Firefox has just gotten unweildy.
Not sure I remember why I migrated away from kmeleon. Always liked it.
First off... my url does not "update" when I click on a new link. It lags behind by a few urls. I had visited a site from google news.. cnn's coverage of the zika virus... and I went to google search, typed "kmeleon" therein, and navigated to this forum. Right now in the url bar above remains the link to cnn's story on the zika virus. What's wrong?

Second. I'm considering going off grid, somewhat. Dropping my internet service. I don't have much demand for it...certainly far short of 600 dollars a year at the current rates in my neck of the woods for the cheapest service. I don't mind at all using the public library for my occasinonal needs or connecting at my workplace. If I use a public wifi access point with kmeleon, how can I protect my connection? I'd like to be able to shop, enter credit card info, use paypal, etc. HTTPS Everywhere seems not to be an option with kmeleon. Other options? Can I use TOR on public connections for secure purchases?

Thanks so very much for any input. Always been a fan. Hope this stays alive. So far, three days in, I'm much impressed with switching from firefox. Faster. No annoying reminders that "this browser is no longer supported here". WTF? Videos, youtube, etc, play without nagging for updates and long downloads. I don't know how it's done behind the curtains, but it's sincerely appreciated.

Did I mention fast? Damn. Love this. In the habit of using JSSWITCH with firefox to keep a damper on the worst of the internet. Easy enough to click it on when necessary. Most of the time leaving it off obviates any need for adblocking additions. I'm amazed at how many I speak to are unaware of this. Firefox has JSSWITCH available as a somewhat obscure add-on. I'm not very technically saavy, but I was unable to configure Chrome with any clickable javascript defeat at all!!!
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but again... WTF is up with that? So imagine delight in finding Kmeleon including a javascript option right from the very get-go. Hurray for you!!!

Again... thanks for the work.

I intend to support... financially since I'm technically an imbecile. I want to give it a few more weeks to be sure you and I can really live together

You can use the JS toggle button on the inbuild Privacy bar. Which still exists.

Some Firefox addons also work. However the limit is that these cannot use anything that uses the XUL GUI of FF. My guess Your JSSwitch uses a button and waun't work. Plus. These things that cannot work often trow JS errors. That makes it a show stopper. Any Addon stops to works on first JS error.

p.s. No FF did not get slower and more bloated quite the opposite but Your hardware got older and fails on modern rich content.

Huge CSS, JS and video content that waits to load even when Your PC is up to sniff.

Seems like the content providers have been to bed with Your ISP that wants to sell You a faster line.

Plus modern pages constantly wait on addvert and monitoring URLs (view in status line) so the use of some page (advert & monitoring) blockers is advisable.

It helps for many pages but some will bar You for that very reason.





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/06/2016 02:06PM by guenter.

brad,

I think, VPN-software like Hotspot Shield is exactly what you need for your public wireless connection.

You may also try CyberGhost, Psiphon or a number of alternatives

Quote
guenter
No FF did not get slower and more bloated quite the opposite but Your hardware got older and fails on modern rich content.

I don't know which Firefox version Brad is comparing to the current one, but in my experience it has gotten much slower, at least with version 43.0.4. To be fair, comparisons should be made with the same hardware, but when software starts to get bloated, the developers always blame the users' hardware. Not everyone can afford to buy a new system every time a new version is released, and Firefox gets updated with incredible frequency.

A comparison I just made using my Windows 7 machine showed that Firefox consumes about 85 MB of RAM on startup, even with my wifi switched off and nothing but a simply local HTML page loaded. I can get it down to 75 MB if I disable all my add-ons. Under the same conditions, KM75 starts out at 25 MB.

Also, I've seen some sites with Flash videos bump RAM usage up to 173 MB in Firefox, while the same site with the identical content uses 125 MB in KM.

I watched a video a few days ago using FF, and once I had cleaned up and closed the browser, my system had trouble recovering -- everything was running very slowly, so I had to restart Windows. After the same video in KM: No problem!

Page-loading speed is another thing: This forum is relatively simple and pages load almost instantly, but not so in Firefox, where there are lags.

