narrowing down my default browser for my Win10 setups

[UCyborg]

Ha, my PC is also over a decade old, 14 years to be exact, it was bought with playing games in mind though while not breaking the bank. But the cheap laptop from 2014 is much slower, though I can still browse with handful of tabs open, even with Firefox 109.0.1. I've been recently experimenting with 32-bit Debian 11 with KDE on that laptop, so trying to save RAM while still being functional. I could probably get by even if that laptop was the only option since I'm one of the more patient folks while most seem INCREDIBLY impatient.

It's been a while since I've been experimenting with Chromium more thoroughly, in the past I've been messing with Vivaldi and Edge, most recent was Edge 94, which I've setup when it was new and I still occasionally update extensions or their settings. But in the end, I always stick with Mozilla-based browser since Chromium is just inflexible in places where I'm used to more flexibility. Even Vivaldi doesn't let you move those extension buttons wherever you want, it's either all of them in one spot or another.

At this point, I'm not sure if Chromium is even worth bothering with again. What sites don't work with Firefox that can't be fixed with user agent override, besides maybe some specialized apps needing Web Serial or WebUSB?

My Firefox looks like this:

Edited February 26, 2023 by UCyborg

[NotHereToPlayGames]

3 hours ago, UCyborg said:

But in the end, I always stick with Mozilla-based browser since Chromium is just inflexible in places where I'm used to more flexibility.

I'm kinda mixed, to be honest.

I was accustomed to the great deal of flexibility with NM27 and then NM28.

I only ran one of them!  I only upgraded from NM27 to NM28 when one of my banking sites couldn't me made to work, despite all the flexibility.

It was ONLY when NM28 could no longer be made to work on my banking sites that I migrated to Chromium-based.

I continue to monitor the Firefox Forks and my fingers are crossed that I may someday return.

[UCyborg]

Yeah, those forks are always behind, mainline Firefox usually isn't (as much) AFAIK. And TBH, there's a good deal of flexibility in those old-school Mozilla-based browsers that I simply don't need (that I know, so extensions that I don't need) while there's probably also some that maybe I would find useful, but to get it, I would have to be the programmer to implement.

I know there are folks that aren't interested in tweaking simply due to the fast pace that these browsers are changing and they just want something that will surely work on all those odd sites and not worry about fighting the browser on each update.

When my parents were young, there was basically one car on the road, it was Zastava 750. If you had a car back then and came from these parts, it was probably that one. Now look at how many cars and different models are on the road. I don't know, maybe I'm straying a little, but sometimes I get these thoughts that all this so called "user choice" is more of a burden than the freedom. I could get by with most popular browser with mostly default settings if I wanted, but I guess I don't due to the nerdy side of me.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

19 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

If you had a car back then and came from these parts, it was probably that one.

Totally understand!

It's one of the reasons I am not a fan of the "Tri-Five Chevy" (1955, 1956, and 1957).

1955 = 1,775,952 produced

1956 = 1,623,376 produced

1957 = 1,555,316 produced

Compare that to Studebaker for 1955 when only 116,333 were produced or 1957 when only 63,101 were produced.

But yeah, a bit OT, lol.

[cmccaff1]

Checking back in, this time from 7 x64.
At this point there's nowhere to go but forward from here, as much as I hate to say it. Unless I'm on a PC so old that I need to use XP for full driver support, I'm pretty much sold on 7 for the foreseeable future. Though in some ways it was a regression from XP, it managed to improve in many ways that are important to me.
Download speeds out of the box are MUCH better, so there's no serious need to keep a download manager around unless you are dead set on getting every last kilobyte your router is capable of routing. The kernel is significantly better too...besides being able to run a much wider range of browsers (and having much more modern options available), browsers seem to be much snappier and perform a lot better.

I've currently settled on Waterfox G3 (Firefox 78-based). It's very fast, still has the now-deprecated Flash support, and just seems to be a good 'base' browser to put on a 7 build...and of course you can still download and experiment with other browsers too. I figure that I can download and try a newer version of Firefox, or a modern Chromium build, if a site gives me trouble in Waterfox. It seems 7 is on the road to taking the torch from XP as the new 'superstar' of legacy OSes and I predict that there will be many, MANY browser options for 7 users as time goes on.

