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

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

Pale Moon v33.5.1 has just been released, so here's the 64-bit portable version based on Nuck-TH's SSE2 compilation. This non-AVX package includes glibc 2.31, running via watchdog's 'tweak' trick, and should run anywhere.

Usage instructions are as mentioned many times previously in this thread. Enjoy!

Mike.

[greengeek]

Pale Moon v33.5.1 has just been released, so here's the 64-bit portable version based on Nuck-TH's SSE2 compilation. This non-AVX package includes glibc 2.31, running via watchdog's 'tweak' trick, and should run anywhere.

Hi Mike, I tried d/l from the first post links and came up with Palemoon64 v31.1.0 - so wondering if I hit the wrong link or had you intended to add a link for 33.5.1 to this current post?

EDIT : found this link towards the bottom of P9 of the thread and it seems to be the correct link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... HxW1pAJPeS

[mikewalsh]

Pale Moon v33.5.1 has just been released, so here's the 64-bit portable version based on Nuck-TH's SSE2 compilation. This non-AVX package includes glibc 2.31, running via watchdog's 'tweak' trick, and should run anywhere.

Hi Mike, I tried d/l from the first post links and came up with Palemoon64 v31.1.0 - so wondering if I hit the wrong link or had you intended to add a link for 33.5.1 to this current post?

EDIT : found this link towards the bottom of P9 of the thread and it seems to be the correct link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... HxW1pAJPeS

@greengeek :-

Ah, thanks for the reminder, Ian. As I said elsewhere back before Xmas, I've now taken Big Brother up on their basic paid a/c; GBP £1.59/mo for a guaranteed 100 GB of storage. This is more than I had between ALL my a/cs previously.

I shall gradually be migrating everything back there over the next year or two, as & when time permits, but it will mean an awful lot of broken links until the process is complete.....which WILL take quite a while. I shall have to rely on folks like yourself to point things out to me as & when you spot them.

I've re-jigged the first post in this thread to point y'all in the right direction. There's now just a single link; everything is in one place, so you'll just need to navigate through to find what you want. OK?

Mike.

[Wiz57]

@mikewalsh
Just a note to let you know that both Steve Pusser's SSE2 GTK3 builds and NuckTH's SSE builds have been updated to Palemoon 33.6.0!! NuckTH's builds linked at the Palemoon Home Page, Steve Pusser's builds for MX21 are linked here: https://mxrepo.com/MX21packages.html about halfway down the page.
Time to update your portables!

[mikewalsh]

@Wiz57 :-

I'll be uploading the 64-bit portable build shortly; this is Nuck-TH's SSE2 compile. However, it looks like my 32-bit builds have now come to an end. I can't get Steve Pusser's 32-bit builds to run any longer.....all I get is a segmentation fault, and no workaround I can apply will alleviate this.

It's unfortunate, but.....there ya go. That's life, I'm afraid. Shit happens.

(*shrug...*)

Mike.

[Wiz57]

@mikewalsh
That's odd...I'm running Steve's 32 bit build right now! I'm in a test version of S15Pup32 , into which I installed the latest Glibc 2.40 from Slackware, though it also runs in the default 2.33. Note...perhaps it is in the method that I'm deploying it? I just click on the downloaded Mx deb file and let PPM install it.
What Puppys have you attempted to run Steve's builds with? My only "issue" is minor, that being they are built with GTK3, and to me that seems a bit slower in response to user input, cursor movement, etc than his former Debian GTK2 builds.
Perhaps it's just that Slackware derivatives are "superior"? Haha!

[greengeek]

...all I get is a segmentation fault, and no workaround I can apply will alleviate this.

I was recently testing a programme (can't even remember which one it was) but got "segmentation fault". Then I remembered that I had not loaded the lib which was a dependency required for that programme.

Loaded the lib and the seg fault went away.

I only mention this because prior to that experience I had thought that seg fault implied a poor compile or incompatible OS.

But now I know it can be just a single missing lib...

