TrevMUN

New Moon 28 was my best shot at it. I also tried KM-Goanna; if I log into my account on LinkedIn that browser can't display anything. Pixiv's front page, logged out, does display, but not any actual pages other than that whether logged in or not. I also have Firefox ESR 52.7.4, Chrome 49, and Advanced Chrome (Chromium 54) but none of them had any luck with these sites, and I didn't expect them to.

It's been a hot minute since I had looked into 360 Extreme Explorer; what's the main difference between the ArcticFoxie and HummingOwl versions? I also remember there had been some effort to go through the code of the browser and the Russian repack to dig out any malware, backdoors, or telemetry. Was there ever a summary of what people found? As interested in this browser as I've been, I've been hesitant to give it a go for those reasons. There's been a huge shift in web development philosophies over the decades. I remember back in the 90s and 00s when web developers prided themselves on being able to write pages in a text editor. Now the big thing is importing entire scripts offsite wholesale. With the browsers I have which use NoScript, it becomes a game of trying to figure out which off-site script does what and if I should unblock it or not. That can be quite annoying when the scripts in question involve very superficial cosmetic stuff that could have been handled within the same domain name ...

Not to mention that it's incredibly tone deaf to lecture someone who's already aware of the challenges posed by sticking with an older operating system or software. As you observed, NotHereToPlayGames, many people here run systems with older operating systems either as a daily driver or in some other capacity. People here already know from experience that they are not going to convince developers to bend over backwards just to support their operating system. So they come to places like this forum, to RyanVM's forums, to Win-Raid and many other communities, because they're seeking potential solutions from likeminded enthusiasts. Many of whom are developers in their own right who do care and are interested in finding solutions. That's why it's condescending to be told things like this, in this community, when asking about the potential benefits and limitations of a solution mentioned in discussions elsewhere on this site: Especially when, as I said earlier, it's done without actually addressing the questions posed. It comes off as if you're really saying "quit whining about your worthless ancient operating system/computer/browser, nobody has to cater to you" when no such expectations were made in the first place. Even if you didn't mean to be condescending, Bruninho, that's how the response(s) came off. Nah, that's more like you being obnoxiously rude and sarcastic. Which, much like the attitude you've had previously, was entirely uncalled for and absolutely unhelpful. No, you didn't. You've completely misread the room, apparently. This topic was not "why can't I access LinkedIn on these browsers," this topic was "what is Polyfill, what can it do and what can't it do." UCyborg provided a much more informative and detailed explanation as to what people were talking about in Roytam1's browsers thread, and he did so without going on about software being "ancient" and "old." I'd say "this topic has run its course" but I'd be interested in hearing UCyborg's findings regarding the sites I mentioned.

Yeah, I'm not expecting it to be a silver bullet. UCyborg made that clear with the example of Web Serial API. Though, I wouldn't know right away which problems are correctable with github-wc-polyfill and which aren't. No worries, it was mainly the other guy. "(x) is old/ancient/dead" responses are a sore spot for me, especially when it's not relevant to the topic. I'd rather a clear-cut explanation of what can and can't be done with a thing rather than a lecture about how foolish it is to keep using a thing because it's old.

Man, thanks for explaning this! I thought I was losing my mind with what these other guys were saying, claiming it's a server-side only thing (not to mention the irrelevant and condescending "your computer and browsers are ancient, accept the inevitable" lecturing) yet seeing people talk about github-wc-polyfill in Roytam1's thread. Try LinkedIn and Pixiv? Both sites have recently blanked out on me. Well, LinkedIn just endlessly shows its loading animation, but Pixiv just goes stark white. Coinbase and BlockFi do the same thing, but only when you try to log in, so those wouldn't be as easy to test.

I don't get the condescension in your response. Was it not apparent that I already acknowledged this in my previous reply? I don't find this attitude helpful at all in trying to understand what Polyfill is or does. You repeatedly use the phrase "old macs, pcs" and "ancient browsers" in your response to me. I think you're making an assumption that I'm trying to access these websites on a Pentium-based machine using IE5 or something. In terms of specs, my machine isn't as old as you may think. And I think it's similarly a mistake to assume the browsers involved are ancient. Personally, if I devoted as much time as Roytam1 does to backporting a browser that's still being developed, I'd be insulted by someone calling it ancient, as if it hadn't received updates and support in over a decade. The issue isn't TLS 1.3. And anyway, I've noticed that older Firefox-based browsers (and offshoots like Pale Moon/New Moon) don't have this problem. Older versions of Chrome/Chromium will report "ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH" if they encounter a site using TLS 1.3, but Firefox-derived browsers will display the page without issue. It's also not a case of HTML5/CSS3 not being understood by the browsers I'm using (I would have had a very hard time developing my site using HTML5/CSS3 if I wasn't able to preview my work as I wrote it). In Roytam1's thread, InterLinked referred to this problem as "breakage-causing JS code." Really, it seems like you're just taking this post as an excuse to lecture about a whole gamut of things unrelated to the topic at hand. I can't speak for others on this topic, but regardless of the operating system I've made a point of installing script and ad blockers on my browsers. I'm particularly fond of NoScript's "don't trust anything inherently" approach.

