Vanilla Updated & TLS
Just a quick heads up, I just completed a major version upgrade (2.8.3 to 3.3) of Vanilla. Everything appears to be working, but if you notice any bugs or errors, post them here.
As a side note, WinWorld now supports TLS 1.3. I'm going to continue supporting TLS 1.0/1.1 for the few browsers that only have TLS 1.0 support, however expect this to change at some point as the older versions are being deprecated - this article provides a brief but clear explanation.
If you actively use a browser that only supports TLS 1.0, please let me know, I'd be interested to see who is still using a browser that supports TLS 1.0 but not 1.2.
Comments
ARRRRAAAAG! So that is why I got nothing but a blank screen in my New Moon browser (never mind even my old Seamonkey 1.1 browser, that was already a pain with all the scripting and garbled layout).
I guess I should not expect any less - the entire web belongs to Google now. It's so bad, even Microsoft has given up. It feels like I'm just a few steps away from having to buy a totally new computer entirely for the purpose of running Google Chrome so I can connect to anything. Although I've discovered recently that even huge powerful desktop computers won't cut it anymore, a lot of crap can only be done on stupid toy cell phones these days.
Thanks for keeping the earlier TLS active. Supposedly Retrozilla/FirefoxRZ can handle TLS 1.2, but the last few months almost every site has locked themselves out. They can't even connect to vetusware anymore. Not sure if they are requiring TLS 1.3 or what. (It's all fake security anyway - it weren't fake, it would never get broken, and they would never have to deprecate anything).
New Moon is a Pale Moon-derived build for XP, no? I can't see why that would be having issues with rendering, Vanilla, while being a large pile of Web 2.0+ is relatively simple...relatively. Especially given I don't see any major changes in the design from 2.8.x.
Eventually (it's being/been discussed in #wwdev) we're looking at having a 'simple' version of WinWorld that can be accessed by anything that has base level HTML support, including text-based browsers. Designing it is easy, integrating it with Adventure elegantly is the challenge. That likely won't include the forums though given the amount of scripting being used.
The insight re: TLS is helpful. Given we cater to the old computing niche, and beyond passwords there really isn't any confidential data being sent to or from the server, I'm comfortable leaving TLS 1.0 enabled for the foreseeable future - barring some critical flaw being discovered (AES_CBC being 'weak' doesn't meet that criteria IMO).
Yea, I've been using 27.x because a couple of my machines need the non-sse2 build, but this one can also run 28.x, which works but has had bad memory leaks that make the machine grind to a halt even with a whopping 4GB ram (I've worked on machines with only 4k!). Also has "Basillisk" but I had to wrangle that pretty bad just to make it work like a real web browser. I do have a slow Windows 10-32 test machine with normal Firefox, but every time I turn that on my internet connection grinds to a halt as it starts sucking down updates.
If I fiddle with it, it occasionally seems to load in 27.x but that just mostly gives me a blank screen. 28.x seems to work most of the time. Oddly seemed to have more success with the ad blocker disabled, but that makes no sense as they both have the same blocker (ABL) and it does not show anything blocked.
Too tired to mess with it more right now.
But since we are talking about Vanilla, I just want to give another big middle finger up to its "Activity" mis-feature. I keep having to ban spammers that do nothing but sign up and post advertising links in "Activity". Clobbered one earlier today even. Activity has absolutely no useful purpose, and although there was an option to hide the link from normal users, there is no way to disable it totally. I'm almost convinced it exists just to allow spamming.
I don't see it as unreasonable that a site operating on the modern web make updates and changes to conform to modern security best practices. Trying to support the old browsers forever is simply just impractical. I don't think it's a ploy to get everyone to use Chrome.
It certainly is a challenge though, given WinWorld's target audience of old computers / software. I think maybe having a reverse proxy on a separate server would be a good solution for maintaining compatibility with older browsers. Maybe have something like, old.winworldpc.com point to it.
I think eventually a proxy will be required to be able to view anything on old browsers. I mean, we're pretty much there already.
I agree, you reach a point where you can't simultaneously support a browser from 1995 and 2020 on the same design/framework/server configuration. Even so, at the moment I think WinWorld is accessible from any PC made in the last 15 years provided it has a modern browser, I feel that's a good balance.
