My Browser Builds (Part 5)

[anton12]

AstroSkipper said:
"These are the preferences layers.acceleration.disabled, which I now set from true to false,"

Hello AstroSkipper,
I use NM28:
(https://o.rthost.win/palemoon/palemoon-28.10.7a1.win32-git-20240525-d849524bd-uxp-f8f3b3ee43-xpmod-sse.7z)

My NM28 default setting is:
 layers.acceleration.enabled; true

Is the name of your NM28 preference correct ?
 
layers.acceleration.disabled     or is the name
layers.acceleration.enabled

 

Edited June 3 by anton12

[UCyborg]

Pale Moon only has layers.acceleration.enabled AFAIK, which is a master switch for webpage compositing to use GPU and is also exposed as a checkbox in browser's settings. I assumed roytam1's version could be different, so I didn't say anything as his releases tend to deviate from upstream in random ways. Mozilla still uses layers.acceleration.disabled, so works the other way around, though newer versions have a bunch of related or not so related (depends on how you look at it) WebRender prefs, the traditional layers acceleration in considered legacy.

The *prefer* prefs, these always made automatic selection of D3D9 on XP in UXP browsers in my experience, although I remember when I was messing with Mypal68 last time, you had to explicitly enable the D3D9 one. layers.acceleration.force can be used in addition to layers.acceleration.enabled to try force-enable it for unsupported configurations.

Edited June 3 by UCyborg

[AstroSkipper]

4 hours ago, anton12 said:

My PM28 default setting is:
 layers.acceleration.enabled; true

Is the name of your PM28 preference correct ?
 
layers.acceleration.disabled     or is the name
layers.acceleration.enabled

 

Yes, of course. Both preferences do exist in my New Moon 28 installation and profiles. I also use the most recent but standard (for SSE2 and up) version https://o.rthost.win/palemoon/palemoon-28.10.7a1.win32-git-20240525-d849524bd-uxp-f8f3b3ee43-xpmod.7z

[UCyborg]

24 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

Both preferences do exist in my New Moon 28 installation and profiles.

Try resetting the "disabled" one. I suspect it will disappear.

Edit: tried the linked NM build, it definitely should disappear.

Edited June 3 by UCyborg

[AstroSkipper]

Yesterday, I did further testing of the hardware acceleration in New Moon 28, Serpent 52, Mypal 68 and Thorium. This feature now works in all of them but video hardware acceleration seems to be a problem. YouTube videos run best in New Moon 28 and worst in Thorium under my modest hardware conditions. Although video hardware acceleration has been enabled and confirmed in Thorium's chrome://gpu-internals page, it is more of a joke.  At least, on my weak hardware. It does not accelerate anything and CPU utilisation is nearly 100%, regardless of the resolution. 

Edited June 3 by AstroSkipper

[AstroSkipper]

36 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

Try resetting the "disabled" one. I suspect it will disappear.

Edit: tried the linked NM build, it definitely should disappear.

Thanks for the tip! I will have a look at this preference once again when I am back at my machine. 

Edited June 3 by AstroSkipper

[UCyborg]

30 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

This feature now works in all of them but video hardware acceleration seems to be a problem.

I've not seen any browser on XP able to do it. Probably the last time it worked was with Flash Player. Not sure your card even does H.264, the writeup on Wikipedia suggests model 6600 is the minimum and hints at only partial decoding of H.264, judging by the text about 2nd generation PureVideo HD. Maybe official specs can still be found somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo

[AstroSkipper]

My NVIDIA 6200 AGP grahics card seems to support H.264. Here is an official comparison table from NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.de/docs/CP/11086/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf

Edited June 3 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[adata]

After accessin https://vk.com
crashes  palemoon 28 64bit browser.
palemon.exe process is killed.

[cloudstr]

I installed Auto Refresh Page addon in Basilisk 52, it has a feature to search for keywords on automatic page refresh, then display notification and play sound effect. When I do the test, the notification does show up but no sound can be heard.

I extracted the XPI and found the mp3 file "auto_refresh_page-3.2.xpi\assets\sounds\notification.mp3", so for some reasons Basilisk does not play this file. Could anyone please help me out? Thank you!

Edited June 3 by cloudstr

[Tomcat76]

On 5/30/2024 at 4:08 AM, VistaLover said:

... The userscript I mentioned is inside the body of the exact MSFN post I (searched and) linked for you  ;

... (...) something's gone awry in your browser's behaviour ...

Indeed. I compared it to Firefox 47.0.2.
 
With FF47, the link first leads to your post, scrolls up a bit and then scrolls back down to your post.
With Serpent 52 (2024-05-10), the link leads to your post, scrolls up a bit and stays there. I mistook mina7601's post for yours.
 

