My Browser Builds (Part 5)

[AstroSkipper]

I have ported my UC.JS  script "Favicon In Url And Tab Bar", which I originally created for Mypal 78, to New Moon 28 and modified it to show the native brand icon on https://o.rthost.win/ in New Moon 28. It is of course also working in the bookmarks toolbar.

[VistaLover]

27 minutes ago, modnar said:

From using this new Serpent 52.9 build 4-30 (or 5-2) I observe slower performance and I suspect it's because of the threads setting. Imgur.com site though heavy is good for testing things. Also tomshardware.com, also heavy.

Have you actually compared this latest build to the 20260411/20260418-released ones? Because "suspect" isn't enough when troubleshooting "performance"-related issues (that are always bound to one's existing H/W and may differ considerably across other setups) ...

[AstroSkipper]

I should mention at this point that I started creating own UC.JS scripts for userChrome.js loaders in January 2025. I deepened my knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and a little HTML/XML/XUL and wrote a lot of scripts. My initial target was Mypal 68/74/78. This is all very time-consuming and is one of the reasons why I have made myself very scarce on MSFN since then. All of my beloved custom buttons for the CB extension have been converted to UC.JS scripts. In all three browsers, Mypal 78, New Moon 28 and Serpent 52, only a few extensions are still installed. Most additional functions or buttons are generated by these scripts.

Edited May 3 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[AstroSkipper]

3 hours ago, VistaLover said:

9 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

Have you already tested it with the most recent releases of New Moon 28

... That question means that you have actually missed my previous post here ; latest NM28 gladly accepts palefill-1.30.xpi as a compatible extension (and doesn't disable it permanently, if already installed) ...

Yes, that's right. I definitely missed your post. Thanks for the info! 

3 hours ago, VistaLover said:

9 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

and Serpent 52? 🤔

In all honesty, I didn't test on latest St52, as I left that as an exercise for you  ; the observed bug with palefill (and other extensions that have strictCompatibility=true inside their instal.rdfs) was caused by ae7c40d, which first appeared in the 20260418 UXP releases (actual buildID dates may be slightly different inside individual apps); that commit was reverted in 12e7d14, which first appears in this weekend's (20260502) UXP releases; since these are platform-wide commits, I have no reason to think that St52 hasn't been "fixed", while NM28 has; if you find otherwise, please let us know  ,,,

Best regards.

I'll soon install the most recent updates and test them. 

Edited May 3 by AstroSkipper

[AstroSkipper]

6 hours ago, VistaLover said:

In all honesty, I didn't test on latest St52, as I left that as an exercise for you 

Ok. I have just updated to the New Moon 28 and Serpent 52 releases from 20260502, and I can confirm that Palefill 1.30 can again be installed without any modifications.

[modnar]

19 hours ago, VistaLover said:

Have you actually compared this latest build to the 20260411/20260418-released ones? Because "suspect" isn't enough when troubleshooting "performance"-related issues (that are always bound to one's existing H/W and may differ considerably across other setups) ...

Of course I compared the 4-25 build with 4-18 and others.

Here's how it was: 4-18 and earlier builds were all slow then 4-25 was out and it was fast compared to before (but I had to revert to 4-18 because 4-25 kept freezing / not-responding).

This new build 4-30 or 5-2, while faster than 4-18 and earlier builds, is slower than 4-25. On my CPU Serpent's thread count now returns 3 which I observed in VM's is a no-go. Slower than 2 or 4 threads. So better stick to even number of threads, but not all of them, so 2. At least for Core2 Quads that are really 2x2 CPU's (shared L2 between only 2 cores) and not 4x1 CPU.

Edited May 4 by modnar
, but not all of them, so 2 - added

[EliraFriesnan]

13 hours ago, modnar said:

Core2 Quads that are really 2x2 CPU's (shared L2 between only 2 cores) and not 4x1 CPU.

No! Here, SpellForce Log file.

Vendor  : GenuineIntel
Name    : Pentium(R) III processor
Type    : 0
Family  : 6
Model   : 7
Stepping: 2
Speed   : 2993 Mhz
PerfFreq: 3679545.000000
ScPerClk: 0.000000
FFLAGS  : bfebfbff
FPU     : y
VIM EXT : y
DBG EXT : y
PSE     : y
MSR     : y
PAE     : y
MCE     : y
CX8     : y
APIC    : y
SEP     : n
MTRR    : y
PGE     : y
MCA     : y
CMOV    : y
PAT     : y
PSE36   : y
CLFSH   : y
DS      : y
ACPI    : y
MMX     : y
FXSR    : y
SSE     : y
SSE2    : y
64BIT   : n
AMD     : y
AMD EXT : n
AMD MME : n
Intel HT: n
PhysProc: 4
LoglProc: 1

[modnar]

@roytam1 Please make the next build of Serpent with threads / 2 or 1 (thread) for 1 core CPU's. I believe it will be faster than current n-1 (or 1) solution.

[johk]

After these days using the latest build of NewMoon 28, I would say, that, despite I don't have BSODs, it hangs quite a lot, and by hang I mean that the window becomes unresponsive a lot.

If the page has lots of javascript, prepare yourself to have an unresponsive window. Before, it just, well, got the CPU  high and no more, but now... oh my... high CPU usage and totally unresponsive.

In my case, might be the patch applied to win32k.sys, but one way or the other, it is crazy how often it happens compared to previous versions.

As I said previously, this didn't happen on 20260411 and earlier.

I don't know if I would agree what modnar said above for NewMoon 28 too, but whatever CPU threading that the engine has now is a killer at whatever level.