You'll have to check around for spare case parts I think. From my experience, spare parts for cases is only done for certain models by certain manufacturers. For example: my daily driver, an XP64 machine I call Palouser, has a NZXT Phantom 820 case. Over a decade old by now, the cable management grommets are starting to fall apart and the rubberized coating for some surfaces has degraded, becoming sticky. More concerning though is that one of the case LEDs burned out. When I inquired to NZXT about replacement LEDs or replacement dials for the case lighting controls (which have aforementioned rubberized coating) I was told they don't have replacement parts for the Phantom 820. They couldn't even tell me what sort of LEDs they used, so I have no idea how to replace the LED myself. Meanwhile, a friend of mine gave me a hand-me-down Windows 10 machine with older specs than Palouser that I call Levanter. My friend very heavily Corsair-themed that PC, with the case being (I believe) Corsair Carbide 500R. This case has a broken front panel exposing the interior. I found that Corsair does sell replacement parts, but I've had trouble locating any Carbide 500R parts. (I've certainly found a lot of Carbide 400C, 600Q/C, and 900D parts though ... ) Try checking Antec's site and see if they sell the parts. If they don't appear to do so, try contacting them and asking if they might have parts in stock, or what to do if they can't/won't sell them to you. You might also have luck checking eBay or Craigslist for spare parts or Antec Three Hundred cases being sold for parts. You might get a lot of mileage out of UserBenchmark. That's a site where users test the speed of their components at various tasks and upload the results. You can then compare the aggregate scores of one model against another. Tonight, in fact, I found out something rather embarrassing for AMD: the recently-released RX 6500-XT had been so hobbled in performance in a bid to make it unattractive to cryptocurrency miners that my GTX TITAN X Maxwell outperforms it in many categories, with an "effective 3D speed" that's 36% faster. (Granted, you shouldn't take the RX 6500 XT as an example of all its contemporaries. AMD's RX 6600-XT leaves my TITAN X Maxwell in the dust.) Aside from GPUs you can also check and compare benchmark aggregates for CPUs, RAM, SSDs, and HDDs. Even USB thumbdrives. Since 2020 there has been a chip shortage that's made itself felt across a bunch of industries, even the automotive industry. GPU prices skyrocketed as a result, especially as scalpers and miners swooped in and scooped up loads of stock, leading to some attempts at developing video cards either purpose-built for mining or unattractive to miners to try and keep them from depriving other customers of GPUs. We may finally be seeing the end of this shortage. That all depends on how world events shake out though; the media's already sounding the alarm about another wave of COVID-19 coming out of China, and we may wind up seeing another return to lockdowns and supply chains forcibly brought to a halt, which will just put us back to square one. There's also the fact that the world put most of its eggs in one basket, so to speak, with Taiwan presently producing the lion's share of chipmaking. Something like 60%, I think. If something were to happen to Taiwan, we would all be in for a bad time.

While I agree with the sentiment and I've put that into practice for my own site, major websites appear to have gotten quite lazy, careless, and uncaring about maximizing compatibility. Just tonight I discovered that Pixiv, the Japanese art website, now completely blanks out on all of my browsers including Roytam1's New Moon builds. I've had similar experiences with LinkedIn, BlockFi, and Coinbase. A number of other sites (such as DeviantArt and a British company, Clove Technology) currently implement such unfriendly code to a point that their sites are mostly unusable but not completely so. From the way people talked about it in Roytam1's thread, Polyfill is something we might be able to do "client-side" to address problems casued "server-side."

Without checking for myself (I don't have my login credentials for my Dropbox account handy) that sounds like Dropbox is yet another site that decided to implement code which doesn't work on any browser available to XP. I've experienced the same thing with LinkedIn, BlockFi, and Coinbase. Over in Roytam1's thread on his XP ports for various browser projects, there seems to be some kind of effort to correct this by some other users with Polyfill. But I've had trouble following along with what they're doing.