[mikewalsh]

@Wiz57 / @greengeek :-

Nah, I can tell you exactly what the problem is, guys. It's the CPU on this HP desktop rig.....despite being a 9th-gen Core CPU - "Coffee Lake" architecture, from just 6 years ago - these later Pentium dual-core CPUs (this is a Pentium 'Gold' G5400) were deliberately "crippled" - by Intel themselves - through the intentional 'omission' of the AVX instruction set. The reason for this was simple; money. By leaving AVX out, they were 'pushing' users towards shelling out more dosh for a more capable CPU.

AVX is not "new". It's been around for well over a decade now, perhaps 12-13 years. But Intel left it out of the Pentium 'Gold' CPUs on purpose, in order to "aim" them further down-market at a specific user segment. Remember; at one time, Pentium CPUs were top-of-the-line, and were the best that Intel had to offer....but for years now, they've been downgraded to a 'bargain-bucket' budget special. They no longer have the exclusive 'cachet' they once possessed.

Despite that Steve is offering both GTK2 and GTK3 builds, he's still compiling with the standard Pale Moon source code.....and for several releases now (dating back to around March/ April last year), Pale Moon has been coded to require AVX to be present. This is why Nuck-TH has been offering the SSE2 builds for a while now.....for those people who, for whatever reason, haven't got AVX.

In every other respect, this G5400 is a 'beast'. It's powerful (quad-core with the H/T engaged), fast, very responsive, supports virtualization, DDR4 RAM.....for a Puppy box, you couldn't ask for more, BUT: it's just "missing" the AVX instruction set. Neither "official" Pale Moon, nor Midori, will run on this box. But both will happily run on my 13-yr old Dell Latitude I use in the front room when I keep Mama company in the evenings.......because the early Core i5 it's fitted with DOES have AVX.

And that's why I have to work-around the issue by using Nuck-TH's SSE2 build here on the HP. It's a hardware issue, unfortunately; no amount of software jiggery-pokery will fix it. You don't have AVX, those 2 browsers WILL NOT RUN. It's as simple as that. I didn't discover all this until after I'd bought this machine at the beginning of COVID.....my first-ever brand-new machine, a replacement for the faithful Compaq Presario I liberated from the recycling centre when my sister upgraded her computer to one with Win 7 built-in, many years ago.

(I do have a CPU replacement in mind if "push" comes to "shove". A Core-i5 8500 will do what I want; it's the exact same "Coffee Lake" architecture, and the same Socket 1151, but it DOES have AVX. And it won't break the bank, 'cos these things were NOT expensive to begin with.....though I'll reserve that step for if, as & when it becomes a necessity. In the meantime, I have a ton of other browsers I use more regularly anyway).

Mike.

[Wiz57]

@mikewalsh I dunno about the lack of AVX being your issue...I'm running Steve's 32 bit Mx19 build, posting from it, on my old Acer Aspire One AOA150, Intel Atom N270 32 bit CPU, and it doesn't have AVX, only up to SSE4! Something must be going on that will require mucho investigato, LOL! Say, have you tried his 32 bit build? May need the 32 bit compatibility sfs for your Puppy, but it might be worth a try. Try it like I'm running right now...download then click on it to let PPM install it...see if it runs. If it does, you have something to start looking for. You can always once finished use PPM to uninstall that one and go back to your portable.

edit to add: after sleeping on it, and a cup of coffee this morning, it seems this entire AVX fiasco is a choice made at compile time, and those who provide the 32 bit builds "assume" those 32 bit CPUs do not have AVX anyhow, so it is excluded. Myself, I think the choice by MCP to go to AVX only is sort of like shooting yourself in the foot...a third tier alternative browser, trying to gain market share in a crowded space competing with the "Big Guys" restrict what CPUs will run their software, just when MS "requires" TPM2, EUFI, etc to update Win10 to Win11...there goes a potential user because their CPU only has SSE4 instructions, no TPM, so stuck on Win10 or Linux...and a potential alternative browser also won't run!

[Null_ID]

it looks like my 32-bit builds have now come to an end. I can't get Steve Pusser's 32-bit builds to run any longer.....all I get is a segmentation fault

I'm not sure what it is that Steve is doing when he compiles the 32-bit .deb package. Earlier, I think back in September/October-ish last year, I tried running the Steve Pusser 32-bit version in the 32-bit VoidPup on an aging T60 Thinkpad. I unpacked Steve's .deb manually on the VoidPup system, using the provided UExtract, and for some reason the Pale Moon executable wouldn't boot when I clicked it. In terminal, I did receive some weird error message on an attempted boot, but forgot now what it is, this was all 4-ish months ago after all at the time of this writing.

