Hello all. Are there good pages/scripts available on how to build Seamonkey?

I already looked through these builds and would love to try building them: wg9s.com/comm-253

I found some bits and pieces, is sthis still up to date? developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/en-US/docs/Simple_SeaMonkey_build

I wanted to try building SeaMonkey for an older version of Windows, it may be unsupported territory, so I wanted to ask out.

Hi, also, is there a Discord for SeaMonkey?

lono

--lolno

no Discord here, sorry

it would not work on our browsers anyway as they target Chrome :/

(also FOSS projects should stay the hell away from it for other reasons)

_Guilt oldest version you can target with 2.53 is Windows 7 x86/x64

we are not dropping Win7 yet, right?

Anything lower just forget it. Even Vista would need third party code adjustments and a buch of stuff added back too.

Oh, I'm interested in compiling stuff for Windows XP.

tomman not on my watch as longs as it is possible.

_Guilt forget it.

So, there's this project called MyPal68

They basically got rust to work well, and are able to build FF78 level code

so that one can actually end up using slightly newer code on XP

However, it's a project that is still developing,

my only thing is that I want to get started with getting to know the build tools and all that and trying stuff out

_Guilt you need VS2017 with the XP stuff so if you can build 2.49.5 for XP you can try. In the end still forget it. Life is too short. Better contribute to ReactOS and see that this one gets Win 7 api support in.

I can use MinGW w64 8.1.x but that config isn't supported to build? Currently it's clang 16.0.x right?

frg_Away, that sounds like a good long term plan.

_Guit VS2019 is used for the x64 builds. VS2017 should still work. Anything clang 9 to 17 should work too. Mingw is unsupported. Patches are in but I doubt it will work and mozilla removed support fo rit if I am not mistaken

Okay. Let me try seeing if there's some binary version of clang that has it's exe compatibility set to lower. Yes, the path to getting a browser working on XP is very painful.

Yet the work done by these two projects is very inspiring:

- seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x

- github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68

Has anyone here played with any of those two projects, just wondering?

I am primarily interested in the first one, because it lets me compile rust binaries for very old systems too.

frg_Away, also, i'm primarily only looking at i386/x86/x32 builds.

Thanks to todays website design they tend to crash sooner than later because of out of memory. Targeting XP plus x86 is a double waste. I ran XP 64 for a long time and this was quite good for its time. As with OS/2 life is too short to muck around with it today.

I think that today's websites do consume a lot of RAM.

the modern web indeed is bloated beyond reason

Today, I was seeing someone posting that Windows 95 just ran well on a 386 with 4MB of RAM

there is nothing that stops webdevs from dialing down to the bloat but alas... that doesn't look nice on a resume

_Guilt: I have a 386SX-40 with 6MB

it DOES run... but not that well

you will want at the very least 8MB, to have some room to breath

tomman, have you tried running any version of Netscape on it?

nope

Like, the older ones

just IE3

Oh?

Does Netscape even run at all?

Haven't really bothered testing web browsers on it, other than IE3 (because it came with Win95 OSR2), and that time I tested Arachne (a DOS browser)

both exhibit terrible performance, and Arachne loves crashing once it runs out of RAM

Really the problem on that one is not the anemic CPU, but the small amount of RAM :/

and 30-pin 4MB SIMMs are simply made of unobtanium, especially in this country

with 16MB THEN I would be more CPU-bound

Win95 alone runs more or less OK on 6MB, but it will be swapping and hammering that HDD A LOT, and on that hardware you don't even have the luxury of DMA for HDD

(which would be pointless anyway because ISA is too slow for MWDMA modes, much less UDMA)

I recently wanted to start figuring out why modern software kinda sucks

so I wanted to actually go back to the past

I have a slightly old PC: blog.karthikkumar.org/usability-of-old-computers-f06a7f00f72e

Even Linux these days consumes a lot more RAM, can't even run a graphical install with 384 MB of RAM