The "old.winworldpc.com" or some variant is basically the idea we've had in mind for a while now Nothing that requires authentication, just basic library access and maybe the forums in a read-only fashion. It'd be served over plain HTTP, with at most HTML4 with base-level CSS. It seems simple in concept but requires some planning and coding to make a reality, the forums in particular.
I just decided to do a quick Google for proxies to browse the modern web on old browsers and I came across this:
https://github.com/tenox7/wrp
An interesting idea for sure. I might toss this on my docker server and take a look at it.
Things look nicer with the new update but, in the comment box, there's now no button to put in a link and I've completely forgotten the markup for it. I guess we would just have to paste URLs on our posts for now, so it's no really big deal. Just wanted to point that out.
I noticed this, there's an issue with "Advanced Editor" which is causing the message box not to appear for replies or product comments. Looking into it.
Until then we're stuck with the less ideal "Rich Editor". Keep in mind you can use either markdown (cheat sheet here) directly, keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+B, etc), or highlighting the text for formatting for the time being.
Looking around, it seems ubuntuxp's dark theme is broken with quote blocks.
Other than that, the only thing I really noticed was the editor and the longer editing time limit.
I noticed some quirky behavior when editing a post. It wouldn't show the text I was trying to edit. It did eventually work though.
I'm going to prioritize getting the Advanced Editor working again, I don't care for this rich editor at all, the way it works, the way it displays quotes... Sadly documentation/support for Vanilla is less than say phpBB or IPB, so it's going to require some manual poking and prodding.
Okay, advanced editor is now back.
I take no credit, it just decided to start working after a few on/off toggles. Let me know if anyone sees any bugs with it, particularly the text area not appearing on product pages and existing threads as that was the original problem.
@robobox I just noticed that, and pushed out an update to make quotes readable again.
Ok, so apparently somewhere someone was offended by how elements naturally load and display so the set the entire page body to hidden until it finishes loading. All the rendering while loading advances brought to us in Netscape 2.0 flushed down the drain.
So, in NewMoon 27 add to usercontent.css:
[code]
@-moz-document url-prefix(https://forum.winworldpc.com/)
{
.isDesktop
{
visibility: visible !important;
}
}
[/code]
and in SeaMonkey 1.1/Firefox 2 add that with some previous modifications to make things somewhat viewable:
[code]
@-moz-document url-prefix(https://winworldpc.com/)
{
.footer
{
display:none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
height: 0px !important;
float: left !important;
}
.col-md-3
{
}
}
@-moz-document url-prefix(https://forum.winworldpc.com/)
{
.isDesktop
{
visibility: visible !important;
}
.Options
{
display:none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
height: 0px !important;
float: left !important;
}
.TextBoxWrapper
{
height: 320px !important;
}
.BodyBox
{
height: 300px !important;
overflow: auto !important;
overflow-y: auto !important;
overflow-x: auto !important;
}
}
[/code]
Posted from Windows 95
Is the quote button missing? All I see is a button to flag posts, but not to quote them. Markdown is a 21st century annoyance to write in, so I miss the button that adds quotes automatically.
@BlueSun, there is no such thing as the "modern web". It is the World Wide Web. It's the same basic technology we've had since the '90s. I can mostly understand not being able to login using an old browser, but it should at least be readable by an older browser.
@nick99nack That's like saying there's no such thing as a modern car because cars have basically the same technology now as a model T...
Sure, on a fundamental level, they're accomplishing the same task... but the underlying technology has changed quite a bit from when it was first conceived. So yes, I say modern web... and by that I mean sites made with current gen frameworks, libraries, best practices, etc.
It's like how "modern communications" consists of speaking Twittish, and depending entirely on cell phone texting service. "Modern" does not usually mean better.
We must all work together to make things more cumbersome and costly, lest consumers become complacent.
Yea, I don't see a quote button/link either. Not that people weren't abusing the hell out of it because most expect a "reply" button in that location. Modern User interface lesson #758, if the user interface layout causes users to misuse a feature, just delete it.
Serpent 52 IA32 2020-05-23 is still working good for me. I've never had memory leaks with roytam1's browsers on my systems, though I did with an earlier build of OG Pale Moon about a year and a half ago.
Serpent (based on Basilisk) has the Firefox 52 ESR UI and functionally isn't much different from NM28.
Posted from Windows 2000 SP4 (no extended kernel).