I began to suspect that the VoidPup system couldn't cope with some particular, unknown thing about the Steve Pusser .32-bit .deb package, so what I did was that I transferred the original .deb package to the then-latest Bookworm Pup 10.0.8 (64-bit edition, mind you) and unpacked the .deb there, then repackaged the "/usr/lib/palemoon" folder to .tar.gz and transferred the newly created palemoon32bit.tar.gz back to VoidPup 32, where I unpacked the .tar.gz package instead and was thus able to get the 32-bit Pale Moon executable working in VoidPup. I don't know what it is, but on my 2nd try something got generated correctly and Pale Moon booted.

We must remember that Steve's .debs primarily target MX Linux, and compatibility with any other flavor of Linux is just a happy accident. Are any of you able to contact Steve to ask him what it is that he's doing to create the 32-bit .deb? An updated package format maybe, that needs a specific version of the unpacker to properly unload?

EDIT: Just to add, I posted this message with Pale Moon 64-bit Steve Pusser, on Fatdog 9.02, so at least the current Fatdogs are able to unpack the Pusser .debs properly.

[ozsouth]

I got Steve Pusser's mx21 debs, which need glibc 2.28+. Later ones need 2.34+ now.
See: https://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/pool/main/p/palemoon/
I expand the deb in a terminal via: dpkg-deb -x (filename) pmnew
& copy Palemoon folder from pmnew to where needed.

[Wiz57]

Steve Pusser has updated his Mx builds of Palemoon. These are GTK3 and GLIBC2.34 (or is it 2.33?
Had 2.33 in non-upgraded S15Pup32, and the 32 bit release ran OK??)
Anyhow...link to the Mx21 repo here https://mxrepo.com/MX21packages.html

The way I have installed these "deb" files in the past, and has worked without fail, even his no
longer maintained Debian 10/11 builds at OpenSuse, I downloaded the deb, then just click on them
and choose to let Puppy Package Manager "install" them. When came time for new version, repeat
and PPM would over-write the old install, but keep all your profile, add-ons, extensions.

Guess you could also use pExtract and extract the deb contents into a directory, then use dir2sfs
from terminal and make an SFS...I did that with Fenyo's GTK2 GLIBC 2.19 build called New Moon!

[Fenyo]

To clarify, glibc 2.17 is the minimum requirement. By the way, you can do the same with a 64bit build (GTK2, glibc 2.17+), but I would build it with SSE3, since except for some very early single core S754/S939 A64/Sempron (pre-E stepping), 99% of 64bit cpus can do that.

[greengeek]

I have not yet found a 64bit Palemoon that behaves well on Facebook (seems unable to enter text into various Facebook fields).
Am I expecting too much from Palemoon? Is it only suitable for simpler websites?

[mikewalsh]

Morning, gang.

All Pale Moon portables are now up-to-date @ the current v33.6.1.

The 64-bit SSE2 portable build is courtesy of Nuck-TH of the Pale Moon community.

The 32-bit portable builds - now "New Moon".....both SSE2 and SSE-only - are courtesy of our member @Fenyo.

Y'all can find the download links via the main link in post #1. Enjoy.

Mike.

[rockedge]

I have not yet found a 64bit Palemoon that behaves well on Facebook (seems unable to enter text into various Facebook fields).
Am I expecting too much from Palemoon? Is it only suitable for simpler websites?

Facebook has been a problematic site in Palemoon for some time now. I also encountered form fields that are unresponsive and other strangness happening.

But the good news is that GitHub works!

For a while Palemoon couldn't render GitHub pages at all and the console interface unusable. This was a major factor why I stopped using Palemoon as much as I had up to that point. Now GitHub works really well but YouTube is uncontrollable.

I use Palemoon to work on web sites. If a web site works well on it that usually means the site code will render just as well, and be responsive on most other browsers.