MyPal 68

[UCyborg]

On 5/19/2022 at 3:03 AM, cmccaff1 said:

I care more about a code base being fundamentally solid, stable and reliable than anything else, and that is very true of Roy's browsers.

Throughout the years, speaking from my own experience (FX->PM->FX->Basilisk->PM), it often felt like the codebase is held together by duct tape, eg. memory leaks continue to persist. You close all tabs, but the browser process still holds hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

Or take Scratchpad editor's "Pretty print" function for instance, broken that it often breaks the code or craps itself; doesn't understand "let" variable declarations (very common!) and "`", there could be more valid characters / words.

On 5/19/2022 at 8:27 PM, mockingbird said:

WebGL2 fails in about:support, whereas with Serpent, it works if you set it to use D3D9 rather than Angle...  This is accomplished by modifying "webgl.disable-angle" to true...  Serpent falls back to D3D9, and then WebGL2 works.

This doesn't make sense, ANGLE enables D3D9/D3D11 output (only former usable on XP), with "webgl.disable-angle" set to true, OpenGL is used, not D3D9 or D3D11.

Edited May 21, 2022 by UCyborg

[cmccaff1]

1 hour ago, UCyborg said:

Throughout the years, speaking from my own experience (FX->PM->FX->Basilisk->PM), it often felt like the codebase is held together by duct tape, eg. memory leaks continue to persist. You close all tabs, but the browser process still holds hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

Or take Scratchpad editor's "Pretty print" function for instance, broken that it often breaks the code or craps itself; doesn't understand "let" variable declarations (very common!) and "`", there could be more valid characters / words.

I respect your opinion, brother.
Naturally, people's use cases will vary. FX, PM, Basilisk, etc., like any other browser, will never be 'perfect'. For me, I've had very good results over the years with most of the builds I've tried, but a lot of that can be attributed to keeping JavaScript turned off as much as possible, which seems to make a big difference towards speed and security.
Of course, Gecko/Goanna/UXP have had problems in recent years with bloated code bases. Especially if you keep JavaScript turned on, web browsing tends to be a slow experience as the aging JS engines are running into more challenges with badly designed web pages and their abundance of badly coded HTML5, but for all their flaws Gecko/Goanna/UXP still do a respectable job with the modern web.
If I could use something like Firefox 3.6, RetroZilla or Netscape 9 on a daily basis as my all-purpose browser then I absolutely would, because it is frustrating to see how web browsers have had to adjust to accommodate all of these bells/whistles that the incompetent web designers ('script-kiddies') of today like to add to their pages.
There are literally no advantages to how most sites are designed today versus what was possible for browsers to handle back in 2008.
(I could go on, but I don't want to rant.)

Even with its flaws, I'm still using MyPal 29.3 as my main browser, but MyPal 68 is very useful as a secondary option, and I'm happy that both versions can coexist with no problems in the same XP installation.
Unless MyPal 29.3 becomes too outmoded and dated for daily use, it will likely remain my primary browser for the foreseeable future.
It will be exciting to see what improvements are made to MyPal 68 going forward, and what will happen with future MyPal versions.

[UCyborg]

I suspect whatever flaws are lurking there wouldn't be as pronounced if web sites were designed differently. Many sites are unusable without JavaScript. I wonder what would be a good content rich website that works without JavaScript and if leaks are really mostly due to JavaScript. Since these browsers do have a loyal following of developers, surely someone must have thought about checking with debugger where memory allocations stay?

Everything develops at really fast rate, much longer development cycles would be a whole lot better in the general. But we live in this insane hyper-capitalist society that keeps chasing its own tail and can't slow down for one minute and take a good look around to see where the heck it's at.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

11 hours ago, UCyborg said:

it often felt like the codebase is held together by duct tape

Agreed!  That really and truly is the only end possible with an ecosystem that revolves around "nightly" and "weekly" updates.

You cannot properly and adequately "test" software with that release schedule.  Your user-base does the "testing" for you.

Oten resulting in bugs from six months ago being buried very deep because it took six months for the user-base to find it.

Edited May 21, 2022 by NotHereToPlayGames

[AstroSkipper]

1 hour ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

10 hours ago, UCyborg said:

it often felt like the codebase is held together by duct tape

Agreed!  That really and truly is the only end possible with an ecosystem that revolves around "nightly" and "weekly" updates.

You cannot properly and adequately "test" software with that release schedule.  Your user-base does the "testing" for you.

Oten resulting in bugs from six months ago being buried very deep because it took six months for the user-base to find it versus the "coder" that is SUPPOSED TO HAVE BETTER KNOWLEDGE of the "code" but the "coder" didn't have the TIME to "test".

