Heh, VMs contains various quirks that can slow down the system in magnitudes cmpared to a real HW! Varous xmoons and pals browsers getting more and more outdated so chrome based seems to remain the only viable option for some sites. E.g. the new win-raid forum is heavy scripted crap where dynamic scrolling wouldn't work...
As it was told by author of Supermium, 3D accel (affecting webgl perfo) was currently disabled on XP due to some issues that have to be resolved, maybe one day will be enabled...

UCyborg wrote on 2024-03-20, 08:18:

Last time I tried it (version 121), it was rather sloppy, even had the bug of those Chinese ports (360 Extreme Explorer at least […]
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Last time I tried it (version 121), it was rather sloppy, even had the bug of those Chinese ports (360 Extreme Explorer at least) where fonts eventually corrupt or disappear when using Stylus, maybe also under certain different circumstances.

Chromium generally works poor on my hardware without GPU acceleration (so no usable WebGL either), even more on the ancient dinosaur that is XP, HD videos are frame-dropping galore, choppy auto-scrolling, laggy CSS transitions/animations. Not that I expected much on XP.

Old Chromium build 291943 (dev variant of Chromium 39), now that's something else, at least as far as WebGL goes. Also a stark difference in how huge Chromium has become over the years.

Also this fork relies on proprietary KernelEx style hack, so it's not a pure XP compatible web browser. You can't take its source code and compile a working browser from it.

here using just supermium+ublock origin, palemoon forum dont have any problem

The PC im writing now is the one i use for programming, a 771 Quad Xeon l5410, 8GB ram, integrated intel GPU, XP 32bits, and while watching a 1080p in youtube i get CPU use of 15-25% max, video is smoth

come on guys... I don't know what kind of computers you guys have, but my xeon is more than 15 years old, and using a integrated GPU...!

Of course you won't reproduce it just like that as the reproduction circumstances are not exactly clear. Good tab on the left, broken tab on the right.

UCyborg wrote on 2024-03-21, 18:10:

Of course you won't reproduce it just like that as the reproduction circumstances are not exactly clear. Good tab on the left, b […]
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Of course you won't reproduce it just like that as the reproduction circumstances are not exactly clear. Good tab on the left, broken tab on the right.

I loaded the palemoon forum, refreshed, change size of window, etc and did not have any font problems. Maybe is a extension you have. The only extension i have is ublock origin

The issue was only ever reported on Windows XP alone as far as I'm aware.

https://retrowindows.miraheze.org/wiki/360_Extreme_Explorer (the latest XP compatible version of this one is based on Chrome 86, a browser from 2020)

Of course, users on newer OS never have to bother with silly workarounds like disabling sandbox or downgrading/removing their extensions. Personally, I only ever managed to reproduce on XP, with the same set of extensions/settings used on other systems.

I think the sandbox is broken rather than being the extension's fault (web extensions are very limited in what they can do), but who would even do the proper review of the source code to confirm?

And since it doesn't seem to occur anywhere else, by which I mean not only modern Windows, but also other non-Windows operating systems and processor architectures that aren't x86/x64 and are PROPERLY SUPPORTED... So as far as I'm concerned, it's not much of a loss if it doesn't work properly on the crappy old Windows IMO.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-03-20, 04:06:

Bruninho wrote on 2024-03-20, 03:52:

even after racking up the RAM for my XP vm

If you don't mind me asking - I do get wanting a browser on a physical machine, but not in a VM. What's the point of using an outdated browser on top of an outdated OS within a virtualized environment which reduces performance and potentially introduces incompatibilities, when you could just do it on the host?

Because I do not have a real machine nor want to have one.

I see no reduced performance or incompatibilities in my VM. Supermium was the only program that showed this problem.

theelf wrote on 2024-03-20, 05:13:

Bruninho wrote on 2024-03-20, 03:52:

theelf wrote on 2024-03-20, 00:21:

I dont see much difference using supermium in both my desktop, xeon quad 8gb and laptop i5 8gb, if i compare using supermium in winxp, win7 or win10

what website is slowfor you? i will test

I didnt even manage to type an URL to load a website, it was just sluggish slow, even after racking up the RAM for my XP vm. I ended sticking with New Moon.

serious answer or is a joke?

Very serious answer, mate. I never joke on things like that.