On 5/28/2024 at 7:30 AM, Tomcat76 said:

2) For a couple of months now, I have experienced issues related to session management.  I have lost tabs that were opened up to 3-4 hours prior to a forced restart following unresponsiveness due to 100% CPU and memory usage, including tabs that were opened while the browser was still fully responsive.  This happened twice so far.  Also, if the browser is starting to become slow and I restart it (via File>Restart provided by Classic Theme Restorer), I am sometimes met with an error message from Session Manager saying "The session/window data is corrupted".  Clearing the closed windows/tabs list using Session Manager prior to restarting can increase the chances of this happening.  Similarly, if the browser is getting slow or nearly unresponsive and I try to save the session using Session Manager, I will always get an error saying "This operation failed due to a file access error".  I can only save a session shortly after opening the browser.

I received a few more errors from Session Manager that were a bit more elaborate:
 
This operation failed due to a file access error:
Component returned failure code: 0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY)
[nsIScriptableUnicodeConverter.convertToInputStream](NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY)
 
This allowed me to do some further digging and I found an old thread on the MozillaZine Forums.  Morac, the creator/maintainer of the Session Manager addon, suggested a user who experienced the exact same error message to change some settings related to disk caching:
browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled;false
browser.cache.disk.capacity;1048576
 
The smart size is set to true by default, which tells the browser to choose a disk cache size relative to the installed RAM.
The second setting is set to 256000 (bytes) by default in Serpent, though I used to have it increased to 350000 if I remember correctly.
 
I also changed the max_file_write_size of the Session Manager addon from the default 20 to 15.  This is based on a suggestion by Morac in the same thread to someone who was unable to save further sessions.  I handpicked the value of 15 as Morac didn't mention a specific alternative value.
 
So far, this seems to have remedied the problems I've been having with Session Manager in the latest builds of Serpent, but it's possible some of the fixes weren't necessary.

[nicolaasjan]

6 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

My NVIDIA 6200 AGP grahics card seems to support H.264. Here is an official comparison table from NVIDIA: https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nvidia.de/docs/CP/11086/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj6rumapr-GAxVVxgIHHZtzAEgQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2zrsCZQLeFLmZ-PNCGP7Eu

De-googled link without tracking.

Can't you just play the video through MPC-HC with hardware acceleration (use Open With extension).

From the release notes of v1.7.0:

Quote

Due to the switch to LAV Filters, DXVA1 support for Windows XP has been dropped. Windows XP users can use LAV Filters’ Nvidia CUVID decoder if they still require hardware acceleration. If you can’t use any of the available hardware acceleration methods, you can use our old standalone MPCVideoDecoder from v1.6.8, at your own risk.

 

Needs youtube-dl. Not sure if this old version recognizes yt-dlp. If not rename or make a symlink (can be made on XP with Link Shell Extension:

Quote

The version for Windows 2000 and for Windows XP will be no more actively developed on, and its functionality is frozen with Link Shell Extension 3.8.7.2 (32 bit) and Link Shell Extension 3.8.7.2 (64 bit)

 

Quote

The driver to enable even WindowsXP with symbolic link functionality is provided courtesy of Masatoshi Kimura. You can download the driver from his homepage or from my site acting as a mirror.

Symbolic Drivers for WindowsXP 64 (86kb) [Original Location] Symbolic Drivers for WindowsXP 64 (86kb) [Mirror schinagl.priv.at]

 

Edited June 3 by nicolaasjan

[AstroSkipper]

3 hours ago, nicolaasjan said:

9 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

My NVIDIA 6200 AGP grahics card seems to support H.264. Here is an official comparison table from NVIDIA: https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nvidia.de/docs/CP/11086/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj6rumapr-GAxVVxgIHHZtzAEgQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2zrsCZQLeFLmZ-PNCGP7Eu

De-googled link without tracking.

Can't you just play the video through MPC-HC with hardware acceleration (use Open With extension).

From the release notes of v1.7.0:

Quote

Due to the switch to LAV Filters, DXVA1 support for Windows XP has been dropped. Windows XP users can use LAV Filters’ Nvidia CUVID decoder if they still require hardware acceleration.

Thanks for your information! I have installed MPC-HC 2.1.2.18 on my Windows XP machine for months, and hardware acceleration is generally available in my system. Additionally, I have configured the 3D Settings via the NVIDIA Control Panel. Furthermore, I have enabled LAV Filters’Nvidia CUVID decoder for using hardware acceleration in MPC, and it works fine. However, more problematic is the video hardware acceleration inside browsers under Windows XP. It is running much better in New Moon 28 than in the others. 

PS: Thanks for un-googling the link! I posted it from my Android tablet, and there is everything googled as you surely know.
 

Edited June 3 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[nicolaasjan]

9 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

I posted it from my Android tablet, and there is everything googled as you surely know.

I believe uBlock Origin is a supported add-on on Firefox for Android.

Then you can enable "AdGuard URL Tracking Protection" and optionally "Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool" (link).

[AstroSkipper]

8 hours ago, nicolaasjan said:

I believe uBlock Origin is a supported add-on on Firefox for Android.

Then you can enable "AdGuard URL Tracking Protection" and optionally "Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool" (link).

Thanks! TBH, I know all of that. I have installed uBlock Origin in Firefox and Kiwi. Additionally, the Adguard app to block ads in my system. But very often I use Opera, and Adguard is not permanently enabled. At such moments, Google strikes. 

Edited June 4 by AstroSkipper
correction