In general, it's good to be able to look at your options and see what works best. It was impressive to see the Mini Browser working so well in XP, but the aging XP kernel is being pushed to its limits, and of course the performance of Chromium 87 in Win7, both x86 and x64, just blows it out of the water. The fact that Chromium 87 even works in XP is amazing in itself, so I wasn't expecting miracles performance-wise.

[mina7601]

39 minutes ago, cmccaff1 said:

I figure that I can download and try a newer version of Firefox

Mozilla still supports Firefox on Windows 7 (they didn't announce an EoS date yet), that's why you can still use it on 7 until now.

Edited March 1, 2023 by mina7601

[cmccaff1]

7 minutes ago, mina7601 said:

Mozilla still supports Firefox on Windows 7 (they didn't announce an EoS date yet), that's why you can still use it on 7.

Exactly! Even the newest supported Chromium (109) is still going to work fine for a long time to come. Luckily Firefox is still supported, which is fantastic.
There are many options for 7 at this moment, and while it may eventually end up where XP is at now, the future is much brighter right now for 7 users. (It's even brighter than that if you're on 10/11, but I'm staying with 7 for now because I prefer the old-school interface and the speed).

[UCyborg]

Yeah, Chromium can't use GPU for rendering on XP. Mozilla-based browsers may be able to use Direct3D 9, but get this, it's rarely mentioned, Direct3D 9 on XP DOES NOT WORK WELL ACROSS MULTIPLE MONITORS...well, it only does with A LOT OF LAG, the performance is only as it should be (within drivers'/OS capabilities) as long as the browser window is entirely on the primary monitor. Talk about waste of good hardware!

[NotHereToPlayGames]

47 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

Chromium can't use GPU for rendering on XP

True.  But I actually prefer to disable GPU rendering on my mid-spec'd not-new but not-old Win10 systems.  I often need to screen-cap via keyboard Print Screen and video frames will not screen-cap if GPU-rendered.  I also don't notice any CPU/RAM "improvement" by offloading that task to the GPU.  Often times it's even the opposite, better CPU and RAM utilization by not offloading to GPU.  That may have been YouTube only, to be honest.  But screen-cap is everywhere, you can't screen-cap if hardware "acceleration" is enabled.

edit - at least none of my Win10 systems will screen-cap if HA is enabled

Edited March 1, 2023 by NotHereToPlayGames

[UCyborg]

23 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

edit - at least none of my Win10 systems will screen-cap if HA is enabled

Yeah, that's not normal I think. On my end, Prt Scr works even with fullscreen D3D (at least D3D8 and later) stuff, which is expected since MS tweaked their compositor and related stuff (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/demystifying-full-screen-optimizations/).

D3D8 was tried with d3d8.dll from an older Win10 build 17134 with "fullscreen maximized windowed mode" disabled - it takes tweaking internal variable inside the file, the one modified by exported function Direct3D8EnableMaximizedWindowedModeShim, the variable must be set to 0.

It's interesting they deleted the code for the old behavior from D3D8...I think maximized windowed mode is just one part of the equation for making old stuff more compatible with compositor, historically, it caused massive performance degradation in DirectDraw based applications/games in Windows 8, which was fixed in Windows 10, but this mode may still show window borders of fullscreen games that don't tweak their window styles because it wasn't really expected to be done by devs, was supposed to be handled internally, so you could create normal window with borders and toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode via D3D and not worry about window styles - workings of fullscreen mode made them disappear anyway...until they came up with "fullscreen maximized windowed mode".

But what we're seeing with more performant alt-tabbing and ability to PrtScr fullscreen stuff etc. - that's on their tweaks in other places it seems, not this "fullscreen maximized windowed mode" as exposed by ddraw.dll, d3d8.dll and maybe d3d9.dll. Though going from my memory, I think intro videos in GTA III era games don't work if it's forced-off for DirectDraw, so yeah, might be done just for compatibility. Easier to just have this mode always enabled rather than putting entries in the compatibility database only for games that need them, since that's a lot of work and needs feedback from customers, but only enterprise customers matter to MS and folks playing old games have community developed solutions for such issues.

Anyway, regarding videos in the browser, they work quite well on my end in Firefox in software mode. Unknown if Chromium still has massive performance hit with videos in software mode.

https://i.imgur.com/NGJJCM3.png (the screen on the right has graphics info indicating software mode is enabled - WebRender (Software))

But there's a bit of slowness in other aspects, immediately apparent with animations on web pages.

