Pale Moon 'portable' browsers - 32- & 64-bit

[greengeek]

Hi Mike, https://mega.nz/folder/zO52VZDQ#F3U5wZYxvb9FNy3aHvMs-w from fist post seems dead.
(Trialling any and every broswer i can find for VanillaDpup32 )
cheers!

[mikewalsh]

@greengeek :-

Good catch, Ian. Thanks for that.

I've got so much stuff uploaded, that on the odd occasions when I "re-organise" my cloud drives, I don't always remember to upgrade the respective links..... The link in post #1 is now the correct one.

Cheers!

Mike.

[peppyy]

After reading that you can update palemoon portable I thought I would give it a try.
Updated to 31.1.0 now I am back where I was before with high cpu and running hot. I need to revert again now that my computer sounds like a jet taking off.
EDIT: Updated again and 31.4.0 seems to be working much better.

[williams2]

my computer sounds like a jet taking off

This is why Puppy was created.

There was Knoppix, but,
Knoppix had no persistence
Knoppix tied up the optical drive.
Knoppix was slow and noisy (because the optical drive is slow and noisy)
Knoppix was not suitable for use as a daily driver (too slow and noisy and no persistence)

Which is Puppy's raison d'etre

Unlike Knoppix, Puppy was intended to be fast and efficient,
and able to get done at least 80% of what you need to do.
and therefor usable as your operating system most of the time.

You can improve the speed and noise by setting the maximum speed of the cd drive.

Code: Select all

eject -x 4

Experiment to find a maximum speed that works for you.

[peppyy]

@williams2 Thanks but it is a frugal install on a SSD. Think I have it under control after the last update. See edit on previous post.
It was the fans in the computer that were getting loud.
PS: My specs are in my signature

[Fenyo]

Happy Santa Claus Day, here are some retro builds;

- 29.1.0 ia32 - sse is even not requried (for PPro, PII, Mendocino core Celeron or classic Athlon/Duron, Geode LX), minimum glibc 2.12 required (Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) or Debian 7 (Wheezy) or higher supported (usually any 32bit distro since 2012))

- 32.0.0 ia32 - sse is even not requried (for PPro, PII, Mendocino core Celeron or classic Athlon/Duron, Geode LX), minimum glibc 2.19 required, Debian 8 (Jessie or hihger supported), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

- 32.0.0 3dnow - usually cpus that have 3dnow, but lack cmov instruction set ( so Amd K6-x series (k6-2/k6-2+/k6-3/k6-3+, Geode LX, some Via cpus (C3 Samuel 2 and C3 Ezra are the target cpus, but also works with classic Athlon/Duron but there are also newer builds for the latter), built under Debian 8 (the latest distro with i586 support) with clang-7. Of course it works with other 3dnow capable cpus on Debian 8 or newer 32bit Debian based distros, but this is only relevant for low-end low-clock Duron/Athlon configurations with low amount of memory, because it will probably run faster than IA32 builds. all past and future builds will be available here

- 29.4.6 sse - sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.12 required (Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) or Debian 7 (Wheezy) or higher supported (usually any 32bit distro since 2012))

- 32.0.0 sse sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.19 required, Debian 8 (Jessie or hihger supported), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

- 32.0.0 sse sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.19 required, Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty or hihger supported), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

- 32.0.0 unmodified (sse2 required) build on Centos 7 i686, so if it existed this would be the closest version to official, minimium glibc 2.17 required (Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) or Debian 8 (Jessie) or higher supported (usually any 32bit distro since 2014), usually for Pentium 4 and Celeron derivates (Willamete, Northwood, Prescott), Pentium M / Celeron M (Banias, Dothan) and Core2 T2xx0 series (Yonah), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

And here are some other 3dnow i586/nosse/non-sse2 browser (Firefox esr, Seamonkey, Basilisk) and email client (Epyrus) builds .

[mikewalsh]

@Fenyo :-

Well; um.....I really don't know what to say! Except to once again, utter a heart-felt "Thank you!"

Shows I haven't visited this thread for a while.....

--------------------------------------

Right, gang. We have two new 32-bit portable builds available.