So in Roytam1's post where he chronicles his work on XP-friendly browsers, I saw a lot of talk of Polyfill. I tried to follow along, but coming into the middle of a long ongoing discussion with no apparent beginning no matter how many pages back I went left me horribly confused as to exactly what it is, how it's used, what it can and can't do and oh no I've gone crosseyed. So I thought the best thing to do would be to get a post specifically about Polyfill going, to untangle the discussion and get up to speed. With that in mind: What exactly is Polyfill? Which browsers can use Polyfill? How do you implement Polyfill into a browser? What can it do and what are its limitations? EDIT: @UCyborg cleared it up for me in this comment! Big thanks to him!

It probably depends on your personal experience with each operating system. For example: I have pretty fond memories of Windows 95 (I even still have the original Windows 95 machine my parents owned right here next to me) but Windows 98 and 98 SE were nigh-unusable nightmares to me. Blue Screens of Death were very common, at least once a day on that machine, usually one every few hours. By contrast, I rarely had BSoDs with XP and XP64. When they do happen (such as when Palouser's RAM fails or how her previous motherboard, a ASUS P5Q-PRO TURBO, developed some kind of thermal stress-related fault) it's almost always because of a hardware issue and not the fault of the operating system. In fact, Palouser had only one BSoD in all of last year. That being said, 98 and 98SE were on a family computer shared by the rest of the household, and my father was quite a bit more careless than I was with his computers. I've been wanting to build a "Bluetooth jukebox PC" themed after vaporwave/retrosynth for a while now, and when I get around to it I plan to have that machine run 98, which is one of the OSes associated with vaporwave and the earliest Windows version that supports Bluetooth, as I understand it.

Just throwing some two cents in here for @BlackOtton, but if you want to make an XP64 system that's as recent as you can get, you could follow what I did with Palouser, my XP64 machine. @XP-x64-Lover located a suite of XP64 drivers for the ASUS X99 SABERTOOTH motherboard. That gets you into 5th gen territory, so you could go all the way up to the Broadwell-E. With Matt's Repository's findings, you could get Windows XP drivers for the nVidia Geforce GTX 970, 980, 980 TI and Titan X. At least until Version 368.81. @bluebolt was able to get an NVMe drive to work as a boot drive for XP64. This would get you up to 2016-level specs. Well, bleeding edge for 2016. As I understand it, the 10xx series of nVidia video cards are still the most commonly used by gamers, partially due to ... well ... the economic forces at play right now. When I overhauled Palouser in 2019 (well, I got started locating parts in 2018, but still) I went balls-to-the-wall. I use Palouser as my do-everything daily driver and workstation, but of course, I am limited by what programs can be made to work on XP64. So she's got an i7-6950X, a TITAN X Maxwell, and 128 GB of RAM. Not the highest-specced RAM, but as I understand it, Intel CPUs of this generation weren't very strongly impacted by RAM speed. I don't know if anyone has had luck with newer hardware. I have heard of people getting XP to run on Ryzen, but aside from a photo I've not seen anyone post instructions on how they did it. EDIT: Well that sucks. I found the guy who said he succeeded at this, but he links to Win-Raid as proof of his accomplishment and the post is gone. There was a whole thread apparently, "XP/W2k3 x86 on Modern Hardware," that had a lot of information on workarounds and compatible drivers which got nuked during a forum database migration and was never restored. On the other hand, there's a thread at Win-Raid titled "XP/W2k3 x64 on Modern Hardware." The first few posts are by someone who claims to have gotten XP64 running on Coffee Lake. That's eighth gen Intel Core CPUs, circa 2017 ... in fact, that's what your machine has, right?

On the XP64 forums @bluebolt detailed efforts to install Windows XP64 on an NVMe drive. He was able to pull it off. Maybe his approach might work to installing Windows 7 on that?

It used to be, back in 2009, that I thought my only real challenge in staying with XP64 would be that I'd not be able to play newer games that use versions of DirectX newer than 9. Then I got firsthand experience with how there's also the issue of API compatibility, i.e. newer versions of Windows having APIs not present in the XP family. Well, now there's something else I hadn't considered which Linus brought up; video cards that say they support a certain version of DirectX doesn't mean they actually support that version flawlessly. DirectX is actually a group of APIs which receive updates of their own, and the collective state of these updates are more or less a type of subversion that Microsoft calls a "Feature Level." In the case of my nVidia GTX TITAN X Maxwell, even though it's said to be compatible with DirectX 12, it only supports up to Feature Level 12.1. That means any programs which require DirectX 12.2 or more wouldn't run with this video card, even if I were to use it with a Windows 10 or 11 install. And that, of course, wouldn't be limited to just games ... any program that uses DirectX for anything. This a more vexing issue for older cards. Many cards a decade old have specs that, on the face of it, should still allow them to run certain current programs and games, and yet they either fail to do so or crash. There are some compatibility layers that convert D3D calls to Vulkan, though, based on Steam Proton. That might work for those who are able to use them.