[roytam1]

16 hours ago, modnar said:

@roytam1 Please make the next build of Serpent with threads / 2 or 1 (thread) for 1 core CPU's. I believe it will be faster than current n-1 (or 1) solution.

mine is already better than upstream. upstream's version will always trying to full load all cpu cores.

 

4 hours ago, johk said:

If the page has lots of javascript, prepare yourself to have an unresponsive window. Before, it just, well, got the CPU  high and no more, but now... oh my... high CPU usage and totally unresponsive.

because not only parse thread goes multithread, upcoming version will also have #3075 implemented which means multithread jit builder.

for some systems, multithreading could mean more struggling.

I'm thinking if I should undo these in IA32 branch so -ia32 and -sse builds should behave like earlier builds.

[AstroSkipper]

On 5/3/2026 at 1:16 PM, AstroSkipper said:

I was additionally blocked by Google due to allegedly unusual activities.  The captcha that you then have to solve is not displayed in New Moon 28.

@roytam1 Google seems to have tightened its algorithms and heuristics.  If compatibility mode is set to "Native", New Moon 28 is now classified as a bot and blocked. I could reproduce this behaviour in my installations. However, the captcha to remove this blockage can't be solved in this browser.  Luckily, switching to "Firefox compatibility" mode resolves this issue.  I therefore suggest to default it to this value from now on. Apart from that, you should now set a SSUAO for Google without any reference to Goanna or Pale Moon, to avoid being immediately flagged as a bot. Google is likely detecting a conflict between Goanna/Pale Moon and a more recent version of Firefox (version 128), possibly in combination with a very old operating system such as Windows XP, concluding this must be a bot. 

    

Edited May 6 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[Guest raddy]

On 5/6/2026 at 1:01 PM, AstroSkipper said:

Apart from that, you should now set a SSUAO for Google without any reference to Goanna or Pale Moon, to avoid being immediately flagged as a bot. Google is likely detecting a conflict between Goanna/Pale Moon and a more recent version of Firefox (version 128), possibly in combination with a very old operating system such as Windows XP, concluding this must be a bot. 

Since 6/Oct/2025 use native mode and override for google

On 10/6/2025 at 10:07 AM, raddy said:

general.useragent.override.google.com Mozilla/5.0 (%OS_SLICE% rv:61.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.7 Firefox/61.9 PaleMoon/33.6.1

and all ok.

ps. Override for google recaptcha, otherwise

On 10/5/2025 at 9:01 PM, raddy said:

Please upgrade to a supported browser to get a reCAPTCHA challenge.

Why is this happening to me?

ps2. blogspot now needs  a custom useragent for commenting

Quote

general.useragent.override.blogger.com Mozilla/5.0 (%OS_SLICE% rv:61.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.7 Firefox/61.9 PaleMoon/33.6.1

 

Edited May 11 by raddy
blogspot

[AstroSkipper]

1 hour ago, raddy said:

4 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

Apart from that, you should now set a SSUAO for Google without any reference to Goanna or Pale Moon, to avoid being immediately flagged as a bot. Google is likely detecting a conflict between Goanna/Pale Moon and a more recent version of Firefox (version 128), possibly in combination with a very old operating system such as Windows XP, concluding this must be a bot. 

Since 6/Oct/2025 use native mode and override for google

On 10/6/2025 at 9:07 AM, raddy said:

general.useragent.override.google.com Mozilla/5.0 (%OS_SLICE% rv:61.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.7 Firefox/61.9 PaleMoon/33.6.1

and all ok.

ps. Override for google recaptcha, otherwise

On 10/5/2025 at 8:01 PM, raddy said:

Please upgrade to a supported browser to get a reCAPTCHA challenge.

Why is this happening to me?

 

Ok, that works too. Thanks! But switching to Firefox Compatibility is working too. So I think I am right in terms of my statement in my previous post. If Google discovers discrepancies between the engine used and the Firefox version, including the operating system version, then it will strike.

[johk]

9 hours ago, roytam1 said:

because not only parse thread goes multithread, upcoming version will also have #3075 implemented which means multithread jit builder.

for some systems, multithreading could mean more struggling.

I'm thinking if I should undo these in IA32 branch so -ia32 and -sse builds should behave like earlier builds.

I'm using the win64 version of NewMoon 28, so, I guess that won't help me.

Whatever, I'm just reporting what I see, simply that I takes a lot of CPU and hangs/unresponsive when before didn't 🤷 As a shame, more than a complain.

I don't know how Mozilla did with 115ESR but I really wish it is achieved the same smoothness (without hangs/locks/unresponsiveness) with Goanna/UXP or which ever is the root cause.

Thanks for your work, yours, Moonchild's and whoever tries to make this alternate engine/browser alive.

I could use alternatives, or buy a more powerful second hand computer, but sadly, is not possible for everyone.

Edited May 6 by johk

[AstroSkipper]

@roytam1 Whatever changes you make with regard to the of threads or CPU cores, I sincerely hope that your SSE2 XPmod releases will continue to work on systems with a single-core CPU. And another little reminder:

On 5/3/2026 at 1:16 PM, AstroSkipper said:

@roytam1 First of all, thanks for all your releases and for trying to fix the favicon issue on your server! Today, I have noticed that you again changed your favicon. But this doesn't work properly. Your favicon is shown in the tab and in the url bar, but not inside the bookmark in the personal toolbar. With your changes on your server o.rthost.win, I now get the following error message:

The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.  
o.rthost.win

 

This now appears permanently in the Browser Console because your HTML document is not configured correctly.