Installed it, tried to load it, waited for ages and then did not even manage to load the settings. I couldnt do anything on it. So I uninstalled it and decided to stick with what I already had - which was SeaMonkey and NewMoon. Both are far more responsive and usable. I don't bother with web browsing on XP, just with the enough for getting the stuff required to make other things work there. XP isn't even my daily driver. But my experience with supermium was really bad there.

From my limited experience, performance of the OS can vary greatly between virtualization solutions. It's been few years since I ran XP more often on a VM, but VMware sucked while VirtualBox was OK. That VMware version generally worked best with Windows 7. I base this on general responsiveness.

Chromium likes multi-core CPUs, I wouldn't go with anything less than a quad core for comfortable browsing.

I still visit XP (x64) ocassionally out of curiosity. The backports of more complex software, if they exist, the quality standards one may be accustomed to from the original versions on supported platforms, they're on the lower level.

Recently, I was surprised to find version 7.3.3 of RivaTuner Statistics Server still launches on XP. Not the most recent version, but it's from current decade. Scanline sync was non-functional. Things like that seem standard in XP world. But I guess one is supposed to adjust expectations, 32-bit version's age is over 2 decades at this point while 64-bit will reach 2 decades mark soon. Sure there were countless updates, but foundamentals stayed the same.

I see your experience with them is different from mine.

When I had intel macs, vmware fusion ran my XP vms flawlessly with no lag at all. Virtualbox sucked more for me, since version 6.1.

But our different experiences with them could be because we had different needs from our VMs.

Here on M1 Macs, XP is very good (not VMware standards tho) from QEMU. I generally use it for removing DRM from music so I can upload them to my old iPod Nano. Nowadays I am using for converting floppy disk images for use with an Apple IIe SDISK II emulator. Browsing on it was never a priority. Still, the OS is very responsive.

Right now I am using NewMoon on XP to download a disk image converter from DKS to NIC and vice versa, for use with another DISK II emulator.

I want to share how much good works Supermium

here in spain is time for goverment taxes payments, and i did every single procedure in Supermium in windows XP, and works fine. Even the more difficult ones, that is using web browser for validate digital certificates, 0 problems

Im very happy to realize Windows XP still alive for online stuff!

Who would've thought, Google didn't have to lift a finger for their browser to find its way into most obscure corners. I find it absurd there's a newer Chromium for XP than there is for Android 7. Oh well, it will probably take a while before 119 is not good enough for general browsing...

For Chromium fans, there's also Thorium.

BTW, the entry for current version of SeaMonkey is incorrect, the system requirements part specifically, 2.49.5 was the last release supporting Windows XP and Vista.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/legacy

I tried Thorium. but seems to not work (and intended to work) on WXP...

Well it is the thread covering all OS...XP build is here: https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-legacy/releases

Same bugs as Supermium it seems (on XP - yay disappearing fonts), different set of patches that may or may not work. JPEG-XL decoding seems working, though h.265 decoding which seems to be another unique characteristic does not. But I'm not sure where either is used at this point outside of test sites.

Thanks. I just tried WebGL in 3D mapy.cz and it runs as slow as Supermium - no HW accel.
I'll try to use it for some time and compare with Supermium...

XP compatibility should be the same, given those patches come from Supermium.

There is a new release for MicroWeb DOS web browser

MicroWeb 2.0 contains several improvements over previous versions: […]
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MicroWeb 2.0 contains several improvements over previous versions:

Support for more video modes, including monochrome and colour modes
GIF images are now loaded
PNG and JPEG dimensions are loaded but not the content
Improved font rendering and better Unicode support for accented characters
More HTML tag support including tables and forms
Can now leverage EMS memory (if available) for larger pages and images

https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb

Minimum requirements
CGA, EGA, VGA or Hercules compatible graphics card
A network interface (it is possible to use your machine's serial port with the EtherSLIP driver)
A mouse is desirable but not 100% required
640K RAM is desirable but can run with less
EMS can be used if available and is recommended for loading heavier web pages and images
Limitations
HTTP only (See HTTPS limitations below)
Only GIF images are rendered, although PNG and JPEG dimensions are loaded for layout purposes
No CSS or Javascript
Very long pages may be truncated if there is not enough RAM available
Mouse cursor is currently not visible in Hercules mode

Links Web Browser it's a better option (HTTPS support among other things), but MicroWeb looks promising.

I already tested MicroWeb 2.0 on my HP 200LX, it seems it renders test web page better (like fonts, encoding) but it renders less % of the whole page than older version 0.5x probably due to increased memory requirements...