Future of Chrome on Windows 7

[D.Draker]

115.0.5760.0 R2 Feedback :

All of the issues with dark theme - fixed ! Millions of Crashpads in the Crashpad are no more (only one small, like it supposed to be).

Sandbox - fixed. The browser is flawless. Though, I'll still be dreaming of the undoodled port. Even though it is a bit older (always).

 

[D.Draker]

On 5/16/2023 at 11:11 PM, win32 said:

the latest release of Supermium

1 - I want to give a hint to use dev. builds with Metrics And Crash Sampling disabled.

Goto: chrome://version/

scroll to the bottom and see:

Active Variations : MetricsAndCrashSampling:OutOfReportingSample

2 - The perfect solution for this chrome not being able to use H264 videos is to redirect it

to the installed system codecs. It would be perfectly legal since, for example, K-Lite is free.

EDIT : under chrome://gpu says it can't load msmpeg2vdec.dl

 

 

Edited May 18, 2023 by D.Draker

[mina7601]

On 5/10/2023 at 4:20 AM, sonyu said:

But the same problem as in the previous version someone released some months ago... online videos not working, do you know how to fix? (except for youtube)

It is going to be fixed next version. See here.

[Alex654]

On 11/10/2022 at 12:44 AM, D.Draker said:

I'd say his weird troubles, 'cause no one else had them. And he wrote only the Vulkan files gave him the troubles, not my method in general.

'Cause it finally worked for him.

The most important he (and looks like you too) missed in my instructions, you need to replace with blanks, not just "clean".

 

--disable-gpu will switch off ALL regarding the GPU, so I just have my doubts he followed the instructions precisely.

Sorry for asking, but why do you suggest to use that flag? I tried disabling GPU acceleration several times in the past, it makes scrolling and ani,ations much less smooth for me (Windows 7 x64, Core i5 2500K overclocked to 4.1 GHz, 16 Gb RAM, AMD HD 7850 GPU).

[Alex654]

On 11/10/2022 at 5:53 PM, D.Draker said:

I have a question for you, how did you (or didn't?) solve the problem with gawdly awful (eye fatiguing)

fonts in newer chromes, since disable direct write was removed ?

Fonts are just wonderful for me on Windows 7 (but are much worse on Windows 10 and newer, haven't tried Windows 8/8.1, but I guess they are the same bad there).

Microsoft broke their font rendering since Windows 8 because of problems with fast page scrolling on mobile phones. Can give you a link explaining that. They just moved to grayscale antialiasing for a lot of fonts, that cannot be overriden in any way.

[Alex654]

On 11/13/2022 at 12:09 AM, D.Draker said:

How it could be scientific, if XP doesn't support ANY form of hardware acceleration, including skia . LOL

So much for your "tests".

I guess you are wrong, because on XP you can still use hardware accelerated:

- Video decoding

- Canvas rendering

- Animations rendering

- Web page rendering

 

I even turned web page rendering acceleration on and off via chrome flags and noticed the difference (on versions 45, 47 and 49).

[Alex654]

On 1/23/2023 at 8:39 AM, D.Draker said:

Also, don't forget - starting from 105 or so, everything is only soft, no hard rendering for windows 7 anymore.

Can you prove it somehow? I use version 109 now on Windows 7, and it seems that I still have hardware rendering on.

Edited August 20, 2023 by Alex654

[Alex654]

On 2/4/2023 at 7:39 AM, D.Draker said:

I totally agree with you, of course Chinese-owned Opera is also extremely high (need to spell it without quotes) spyware.

I thought that Opera is a Norwegian company with headquartes in Oslo...

[Alex654]

On 2/9/2023 at 8:51 PM, Cocodile said:

There's a lot of software and games that don't work on windows 7 already and for a long time. 

And so was also true for Windows XP back in 2014-2016 (I personally was using it untill end of spring of 2020 or so).

On 2/9/2023 at 8:51 PM, Cocodile said:

Major exodus had happened in 2017.

Why? New Firefox based on Quantum was fast and beatiful, with very few bugs (and the people who really loved Australis theme stayed on version 52 on XP and version 56 on Windows Vista and 7/8/8.1/10), it kept working without problems for quite a long time.

As for me - I never liked Chrome on Windows 7 because of thin and too light fonts. But I get used to it because a lot of sites in 2020-2021 completely stopped working in Firefox 62, and I personally did not like the UI changes they made in Firefox 79 when they introduced a new logo. So I got used to thin fonts and moved to Chrome.