• The current, 'standard' glibc-tweaked Pale Moon offering - what I'm now dubbing "PaleMoon+".....currently @ v32.0.1, and using Steve Pusser's Xubuntu 18.04 build, and.....

• A brand-new, bang up-to-date glibc-tweaked SSE-only "NewMoon" build - for those of you with really old hardware, like PIIIs, Athlon XPs, etc - courtesy of our good friend Fenyo (as listed above)......also @ v32.0.1. Many thanks, Fenyo!

Links for these are available, as always, from post #1 of this thread.

------------------------------------

Browsing through Fenyo's stuff at archive.org, there's an interesting-looking email client available from the MoonChild Productions team. I'm not entirely sure what this is called; much of the packaging is labelled as "Epyrus", yet once it's up-and-running you're greeted with a banner stating "Welcome to the 'Hermopolis' email client...". My guess is that this is still very much a WIP - 'work in progress'. It's a UXP-developed variant of the older-style Thunderbird, in much the same way Pale Moon has evolved from the older pre-Australis Firefox. Mis-matched labelling aside, it seems pretty good, and rather more lightweight than T-Bird itself. I'm evaluating this ATM, and will let y'all have my thoughts on it in a bit....

Mike.

[Amol]

Hello old puppy lovers !
I'm under a puppy wheezy k.3.14.56 right now, running the last palemoon.A big thank to Fenyo, Battleshooter and others for that.At start up it uses 65Mo of ram.
Best regards,
Amol.

[mmmrr]

howdy amol.
congrats,mm

[mmmrr]

what does sse stand for?

[Amol]

Hello mmmrr !
Look here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions
Amol

[mmmrr]

thanks amol..

take away:
to check for sse on computer

in terminal, i entered 'lscpu' no quotes
end of output is a list of flags
which included sse & sse2.

cheers, mm

[Null_ID]

Since Puppy and Fatdog have people who often use old hardware, I feel that you should be made aware of this one:

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909

Furboy is thinking about optimizing the Pale Moon browser for systems supporting the AVX instruction set only. Any system not supporting this set of CPU instructions will be locked out if/when this change is pushed trough. Any old system made in 2011 or before would no longer work with this browser. The community might still offer alternative builds that retain SSE2/SSE3 support used by older hardware, and Pale Moon's sister project Basilisk has promised to remain SSE2 compatible.

[Amol]

A big thank you, to Fenyo for the palemoon 33.0.1 update. Runs great like the 32.5.2.
Best regards,
Amol

[mikewalsh]

@Null_ID :-

Yeah, I saw that myself. It has the potential to exclude a LOT of 'Puppy' hardware; even this 2019 HP Pavilion's Pentium G5400 CPU doesn't have AVX.....and although I treated myself to my first new rig for a LONG while when I got it, even I don't have the readies to go daft with expensive hardware.

(I could 'upgrade' - on Socket LGA 1151 - to a Core i7, or summat similar.....but even on eBay, most of these are going for 3 figures plus. I don't consider the outlay justifiable for one single item of software.)

Looks like Moonchild wants to make Pale Moon a specialist, 'niche' browser. (BTW, I haven't visited for some weeks; when DID they change to that HORRIBLE pink & grey theme? It's awful! )

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

Well now:-

Following an exchange with Moonchild on the Pale Moon forums about this upcoming AVX issue, it appears he IS determined to go ahead with it. For anybody else who wants a different configuration to his AVX "standard", you will have exactly one option.....you'll have to compile your own browser from source. And that is no small task, it seems.

It appears that, in his usual blinkered way, he's basically catering for the Pale Moon community.....most of whom appear to be running expensive, top-end hardware. Still, you can't argue with the guy; Tobin is history, so Moonchild is now the sole developer; he also 'owns' Moonchild Productions AND pays for the forum hosting, so if he wants to go his own sweet way, that's his prerogative, I guess..!

I think we can forget Pale Moon soon.....unless Steve Pusser's builds will continue to cater for those who don't have AVX in their CPU instruction sets. We'll see, I guess. I know I'm not buying new hardware just to run a damn browser!!

Throughout history, it's been the same. Whenever any organization has a "sole proprietor", invariably that individual will always be right. You cannot argue the toss with them, because you'll lose. EVERY time.

