youtube supports VP9 encoding. So I figured I could finally watch videos on it instead of downloading them and watching them offline.

I went to about:config, changed "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" to "true", restarted the browser, went to Youtube, and it actually worked! You can even change video quality.

[schwups]

YouTube still works with default media prefs on FF 43+ here. So far I haven't dealt intensively with this item.

[schwups]

I checked "media.mediasource.webm.enabled";true successfully with FF42.

[tyukok]

I found a way to enable YT in Firefox 3x, too: you need to change "media.mediasource.enabled" to true in about:config.

Also, looks like Greasemonkey doesn't work properly in FF4x - you can install it, but none of the userscripts seem to work.

[schwups]

8 hours ago, tyukok said:

I found a way to enable YT in Firefox 3x, too: you need to change "media.mediasource.enabled" to true in about:config.

I tried it on the fast, so only superficially.

35.01 and 33.1.1=> good

32.0.3 => useful, no audio after moving forward

28 and 31.8 => rather useless - different errors occurred: sluggish, only Audio or only video or stucks, only the player is loaded

27.0.1 => no playback

Edited November 25, 2020 by schwups

[athlonxpuser]

Hey, I wonder what I'm doing wrong since all of this doesn't seem to work for me. I have installed Win 98 SE with all updates and KernelEx + current Core updates. I already tried Firefox versions 31.8, 35.0.1, 32.0.3 and a few others 3x versions. They can open at least but as soon as I open a website, the browser just freezes and doesn't respond anymore. Of course I set the firefox.exe and xul.dll to Win XP SP2 compatibility. I also tried versions 45.9 and 46.0.2 (with the required DLL files copied from Win XP SP3) but they crash immediately and just give me a message to send an error report. What could I be doing wrong?

[schwups]

It could be hardware related. What's your CPU (instruction set - SSE?, SSE2?, SSE3? ..., chipset and graphics card (VRAM?). How much Ram do you have fitted? Or is it a VM? Did you have disabled the "NewTabPage"? Make sure that have choosen WinXPSP2 and not legacy WinXPSP2. We still have far too few tests!!! Try to install QuickJava and check with CS or JS disabled.

[athlonxpuser]

Test system is an asrock 775i65g, celeron 450 (core2-based, supports SSE2 and SSE3), gpu is the integrated Intel 82865G for now... I installed 2GB of RAM using Rloew's Ram Patch but I had only 512 MB before without the patch and it also didn't work. Disabling newtabpage in about:config didn't really make any difference for me. Yeah I have definitely picked WinXPSP2 and not legacy. With Javascript disabled it certainly seems to work better and most pages can load, however when it's enabled not even google or bing will work without freezing, while some people here can even watch youtube so there definitely must be something wrong on my side.

[schwups]

Thanks for testing. The Celeron 450 should be good, but it isn't in the CPU Support List of your board.? Maybe the Integrated Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 82865G is too weak. A good AGP card is worth a try. 2GB Ram must be enough. Ok, it is a real machine and not a VM.

[athlonxpuser]

Yes I know the cpu isn't in the official support list but it was working completely fine under Win7 and Win XP... same for other cpus like Pentium E5800, they also work fine even though they are not listed. Apart from the issues with Firefox, the system also runs fine on Windows 98 SE. I can browse the web with IE6 (very limited amount of sites still works) and Retrozilla (the updated version with TLS 1.2 etc) which actually isn't that bad.  Yeah during the next days I will try a different AGP gpu like Radeon 9800 Pro or geforce 6800 to see if that makes any difference.

[schwups]

New Test: Now I run FF48 on a noticeable slower machine also with the view to YouTube: Asus P4V800D-X, VIA PT880Ultra, Pentium 4 C Northwood - SSE2, NV5900XT AGP8x + driver NV82.16 / Win ME. YT: I don't have video here, only audio. The player remains black or turns white and disappears. Apart from that the YT page loads completely. ME isn't fresh, it is an old installation. It is quite possible that I've something wrong in that system.

[tyukok]

6 minutes ago, schwups said:

New Test: Now I run FF48 on a noticeable slower machine also with the view to YouTube: Asus P4V800D-X, VIA PT880Ultra, Pentium 4 C Northwood - SSE2, NV5900XT AGP8x + driver NV82.16 / Win ME. YT: I don't have video here, only audio. The player remains black or turns white and disappears. Apart from that the YT page loads completely. ME isn't fresh, it is an old installation. It is quite possible that I've something wrong in that system.

Interesting. Try using the last official drivers - 81.98. From what I've heard, unofficial drivers can get pretty unreliable at times.

Also, try it on FF47.0.1 without enabling hardware acceleration.

[schwups]

Yes video works , when I turn hardware acceleration off on this machine. Then of course the ui glitch is back.
The driver makes no difference (NV81.98/82.16/82.69). I have been using 82.16 for more than ten years. It is as good as 81.98.
82.69 has a known bug in nvopengl.dll. But as I said, the driver doesn't matter in this case.

The Firefox.exe CPU consumption at times reaches over 90 percent on YT playback.
In contrast, the consumption of the Core2Duo E8400 Wolfsdale processor is only 30 - 40 percent.

[schwups]

My Asus P4V800D-X has a AGP 8x and a PCIE 4x slot. So I changed the NV5900XT for a NV7800GT PCIE to see what happens.
I enabled hardware acceleration in Firefox. The result is video basically works with this configuration, so the problem seem to be due of the older 5900XT.
In other words "hardware acceleration" doesn't get along with the 5900XT on Win ME.
Another result is the Pentium 4C is too weak. YT is very sluggish. It's just not fun. Some Vidoes might work with very low resolution. The CPU consumption is too high and it gets too warm.

[athlonxpuser]

I tested two different AGP cards now (9800Pro and 6800GT) but with both of them nothing really changed. With Javascript enabled Firefox freezes instantly whenever I try to load a page and with Javascript disabled it works, kind of. I even tried the much older version 10.0.11 and even there I have exactly the same issues. Doesn't work with Javascript enabled, works without Javascript even though it's kind of laggy and slow at loading pages. I guess I will do a complete reinstall of Win 98 SE... maybe I messed up something while installing all the patches or KernelEx.