Future of Chrome on Windows 7

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, msfntor said:

"Isn't there a checkbox for this in uBlock ?"

- of course, yes.

LOL , oh that guy is always looking for complicated solutions. LOL

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, msfntor said:

_ Hmm why I use uBlock Origin v1.26.2 in DCBrowser and 360Chrome v13.5 and v13.0 ?..

Thanks, too old. I mean (maybe) it's still fine for 360 (I guess). But we are talking about newer chrome here - like 102 and UP.

[msfntor]

On 11/10/2022 at 3:53 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,

By using uBlock with deny fonts notched, and Dark Background and White Text extension...

[D.Draker]

5 hours ago, msfntor said:

By using uBlock with deny fonts notched, and Dark Background and White Text extension...

1 - Thanks. I meant another subject. It calls --disable-direct-write. This flag switches off the awful font "technique" in Vista and up.

It became awfully aliased in win7 and later. The flag was disabled long ago.

2 - Why would you need an extension when you can just add

--force-dark-mode

 --enable-features=WebContentsForceDark

[NotHereToPlayGames]

3 hours ago, D.Draker said:

But we are talking about newer chrome here - like 102 and UP.

I only use v97 on my Win10 installs.

And I highly prefer uMatrix over uBlock.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

I only use v97 on my Win10 installs.

And I highly prefer uMatrix over uBlock.

Thank you, I understood. Just not the easiest solution for simple folks. As an example, be it uMatrix or NoScript, they all have a conflict with my autosearch proxy extension for instagram,

I think I wrote before - I have to use instagram, even though I hate it.

The error was smth like "web-declarative-request was being blocked upon the usage"/ Not sure I remembered correctly. Some weird English was used, definitely,lol.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

I only use v97 on my Win10 installs.

And I highly prefer uMatrix over uBlock.

in 97 Skia will work. But like I recently discovered, it was completely blocked somewhere in 105-106. And it sucked, honestly.

So you'd have to check after you applied my flags, if you're gonna use smth after 104.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/181612-wip-windows-vista-extended-kernel/?do=findComment&comment=1229252

[NotHereToPlayGames]

5 minutes ago, D.Draker said:

So you'd have to check after you applied my flags

I applied those flags to v97 and, um, didn't notice any difference in performance so I've reverted to my original setup.

Coupled with other members citing dropped frames (which I did not test myself).

I guess I didn't see the need in using "too many" flags without any noticeable performance boost.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

Also note that none of my Win10 install's have Chrome v97's hardware acceleration enabled.  I have much MUCH better performance with hardware acceleration DISABLED.

Nothing infuriates me more than having three to five monitors on all of my computers and running background window on one of those monitors for YouTube and all three to five other monitors will "blip" occasionally whenever "hardware acceleration" is enabled.

I have never had any luck with "acceleration" enabled - it SOUNDS LIKE a nice "feature", but it ALWAYS has NEGATIVE side effects on my computers.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

I applied those flags to v97 and, um, didn't notice any difference in performance so I've reverted to my original setup.

Coupled with other members citing dropped frames (which I did not test myself).

I guess I didn't see the need in using "too many" flags without any noticeable performance boost.

By "other members" you mean uCyborg ? lol . But he wrote the frames dropped with the Hardware video accel. OFF .

He didn't try skia. Skia and videodecoding are two diff. things. Anyways, like you love to say, to each their own.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/184046-future-of-chrome-on-windows-7/?do=findComment&comment=1229258

[D.Draker]

5 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

ll three to five other monitors will "blip" occasionally whenever "hardware acceleration" is enabled.

Did you try to select prefer maximum performance under power management mode in Nvidia CPL ?

EDIT: Also - Maximum Pre-rendered frames - 1

Edited November 12, 2022 by D.Draker

[D.Draker]

5 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

"too many" flags

You know what, I agree , too many flags not needed, will you try just these and maybe measure the startup with and without ?

Like you love to do with "scientific" approach. Screengrabs , etc.

--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

--disable-gpu

--disable-software-rasterizer 

--disable-webgl 

--disable-histogram-customizer 

--disable-reading-from-canvas 

--disable-gpu-watchdog

--vulkan-null

[UCyborg]

15 hours ago, D.Draker said:

2 - That's because they recently blocked Skia (hardware renderer) from running. Here's the explanations - everything's on soft now. I'm gonna stick to pre-104 Chrome.

I don't think Skia has much of influence, still pretty bad with it enabled. I normally use Edge 94 if I need Chromium for some reason and I noticed the same behavior with other Chromium flavors of the time when I tried them a year ago (though then, I never disabled Skia).

https://i.imgur.com/HPMQWfM.png

https://i.imgur.com/QXXm35P.png

Haven't actually checked videos with latest Chrome yet and --disable-gpu, will do that next week on a work laptop where I have it. I suspect not much has changed.

Not sure there's much point wasting too much time discussing on how these things work in Chromium browsers work as historically, nobody really changed much in how they work under hood. Google codes it in and that's how it stays.

Heh, seems to be how Google codes in general (doesn't optimize software fallbacks). I've been toying with a PC port of Android x86 in the past and making it fallback to software rendering made the whole OS useless, couldn't even move the mouse normally. So was totally useless on my desktop PC with NVIDIA GPU because decent open-source GPU driver doesn't exist for it while I could use it on a laptop with AMD graphics (but useless when choosing a boot menu option to boot into standard VESA mode that doesn't load the usual graphics driver - if I remember correctly it was called something along these lines).

Regarding the future of Chrome on Windows 7, there's none for the stock version I imagine. Maybe a fork will popup that'll keep support, but I don't expect much deviation from how it works under the hood (or did to accommodate poorer API function availability of Win7).

BTW, for those who think DirectWrite is a problem...https://github.com/GTANAdam/GDIChromium...I tried that fork a while back and still found fonts to be bad...I really only find Edge with Enhance text contrast (edge://flags/#edge-enhance-text-contrast) to make fonts better (I haven't checked if it's enabled by default on newer versions), though still not as good as Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, Waterfox...speaking of which, I have those set at the default setting, which is that D2D is preferred over Skia. And when I messed with roytam1's browser forks for XP, on that OS, I explicitly set it to use Cairo. Opting for Skia is just painful on my eyes. Though I think Skia works differently on OS that aren't Windows.

And I don't have a problem with font anti-aliasing in general and don't disable it anywhere, apparently it's needed to render many fonts right. Web-safe fonts that look right are few and far in-between and I prefer variety, so I don't go out of my way to force every website to use one of those.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

For now, I will limit this test to my XP x64 machine.  I rarely use my Win10 installs because I can "still" get EVERYTHING done (that I need to do!) in XP.

Original setup flags:
  --disable-logging --no-default-browser-check --disable-component-update --disable-background-networking --allow-outdated-plugins --kiosk-printing --disable-print-preview --cipher-suite-blacklist=0xcc14,0xe013 --ignore-certificate-errors --disable-webgl --js-flags=--noexpose_wasm --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36"

[NotHereToPlayGames]

No flag changes in loader.ini.  Enabled Skia API for compositing in chrome://flags.  Score went from 2249 to 2302.