And geeks everywhere are the same. Because they think nothing of dropping 100s or 1000s of dollars/pounds on new hardware, they tend to assume that all computer users, everywhere, take the same view as they do......and attach the same level of importance to what THEY consider "top priority". Mostly these seem to be folks in well-paid jobs with LOTS of "pocket-money"....

That's a relatively small minority, believe me!

Mike.

[Wiz57]

@mikewalsh I wouldn't even attempt to speak for Moonchild, but I get the feeling that as he is basically the sole developer,
he doesn't think it's feasible to support SSE2/3 and AVX...I don't know myself, but I do know that Roytam1 still publishes SSE browsers based on older
Tycho engine of Mozilla, ported from Win7 and later targeted code base! I read the Palemoon forum often, but have never joined/posted to it...
same with the MSFN forum where Roytam1 announces his releases. I've been using Steve Pusser's Debian GTK2 32 bit builds on my old Acer Aspire One
netbook for what seems like forever...I don't use a built-in updater, just download a new DEB when released and install it just like you would a pet.
One final observation...may or may not be relevant...there is STILL some animosity from some of the Palemoon forum members and the group at MSFN,
namely because Roytam1 continues to backport PM source updates to Windows XP and even earlier! This whole AVX thing "could be" another attempt
at circumventing Roytam1's efforts, since Tobin was banned about a year or more ago, and then Tobin poisoned the source/build repo! That really
ticked Moonchild off, and for a while Moonchild didn't say much negative about MSFN...but I notice other members derogatory postings about MSFN!
Just a bit of food for thought.

[rolandradio]

Happy Santa Claus Day, here are some retro builds;

• 29.4.6 sse - sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.12 required (Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) or Debian 7 (Wheezy) or higher supported (usually any 32bit distro since 2012))

• 32.0.0 sse sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.19 required, Debian 8 (Jessie or hihger supported), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

• 32.0.0 sse sse required (PIII and Celeron derivates (Katmai, Coppermine, Tualatin), Athlon Xp/K7 based Sempron/Geode NX or Morgan core or newer Duron), Via C3 Nehemiah, minimum glibc 2.19 required, Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty or hihger supported), Palemoon 32 is a huge webcompatibility (Chromified Web) develeponment forward, many websites are working properly again. all past and future builds will be available here

And here are some other 3dnow i586/nosse/non-sse2 browser (Firefox esr, Seamonkey, Basilisk) and email client (Epyrus) builds .

Thanks Fenyo ! Nice links

[Amol]

THANKS Fenyo for the Palemoon-33.2.0 !
Very appreciated.
Amol

[Null_ID]

A brief update on things: Per this announcement, the Palemoon browser, starting with version 33.3.0, will begin to require mandatory AVX instructions support from your system CPU. Palemoon mainline builds will no longer function with silicone lacking this instruction set. A PM user/contributor called Nuck-TH has promised to keep separate, SSE2/SSE3 compliant builds of Palemoon available, but for how long that continues is everybody's guess. Past contributors, like Steve Pusser, appear to have exited the project, and vanished quietly in recent times.

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 49#p253649

Related, PM's sister project Basilisk, run by a certain Basilisk-Dev, appears to have stalled. There have been no new updates/releases of Basilisk since May 11th, and all threads on the Basilisk message board have suddenly been locked, so probably we can't rely on that one as a PM replacement either. Effectively, all UXP tech based browsers could soon be more or less useless for us Puppians.

If you still need Palemoon 33.2.1, grab it while you can.

[peebee]

Palemoon-33.3.x will not run on my Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5450 even though the motherboard is Release Date: 04/30/2012

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_ ... Extensions
first supported by Intel with the Sandy Bridge[1] microarchitecture shipping in Q1 2011 and later by AMD with the Bulldozer[2] microarchitecture shipping in Q4 2011.

Code: Select all

lscpu | grep avx

[Jasper]

From their changelog:

v33.3.0 (2024-08-13)
This is a major development update.

Important notes with this version:

From this version forward, all 64-bit releases require a processor with AVX capabilities! Please keep en eye on the forum for announcements of 64-bit SSE builds by the community if you are on particularly old or otherwise limited hardware that does not support AVX.