It also seems Mozilla did some changes/fixes between Firefox 96 and 110 regarding notifications. Enabling alerts.useSystemBackend in about:config to use OS' notification system no longer causes notifications to just disappear after few seconds.

Edited March 2, 2023 by UCyborg

[cmccaff1]

Back on 7 x64, and have settled on an interesting compromise. Maybe just because I'm old-fashioned and still have an affinity for old Flash content (and being able to view/play Flash content in a browser), but I've decided to use Chromium 87 with the PPAPI version of Flash 32.0.0.371 (an important version because that is the very last one before the 'time bomb' lockout system was implemented, meaning you can use it forever in any browser that has Flash support). While this version of Chromium will not get any more updates, unless an absolute saint comes along and decides to start back-porting security updates from newer versions to create their own Chromium 87 fork, it's still a good browser that has support for a good number of modern web technologies.

At the very least, Chromium 87 is a good 'base' version, along with Firefox 78 ESR, Waterfox G3, or Firefox 84 (the final version to support Flash) to install on your computer. With any one of these browsers, you're pretty much good to go out of the box, and from there you can look at later versions, or other browser options, if you find you absolutely need to move up from there. The fact that all of them support Flash is a very nice bonus, but I doubt it'll be a selling point for most people (since, you know, most people aren't like me and in the majority of cases aren't completely insane).

(Of course, you can also be someone who's actually not insane and just keep a standalone Flash 32 around [any version will work as none of them have the time bomb], if you feel the need to revisit any Flash content--I highly recommend good 'ol Homestar Runner.)

My solution for the moment is to keep a Hibbiki build of Chromium 87 around as my 'base' browser, and try out newer versions and different browsers when the need arises. Seems to be a good compromise...I can also see myself tinkering with even older versions, just to see the gains in performance (as 87, even now, is still overkill for a good number of sites).

[UCyborg]

There are instructions out there how to patch latest Flash to disable EOL restriction. I was the first to bring it up on MSFN. Some even opt to use Flash version that continued to be developed for Chinese market (only security fixes I guess) after it was EOL for the rest of the world, but I didn't follow that.

In my most recent experience, NPAPI version for Mozilla-based browsers and other browsers implementing NPAPI was most performant, the worst was ActiveX in Internet Explorer, though for some reason it was much better in the pre-Chromium Edge, a bit better than NPAPI even.

Of course, standalone version keeps it simple by not being tied to the web browser's plugin architecture.

Edited March 3, 2023 by UCyborg

[cmccaff1]

2 hours ago, UCyborg said:

There are instructions out there how to patch latest Flash to disable EOL restriction. I was the first to bring it up on MSFN. Some even opt to use Flash version that continued to be developed for Chinese market (only security fixes I guess) after it was EOL for the rest of the world, but I didn't follow that.

In my most recent experience, NPAPI version for Mozilla-based browsers and other browsers implementing NPAPI was most performant, the worst was ActiveX in Internet Explorer, though for some reason it was much better in the pre-Chromium Edge, a bit better than NPAPI even.

Of course, standalone version keeps it simple by not being tied to the web browser's plugin architecture.

I have learned about that (and I thank you for your efforts!)
I guess I've just stuck to 32.0.0.371 because it works well...I have not had any security issues with it, but since I've mainly just used it on the archived Homestar Runner website and Andkon.com (my favorite Flash game site since my old middle & high school days), there's almost no chance of an exploit bringing my system down.

There's no doubt that NPAPI outperforms PPAPI and ActiveX, and it's especially apparent when you go back to older, lightweight browsers and older, lightweight Flash versions. I believe NPAPI support for Chromium was discontinued with version 45 (44 was the last one with NPAPI support, but that version is extremely ancient [though still good for its time, less than 50% of the modern Web will work with it now]). Luckily, I've noticed no performance drops with any content thus far using PPAPI Flash 32/Chromium 87, though it may help that I have a dual core processor--if you're using a single core, you pretty much have to drop back to Flash 11 or earlier because as I recall there were various optimizations for dual cores introduced starting with Flash 12 (and sadly, these optimizations came with a very steep price because Flash performance became a lot worse on old Pentium III & 4-era processors).

[UCyborg]

Edit: Oops, wrong thread...

Edited March 5, 2023 by UCyborg