Old Sony, Browsers, Deviantart, MP4, Roytam1?

[GusCE6]

Once I gain any any talent in recompiling browsers (ain't going to happen if I don't get some starter instructions and help) there are a number of things I'd like to try:

 

1) Don't woryy about the ASUS and working on browsers. I can assure you that will be NO problem, not for a laptop that can run "World of Tanks" with library wifi on best settings- on a USB stick.

2) My goal is to make old hardware useful again. THE main thing for most people would be a good browser able to do things on the Internet.

3) One obvious thing to try would be a browser that acts like Opera Mini but is not a proxy browser. In this case it would also simply filter out anything the user wants to filter out, and this would include a document- say an XLM document- you would add things to, say "google analytics," whatever. My version would also include something like "*qualtrics.com" so if ANYTHING includes that last part it will be excluded- so making a dynamic random sequence will not work. It would not show anything animated, no videos, etc. UNLESS you click on it. A tag with "MP4" would appear telling you about such a thing, ideally if such a stream could be shunted through a standalone media player old devices could do it.

NOTE: This is not just a theory. Several years ago, using the ever-reliable ASUS, I isolated the streaming URL of "The Rockford Files"- MP4 AVC H.264 240p- plugged the url into the TCPMP Player on the crummy Windows CE netbook with its available 42MB RAM...and it worked perfectly. In that way the Sony could do better.

4) Again, a way to get audio-only. On Twitch TV some streams do not go below 720p, once or twice I saw 1080p; there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that will ever work on an old laptop- for 1080p even the ASUS has trouble at that site- but audio-only? In theory at least should work. Twitch Radio vs. Nothing At All, not a difficult choice, no?

5) My best bet is to first start working on simple modifications- getting my feet wet. By the way, it seems I was wrong, Palemoon 28 does not work fully with Deviantart, unless I am doing something wrong.

[Humming Owl]

5 hours ago, GusCE6 said:

Once I gain any any talent in recompiling browsers (ain't going to happen if I don't get some starter instructions and help) there are a number of things I'd like to try:

Hello,

I wasn't planning on making this comment as I have no experience with Firefox based browsers or the process of compiling them, but since no one has answered your question directly, I want to give a bit of information that may be helpful for what you are trying to accomplish (I really don't know if it will be helpful at all, I hope it is). Firstly, I am very excited to see what you are going to do, not everyone wants to tackle the real problems, only a few have the guts and inspiration to do something like this. Secondly, the approach I took is very tough. I will mention the tools I used to modify the binary files of 360EE (a browser based on Chromium). This method should be the last one to consider because it is better to deal with the source code of the program you want to modify and then compile it (but it also requires a better understanding of the programming languages in which the program is written). But even if you don't want to take this approach (it may result in failure, as it is extremely limited what you can do) some of the mentioned tools may be useful.

I believe the source codes of these browsers are all available in some Github repository. One of them --> https://github.com/roytam1/palemoon27

I think there are others here --> https://github.com/roytam1

 

Tools:

HxD --> A Hexadecimal editor that can help to modify binary files (DLLs for example) --> https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

7zip --> A very useful compressor/decompressor that can help you decompress a lot of files that you wouldn't think can be treated as compressed --> https://www.7-zip.org

WinMerge --> A text editor that can find differences between files in different folders and can help you edit those files at the same time --> https://winmerge.org/

Resource Hacker --> A program that can partially open an EXE or DLL file and can extract images or change the properties of them --> http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/

grepWin --> A very good tool that can search a word inside several files at the same time (you can add many parameters to those searches) --> https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

Diff Checker --> Same as WinMerge but it is online --> https://www.diffchecker.com/diff

Online Unicode Tools --> Helps you translate between various types of text encodings --> https://onlineunicodetools.com

 

I was looking a while ago for a decompiler for DLL files but I had no luck because the ones I got were for files compiled under a specific language.

For example --> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5197397/how-do-i-decompile-a-dll-file

 

What you can do with this kind of tools is to open almost any file you want and try to locate the entries that are not messed up by the compilation process and that you can edit to make a modification. Unfortunately it is very limited what you can see or edit, but that is not something that should stop you. I don't know if there is some kind of translator for that messed up code into something readable.

To compile (at least Windows Palemoon 27) you need what is mentioned at the following site --> https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=13556

I imagine the compilation process will be similar for other Firefox based browsers.

I will be digging into some more information about Firefox based browsers to see if I can help with anything else (sorry if I wasted your time with this, I like to see someone wanting to do things on their own and wanted to express some of my excitement trying to help even if it is bad information).

Cheers.

[GusCE6]

I have tried that plugin to filter out unwanted sites and the results on Deviantart.com have been very disappointing so far- except for one thing.

 

I do not know what "static.parastorage.com" is used for, but it is absolutely the problem. You cannot filter out any aspect of it, and if you simply exclude it you cannot Reply, Comment, Journal, or Literature- which means you're better off using Palemoon 27.

 

When that server is involved it makes everything hopelessly slow on old hardware.