For Linux users: Starting with this version, our binaries are built with gcc 11 on a still conservative but more modern build platform (Oracle Linux 8). As a result, there may be some lib incompatibilities if you are still running on a particularly old distro for some reason. While we try to serve as broad of a Linux base as possible with our binaries, our lowest common denominator will occasionally shift to newer distros as a result of O.S. life cycles, compiler capabilities and available libraries.

Notable updates:

Added support for FFmpeg 7.0 / libavcodec 61 (Linux).
Security issues addressed: CVE-2024-7531 (Firefox ESR 115.14 Vulnerability Allows Plaintext Passage on Intel Sandy Bridge)

[mikewalsh]

@Jasper :-

Well, that's IT for me, then. No more Pale Moon....

Despite this Pentium 'Gold' G5400 being 8th/9th-gen 'Core' age, Q2 2018 (approx), it does NOT have the AVX instruction set. It has SSE4.1/4.2, vt-X for virtulization, has Hyper-threading AND runs at nearly 4 GHz, but.....NO AVX. So I won't be able to use an up-to-date Pale Moon from now on, unless someone in the community DOES build an SSE-only variant.

I've been expecting this. No way am I shelling out for new hardware just to support a browser that isn't even my primary , although this will stuff my using the Latitude since Pale Moon runs the best on there....

Sugar puffs...!! (Grrr...)

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

TBH, following the Pale Moon community discussion around this in late March/early April this year, I got the distinct impression that Moonchild and the dev team had already long since made their minds up that PM would be heading in this direction, regardless of what the community thought about it.

Many members expressed concern that this development would alienate a large part of their user-base, and people would switch away from Pale Moon in droves. Their response was this; that Pale Moon is more about "vision" & "principles" than it is about keeping users.......and that, since AVX has been available in Intel processors for almost 12 years, anybody daft enough to buy a CPU without it had only themselves to blame (and why would people NOT fork out more money for the most capable CPUs while they were at it?)

The Pale Moon team come across as an exclusive little club, more concerned with back-slapping and congratulating each other than actually putting the user-base first (without which, no project can keep going for long). It's easy to see who the members of said select club are; they're the same gang that always post in support of each other, regardless of the subject matter. But then, most communities exhibit the same behaviour at times....

(*shrug...*)

They were under the impression that we had a team of full-time package maintainers, who did nothing BUT maintain, compile and update packages for the community. I attempted to disabuse them of this notion, but they wouldn't believe me! Null_ID posted in support to back me up, but they refused to believe him, too.....

Like I said, they'd already made their minds up......and if you didn't like it, it wasn't THEIR problem.

Mike.

[bigpup]

@mikewalsh
I would think, portable builds could still be made, using these deb packages.

Pale Moon builds by the community.

This seems to still offer a lot of choices.
https://www.palemoon.org/contributed-builds.shtml

I go here, to keep a version of Pale Moon updated, that is used on a Raspberry Pi 400 computer, running Easy OS version for Raspberry Pi computers.
The arm version works on it.

On this web page as an example:
Click on the Pale Moon GTK2 repositories for Debian and Ubuntu
On page that pops up.
Click on the debian icon.
Click on Grab binary packages directly
This will list a bunch of different deb packages to select from. They are a complete deb package of that build of Pale Moon. Install as any other deb package.

Notice it also has 64bit and 32bit versions.

So, seems some of the people are still supporting the older OS's and hardware.

[bigpup]

@mikewalsh

Pentium 'Gold' G5400 being 8th/9th-gen 'Core' age, Q2 2018 (approx), it does NOT have the AVX instruction set.

You sure the CPU does not have AVX support?

This says it does:
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/p ... 5400.c1988

I checked my CPU by using Pup-Sysinfo ->Mainboard ->CPU

[FeodorF]

Ref: AVX / Pale Moon

Hi @bigpup , hi @mikewalsh ,

What to do?
https://community.intel.com/t5/Intel-Di ... -p/1138691

CPU's and GPU's that do work ... and so on.
https://docs.openvino.ai/2024/about-ope ... ments.html

I'm feeling really screwed after that info.