[VistaLover]

29 minutes ago, Alex654 said:

I thought that Opera is a Norwegian company with headquarters in Oslo...

https://newsweb.oslobors.no/message/407334

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)

Quote

In 2016, the company changed ownership when a group of Chinese investors purchased the web browser, consumer business, and brand of Opera Software ASA. The remaining assets were renamed as the Otello Corporation.[35] The ownership change was initiated in February 2016 when a group of Chinese investors offered US$1.2 billion ($8.31 per share) to buy Opera Software ASA,[note 1][36] though the deal reportedly did not meet regulatory approval.[37] On 18 July 2016, Opera Software ASA announced it had sold its browser, privacy and performance apps, and the Opera brand to Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership[38][39][40] (a consortium of Chinese investors led by Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and Qihoo 360) for an amount of US$600 million.[37] The transaction for sale of Opera's consumer business was approved on 31 October 2016 by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.[41] An earlier deal was not approved by Norwegian regulators.[40] On 4 November 2016, Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I L.P. completed the acquisition.[42] After divesting itself of the Opera browser and brand, Opera Software ASA[note 1] changed its name to Otello Corporation ASA.[43]

[Alex654]

On 3/1/2023 at 3:56 AM, D.Draker said:

Simple to explain, those who were still hanging onto Windows 7 is now moved on 'cause the browser support died off.

So the OS is simply dead 'cause no gaming drivers and no hardware since 2015. I have a Kabylake (2016) and win 7 can't even 

proprely utilise the C sates on the CPU ! So no modern gaming , no browsing, no chrome on win 7 , etc.

Funny thing as of now, even Vista is able to use more modern chrome (with hacks , of course).

And windows 7 doesn't even have any usable form of ex-kernel.

AMD and NVidia dropped Win7 support only in 2021-2022. As for me, my 2 PCs use Intel processors form 2011-2013 (2nd generation Core i5 and 2nd generation 10-core Xeon). So everything is just fine with drivers and hardware on Win 7 from my point of view

[Alex654]

On 4/15/2023 at 9:00 PM, D.Draker said:

BEWARE of that dodgy browser ! Using it will make you 100% unique ! 

Why ? The sneaky china fella injected a unique identifier right into the browser code !

Go here and you will see :

https://browserleaks.com/javascript

catsxp [object Catsxp]

Everyone will know you're using his browser !

Well, the same was true for Opera Presto (which had window.opera object). No one seemd to care much about it that days. Anyway, to use this object a website developer needs to know that such object exists, and only CatsXP devs know about it for the moment). Of course they can start forcing this thing around JS developers, but because the audience is way too small, no one will put effort in including this in the checks, I guess. There are commonly used solutions like Modernizr, which can make use of this info, but you can still write a userscript removing this object and apply it for all sites (in case the browser will allow you to delete this object, of course).

[Alex654]

Guys, does anyone of you have an AMD GPU from 2011-2013 and a Windows 7 install?

I have 2 rendering bugs in Chrome, one of which was inctroduced in autumn of 2019 (November or December) and is still not fixed, and the second one appeared in the 109 release (last official release for Windows 7 and 8/8.1).

Here is how the first one looks:

Way to reproduce: drag the DevTools windows partly offscreen and then return it back.

The second bug is related to drawing favicons on some sites (like Yandex mail and YouTube). Random part of the icon becomes white, and this area is increased over time as you switch tabs.

Here is how it looks (it happens even with a single opened tab):

I wanted to ask: can I somehow fix this by changing my rendering settings in official version 109?

UPD: Supremium by @win32 does not have any of these bugs, though the DevTools window border is looking kin of strange (top part is from Windows 10, coloured by the selected theme, and the borders are loke in native Windows 7 app).

UPD2: The devs are aware, but no fix is available still since February

UPD3: Enabling Override software rendering list setting did not fix the first bug with DevTools, but --disable-gpu-compositing startup key fixed the problem almost completely.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Alex654

[VistaLover]

11 hours ago, Alex654 said:

(and the people who really loved Australis theme stayed on version 52 on XP and version 56 on Windows Vista and 7/8/8.1/10),

Correction : Mozilla, aping Google  to the letter, but with a delay of a few years, put Vista SP2 on the same boat as XP SP3; FxESR 52.9.x was/is the last version of Firefox to run on (plain) Vista SP2; release channel v53.0.x. could be "hacked" to launch there, too, but with serious shortcomings in the media playback department...

TL:DR: Fx 53.0+ requires Win7 SP1 and higher (obviously, I'm not talking here about Vista's 64-bit Extended Kernel implementations ) ...

[Alex654]

On 7/30/2023 at 5:22 PM, VistaLover said:

Correction : Mozilla, aping Google  to the letter, but with a delay of a few years, put Vista SP2 on the same boat as XP SP3; FxESR 52.9.x was/is the last version of Firefox to run on (plain) Vista SP2; release channel v53.0.x. could be "hacked" to launch there, too, but with serious shortcomings in the media playback department...

TL:DR: Fx 53.0+ requires Win7 SP1 and higher (obviously, I'm not talking here about Vista's 64-bit Extended Kernel implementations ) ...

Oh, sorry, of course you are right. I meant Win 7 and higher.