Agreed totally too! Nowadays the user is demoted to be a beta tester. That's one of the reasons I prefer @feodor2's release schedule. The new version of Mypal 68 (68.12.3) seems to have been tested more deeply than browsers with a one week release schedule. Of course, a one month interval for developing and testing doesn't mean all bugs have been eliminated or all missing features have been added , but for me the new release of Mypal 68 seems to be very matured. Anyway, I am very happy about the progress of development. 

Cheers, AstroSkipper

[cmccaff1]

14 hours ago, UCyborg said:

I suspect whatever flaws are lurking there wouldn't be as pronounced if web sites were designed differently. Many sites are unusable without JavaScript. I wonder what would be a good content rich website that works without JavaScript and if leaks are really mostly due to JavaScript. Since these browsers do have a loyal following of developers, surely someone must have thought about checking with debugger where memory allocations stay?

Everything develops at really fast rate, much longer development cycles would be a whole lot better in the general. But we live in this insane hyper-capitalist society that keeps chasing its own tail and can't slow down for one minute and take a good look around to see where the heck it's at.

I completely agree. A lot of websites that used to work well in older browsers are now hard if not impossible to use in a browser that handled them just fine several years before, and there's no logical reason why that should be the case other than to try to push people off of old browsers and old PCs and try to force them to buy something 'new' and 'shiny'.
Planned obsolescence at its worst.
Considering how far back Gecko goes, I can understand why Gecko and its descendants would have trouble with HTML5 and modern 'evolutions' of JavaScript, as Gecko was never meant to run that crap in the first place.
The more bloat that has to be added to a code base, the slower a browser that uses this code base is going to run.

When I look back at archived versions of pages from circa 2008, it's amazing but also depressing to see how much nicer many pages looked back then. Obviously, not all of them were winners, and some sites actually improved with later re-designs, but comparing how most sites looked in 2008 to what they look like today, the 2008-era sites win by a landslide nine times out of ten.
They were (for the most part) simpler, more elegant, and served their purposes effectively.
I have nothing against HTML5 or other modern web technologies, but I do have a serious problem with them being used in such a way that a site literally becomes unusable without a fairly recent browser.

For me, Firefox 3.6 was the last truly great version of Firefox, and in my opinion the 3.x series as a whole was the peak of Firefox overall.
If you count all three versions together, then between the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.0 (in November 2007) and Firefox 3.6's last release in March 2012, that's well over four years of development.
While the people at Mozilla had a great idea with having 'ESR' versions of Firefox (as it brought back emphasis on longer development cycles), my only major gripe with it is that by having it go by every seventh version (10 > 17 > 24 > 31 > etc.), they missed many versions that were the last of their kind that could have benefited more from having ESR status.
For example, 12 was the last version to support Windows 2000 without unofficial kernel updates, 28 was the last pre-Australis version, 48 was the final version that did not require SSE2, and 56 was the last pre-Quantum version.
It would have made more sense to create ESR versions of these, and while I realize there isn't a world's worth of difference between the ESRs that we did get and these versions, it created an interesting dilemma: stick to a 'final' version with a now-deprecated feature, or stay up-to-date with an ESR that continues to get security updates, but is also missing 2 to 4 versions' worth of improvements.
Having 56 as an ESR version and the final version for XP would have been four versions' worth of improvements XP users could have gotten, and it would have been a carrot to dangle for XP users by having the last pre-Quantum version also be the last version for XP (ooh, look at shiny new Quantum--you want it? You gotta get off of XP!)

My apologies for ranting...I'll make sure to stay on topic with any future posts in this thread from here on in, but I just wanted to get these thoughts out. Sometimes it's good to get these things off your chest.

[AstroSkipper]

If I had one wish and it was possible, I would desire support of XUL based extensions in Mypal 68. Then we could install add-ons from both worlds. Truth be told, I miss a lot of my old beloved extensions and in many cases there is no reasonable substitute among web extensions. In the past I created some custom buttons using Javascript, but no chance to get them work in more recent Firefox versions or in Mypal 68. But as I already said it's just a wish which will probably never come true.   

Cheers, AstroSkipper 

[mockingbird]

On 5/20/2022 at 10:27 PM, UCyborg said:

Throughout the years, speaking from my own experience (FX->PM->FX->Basilisk->PM), it often felt like the codebase is held together by duct tape, eg. memory leaks continue to persist. You close all tabs, but the browser process still holds hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

Or take Scratchpad editor's "Pretty print" function for instance, broken that it often breaks the code or craps itself; doesn't understand "let" variable declarations (very common!) and "`", there could be more valid characters / words.