@tomman, being have computer issues, last message I read was the anemic CPU

(history not available in IRC, so I was asking if there was Discord)

sorry, it's annoying

this channel is logged here: ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/seamonkey

Anyway, the other problem of trying to run modern software on older machines (aside of the bloat) is the actual driver/OS support

Debian won't install anymore on anything prior to a Pentium Pro or a Athlon

is that in the channel info cause it ain't in the topic.. freeno.. liberairc rules require channel logging to be publicly disclosed upon entry frg_Away

i got slapped by that before

Guilt: the installer will also complain if you dare using anything under 256MB RAM (for the text mode installer!) since Buster at least

And even if you manage to get past that hurdle, you'll find out that your 15-20 year old Radeon GPU doesn't have working video acceleration at all anymore as all the driver support for it got nuked because it had been broken since 2021

yeah, that sucks. I was able to spin up a 128MB SUSE 8.0 machine and it ran fine.

Linux had decent FB support and they broke it too.

Installing old distros is an option, but then you have to deal with shutdown/archived repos, and paranoid nutters saying that you'll get AIDS, hemorrhagic COVID and Ebola if you plug a retrobox to the Internet

@tomman, I keep archived versions of drivers for old GPUs.

(Likely for XP, not so much for 9x or even ancient Linux)

Guilt: that saves you on Windows, but on Linux you're the mercy at the kernel folks :/

I was able to get OpenCL code running on XP recently. It's funny how bitcoin miners run better than machine learning and webgpu today

if only they understood why stable APIs are a good idea, instead of "only proprietary software would benefit"...

there is zero testing actually of Linux devices

only the big companies which can afford to test their newer stuff are part of the 'community testing only'

so the older drivers are getting removed, and their idea is that if the code hasn't been updated for a long time, it's dead weight

so no stable interfaces really

Linux kinda is the new Windows now

Windows has better compatibility story now

but don't worry, soon Windows and Linux will be gone, because the browser is the new OS™

Oh no. it'll land in more authoritarian hands than ever

Lock the data, lock the protocols, force the user to centralize the data

developers love that because it finally realizes the Java dream: Write Once, Run Anywhere (that boots to Chrome)!

use the data to train human replacements, kill the humans

Anyway, I should try Retrozilla one of those days on my Win9x boxes

Java, Flash, JavaScript, Wasm ... all the same.

sadly the lack of localizations push me back

What is retrozilla ?

I can try it once I set up a 9x VM/something

MyPal68 is my current SeaMonkey alternative on XP.

I really wish they brought back old addon compatibility to Firefox

ChatZilla is so awesome (currently am using HexChat)

Guilt: or at least trying to bring back original GodZilla movie with Raymond Burr (AKA Perry Mason)

Wow, Raymond Burr is from New West.

Had o look him up.

WG9s, hello!

Guilt: hi

bacl on the 1950's/1q960's Raymond Burr played Perry Mason on TV. and then showed up as a TV reporter in Godzilla.

bacl on the 1950's/1960's Raymond Burr played Perry Mason on TV. and then showed up as a TV reporter in Godzilla.

I'm glad Seamonkey exists today, and they are adding uBlock Origin for it on github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy and it's not findable on SeaMonkey addons

WG9s, oh, he was also Perry Mason?

well frg wont land a new version if ublock does not work

ON YV

TV

I didnt find uBlock Origin on the addons page

I'm using 2.53.17.1

But the GH version is working

Guilt: I asked frg to respond to you He can point to a version of ublock that works with SeaMonkey.

it is in the page so what is the problem? github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firef…Block0_1.16.4.30.firefox-legacy.xpi

Guilt: frg saus in in the Seamonkey release notes

On this page:

there's no way to see uBlock origin there, do we need to let the developer know to list it there?

addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/ublock-origin <- that install button isn't working

I don't know if the developer is active on these repos any more, guess this will be non-discoverable :/

Alright my kid's up. Will be back after a bit. AFK.

Guilt: frg says latest version f ublock from github works