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Gerry

The machines I currently use all have a GB RAM or more. I remember when I was mainly on a ca. 200 mb RAM machine that the Mozilla GREs JS engines started to get faster (K-Meleon 1.6 times) and they have improved ever since. And older GREs and settings are faster on that machine which is still usable.

Modern JS heavy pages require a faster JS engine with goddies like speculative compile ahead to be tolerably fast. Many improvements inside the Mozilla engine have a hardware cost so to speak. Things like speculative compile ahead need an amount of RAM which old machines simply do not have.

On a well equipped PC. If You use such pages with an old FF or even K-Meleon which I have installed You will notice that they are slower.

However if You are on an older machine Your PC may not be able to see/use the speed improvements out of the box - because of the hardware limits. You have to switch to other older settings to use and see the increased speed sometimes.


p.s. RAM. Yes FF is set to use as much as is available. Only used RAM is good RAM.
Much the same on a smaller scale for K-Meleon. Smaller IMHO because we have no XUL GUI.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2016 09:24AM by guenter.

Well, I use only a little netbook here. It has 1 GB of RAM and 250 MB of graphics memory (not so great, I guess). The CPU speed is 1.66 Ghz. All my comparisons are made on the same machine. The only other computer I have access to is that of my partner's. His has a dual-core processor, higher speed and more RAM, yet for some reason, Firefox -- even a version as old as 15 -- is nearly useless on his machine. Pages take forever to load, whereas even the recent version of Firefox runs tolerably well on mine.

There are just too many variables to consider, and my technical knowledge for understanding them is insufficient, anyway.

Off-topic: Now I'm facing another enigma: Suddenly Google Maps (even the so-called "Lite Mode") no longer works in my KM75, yet it was working only a day or two ago. My partner's KM75 installation has no trouble with it. What I get is just the search box and a blank screen. If I type in an address, it gets auto-completed by Google, so that much works, but no map appears. Even the thumbnail labeled "satellite" has no image with it. This is without blocking any of the privacy items. In Google Images I get only the first row of thumbnails; the rest of them are just blank gray squares. Of course, if I disable JavaScript and use the old Images format, I get all the thumbnails.

When this happened last night I visited some other sites, making sure they were as heavy with graphics and advertising as possible. They all worked fine.

The next thing I did was to try Maps with Firefox. It came up just fine, and so did Images.

Since KM had been OK before, I'm going to try a system restore to see if that corrects the problem.

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Gerry

Sorry about the topic change, but with reference to my previous post, the problem with Google Maps and Images wasn't due to a corrupt file at all. When I created a brand-new profile everything returned to normal, so I gradually copied the files from my backed up profile to see which file might be causing the problem. It turned out to be prefs.js, so I finally opened about:config and sorted the list by status to look for changes in the settings. This key was in bold, indicating a change from the default, and it looked suspicious, since it dealt with images:

dom.disable_image_src_set

It was set to true. When I set it to false, everything went back to normal. Accord to Mozilla, that setting "determines whether scripts may change the .src member of image objects (effectively, whether images can be changed via JavaScript)".

As you can see, I learn most of what I know by trial and error, and I make as many errors as anybody!

What puzzles me is that I hadn't made any preference changes for a long time, at least not in about:config. :s

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Gerry

Glad you figured it out
Had trouble with that one too in the past, and related with maps as well!

PS: that setting has a GUI, perhaps you did change it there and forgot again?
F2 > Javascript > Content Manipulation

"Disallow scripts to change images"
=dom.disable_image_src_set



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2016 08:23PM by siria.

Quote
siria
Glad you figured it out
Had trouble with that one too in the past, and related with maps as well!

PS: that setting has a GUI, perhaps you did change it there and forgot again?
F2 > Javascript > Content Manipulation

"Disallow scripts to change images"
=dom.disable_image_src_set

Well, it could be that I accidentally checked that option when I opened the JavaScript dialog to change some permissions. In the past, when I was still using KM74, I think I may have checked it to prevent the roll-over effects, but never noticed an effect on maps, possibly because at that time Google Maps hadn't changed to the vastly inferior format it uses now. It was still using Flash back then. Street view was so much better, too!

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Gerry