This doesn't make sense, ANGLE enables D3D9/D3D11 output (only former usable on XP), with "webgl.disable-angle" set to true, OpenGL is used, not D3D9 or D3D11.

Please see these screenshots:

Serpent:

 

MyPal:

On a side note, I would like to make a feature suggestion that D3D9 be hacked into Mypal68 if possible...  Notice that in Serpent, the compositor is set to "D3D9", but on Mypal it is set to Basic, since Firefox Quantum had D3D9 removed and replaced with D3D11, which is not available on XP.

Edited May 22, 2022 by mockingbird

[Sampei.Nihira]

Guys would it be possible to see in a screen the difference of the sandbox in the 2 browsers?

TH.

about:support

[dmiranda]

On 5/20/2022 at 10:19 AM, XPerceniol said:

I now have very high hopes for mypal going forward - I'm truly enjoying using this browser and might consider making it default someday soon.

It is indeed working well, with the caveats noted in this thread.  As per about:config stuff, since I don't like quantum, I do not plan to use mypal regularly, so I won't comment except for the following:

You should start with https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/releases/tag/68.0 . All the tricks in our bags are ff52, and by 68 there were enough changes in place. It SEEMS as if dropping this user.js in the profile works (the settings are taken by the browser).

Edited May 22, 2022 by dmiranda

[UCyborg]

4 hours ago, mockingbird said:

MyPal:

Yes, ANGLE is active here and WebGL2 can't work with D3D9 feature set AFAIK. Is that with webgl.disable-angle = true? It may only work by also adding layers.prefer-opengl = true, which forces OpenGL for general webpage compositing and has its own quirks...not exactly the same as with St52 where you can keep D3D9 for webpage compositing.

[XPerceniol]

On 5/20/2022 at 8:25 AM, XPerceniol said:

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-client-hello-the-future-of-esni-in-firefox/

I have added the following prefs manually via the about:config:

network.dns.echconfig.enabled and network.dns.use_https_rr_as_altsvc and network.security.esni.enabled to true, but to no avail.

Thank you @dmiranda ... works well, and you'd be surprised to know I actually took those prefs from Serpent and did them by hand on Mypal68 (I missed some, so thank you for the recommendation) took them one-by-one and reset-by-reset until I got what I was/am looking for. No complaints thus far, but then, after a little while I found myself going back to Arctic Foxie 360v11 as my default and Serpent 2nd and NM 3rd (only use when needed now). Other than the fonts looking a bit strange 'here and there', 360v11 will be my default, but I think as this is early in development, could get better.

After reading my postings, I realized we can't (and likely won't get) a secure connection to 1.1.1.1 or Encrypted dns, I I recall we decided that in 360 Chrome - even though it was available - it was spyware or something, again, just vaguely recall.

network.dns.echconfig.enabled and network.dns.use_https_rr_as_altsvc I added manually, but network.security.esni.(is present, but not working) enabled it to true, but to no avail. I also toggled network.http.altsvc.oe to false (true default)

Sort of wish there were poisondata in Mypal68 canvas, as well.

Appreciate your advice.

Edited May 22, 2022 by XPerceniol

[roytam1]

1 hour ago, XPerceniol said:

network.dns.echconfig.enabled and network.dns.use_https_rr_as_altsvc

why you think they're available in 68esr?

[mockingbird]

7 hours ago, UCyborg said:

Yes, ANGLE is active here and WebGL2 can't work with D3D9 feature set AFAIK. Is that with webgl.disable-angle = true? It may only work by also adding layers.prefer-opengl = true, which forces OpenGL for general webpage compositing and has its own quirks...not exactly the same as with St52 where you can keep D3D9 for webpage compositing.

With Mypal, no it is not using OpenGL as the compositor because it is quirky - as you say...  Everything is shifted up when this is enabled, and it is not functional.

Oh well, that's a deal killer for me...  If D3D9 could be backported to Mypal 68 then it would be ideal...  for now I'll stick with Serpent...  He fixed a lot of stuff in the last release and it is running well.

[Tripredacus]

On 5/20/2022 at 7:50 PM, Dave-H said:

Fine by me, but I'll bring this to the attention of @Tripredacus and @dencorso in case they have any reservations about it.

It seems to be that Feodor2 only provides MPL2 on the repo and nothing in addition. MPL2 FAQ doesn't seem to say anything about redist of old binaries in particular. So as long as the the person who is going/wants to share the old version has not modified the files they can link to it here. If they have modified the files, then they must meet requirements of MPL2 to link to it. If the original author requests content removal and proves that MPL2 has been violated then we will of course remove the link afterwards.

https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68/blob/main/LICENSE

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/