Regards,
Feodor

[mikewalsh]

@bigpup / @FeodorF :-

I don't place a lot of faith in TechPowerUp! Their GPU database is first-class.....but a LOT of their other stuff is frequently wrong.

According to Intel themselves:-

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 0-ghz.html

....and CPU-World:-

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_ ... G5400.html

.....the G5400 does NOT have the AVX extension. Pup-SysInfo says no, as well (see attached report). And downloading the official tarball, and re-building a copy of the portable, upon attempting to launch from the terminal I got "Illegal action : avx_extension_not_detected...."......and it point-blank refused to play ball.

I suspect you'll find it's one of two things; either the Coffee-Lake Pentium 'Gold's were 'seconds' left over after the Coffee-Lake Core i5s had been 'binned', OR - which is probably nearer the mark - Intel deliberately disabled certain parts of the core, simply to 'aim' the G5400 more accurately at its 'target' market segment.... AES is there, but AVX very definitely isn't.

They do a LOT of this..! (It 'encourages' people to shell out extra dough for the more up-market models in any given generation, of course......which is WHY they do it. That, and the fact it's a way of using up the "rougher" chips from any individual wafer; cuts down on wastage).

===================================

However; all is NOT lost. You beat me to the 3rd-party contrib. builds page, but I was heading there anyway. A community member by the name of Nuck-TH has begun to compile SSE2 builds of mainline Pale Moon, and his first builds are now available.

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 11#p254211 , leading to...
.... http://ftp2.palemoon.org/avx/linux/

I've had to include glibc 2.28, using watchdog's 'tweak' trick, due to the fact that this is now the minimum required by their newly-upgraded build system.......but, thanks to Nuck-TH, I've now got a Puppy-portable package available for Pale Moon v33.3.0, which - if the "official" package isn't working for you - can be found here:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Seems to run very well, so far. Posting from it now, in fact....

Swap-in your own profile from the previous version, as usual.

• Download

• Unzip

• Move the extracted portable anywhere you like (preferably outside the save, of course!)

• Click to enter

• Click to launch...

The usual MenuEntry scripts are there, if one is required. Enjoy!

Please note:-

According to Nuck-TH, these haven't yet received any extensive testing; they've only just been built, and although they run on his system, he doesn't have a dedicated Linux install, so testing takes place in a VM. DO BE AWARE....there may yet be some instability, since this is all a bit in the"experimental" stage ATM. If y'all find anything you consider to be "instability", please report it here in the thread and I'll forward the information on to Nuck-TH.

Mike.

[Null_ID]

TBH, following the Pale Moon community discussion around this in late March/early April this year, I got the distinct impression that Moonchild and the dev team had already long since made their minds up that PM would be heading in this direction, regardless of what the community thought about it.

This is my impression too. Moonchild was just going to push this change trough, no matter what. That little forum poll back in March was a total sham, intended just to give this change a sort-of legitimacy. I think he's doing this in an effort to cover up the fact that their Javascript engine is terribly slow and, simply put, falling behind. They simply cannot rise to meet Google's challenge. They don't have the resources. Chrome won. Their Javascript code was forked from around Firefox 56, so pretty ancient. But they cannot throw it away to start anew, because it would mean losing their cherished XUL extension system for good. In short: They have painted themselves into a corner.

Good thing that there's that Nuck-TH fella who gave us a way out and has agreed to keep SSE2 builds going. What worries me is that he's not an official member of the dev team proper, he's just a 3rd party contributor and, as such, has no obligation to keep doing this forever. We could get cut off at the drop of a hat with no warning. Especially if he disagrees one too many times with the furry and is simply made to disappear. That's my issue with this whole thing.

[mikewalsh]

@Null_ID :-

You're probably right about the Javascript engine. YouTube has, for me, been freezing-up at random for several releases now.......something it didn't do a while back. I guess Google have performed one too many Chrome "optimizations" for their script engine to handle.....

(*shrug...*)

I'll keep these going for as long as I can. On the big HP rig, I can use any browser I like.....frequently, I have 2 or 3 open at once. But I DO need Pale Moon for the elderly Latitude; it just runs so much better with Pale Moon than any other browser, due to its older tech...... (*sigh*)

We shall see what we shall see.....as always!

Mike.