PCbanter - View Single Post - What is the oldest version of Firefox that willl load new websites?

**Bill in Co** · September 7th 18, 12:40 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm running XP Pro SP3 on an older laptop T43 Lenovo.
I upgraded from Firefox 28 or 29 (something like that), to Firefox 47.
This new FF is not working well. It seems like it gets saturated after
it's used for a half hour or so. (Depends a lot of the type of website I
am running). Then FF tends to just freezeup. Often times it will just
hang for 5 or 10 minutes. Other times it is permanently frozen so i have
to do a 3 finger salute to close it.

To fix it, I have to close FF, then clear the FF cache, and close it
once more. Than it works for another half hour or so before doing this
**** again.

I stick with FF because I use the video download addons more than
anything else. To view Youtube videos, I have to go to a public WIFI at
the library or a restaurant. It's no fun watching them in those places
because I cant play the sound. So I just download them and watch them
later when I am home. Otherwise Id try other browsers, even though there
dont seem to be many choices Since Windows Explorer is way outdated, and
I refuse to use Chrome at let Google track me.

Anyhow, I want to downgrade FF as much as possible and still be able to
use current websites.

That's pretty well pointless now.

You get the most benefit out of FF 52.9 ESR.
Support has stopped for it. It's the last
one that supports the old plugins.

Grabbing a copy of 47 and using that, is just
delaying the inevitable. In a short time,
something will happen to take you to 52.9ESR.

And after that, that'll be it. It'll be rubbish
browsers after that. Stuff with tricks. Stuff
that does things, that specifically violate
the P.R. material presented for the product.
Like "protects your privacy" when it's just
as much of a pig as your previous browser was.
Or a browser that "stops adverts"... because
it wants to present it's own set of
canned adverts instead. That's the kind of
forthright moral individuals we deal with now.

And waiting this long to upgrade hardware,
causes other issues. They've stripped out
a generation of cards now. Nothing has VGA
any more (you can get VGA using adapters).
But for older machines, machines with AGP,
there's nothing to upgrade those. There are
very few native AGP cards (maybe a 6200 is
as close as you'd get). And the bridge chips
have been out of production for 8-10 years.

In some cases, a browser relies on video card
acceleration for silly stuff (font rendering).
When the CPU was perfectly suited. Or, browsers
like Firefox use "compositing", and not all
WinXP machine video cards are ideal for this.
If I had a year 2002 machine with a 4MB or 8MB
Millenium 200 or something, there's no way for
one of those to "composite". Not enough video
RAM. Missing functions.

You need more modern video cards to provide the
"boost" the browser expects. When the video
card doesn't have what it takes, the CPU does
it all. When the CPU does it all, and the CPU
has one core, well, guess what happens ?
Snore.

In short, any attempt to browse with WinXP,
is a waste of time and money.

Now, if you have other functions you use in
WinXP (say, Outlook Express), you can always
run WinXP as a virtual machine. Buy a copy
of Windows 7 and run WinXP Mode for example.

But browsing is really hard to do well now,
on old hardware. The software is de-optimized
on purpose for old hardware. The developers
have stopped caring.

The average developer today, has a 20-core CPU
in their developer machine. With 32 or 64GB of RAM.
They don't think there is anything wrong with
the software they write, because they're driving
a "monster truck". If you gave each one of them
a Pentium 4 to develop on, the product would
be entirely different (and more efficient).

Paul

Just an anecdote. You can still install and run Outlook Express on Windows
7 if you get that special version OEx or use the Outlook Express Classic
(clone), as noted before in one of my posts.

For Windows XP, I agree that the time may come that we'll either have to be
using FF 52.9 ESR (or close to that version) for some sites (I already had
that issue on one site), or forego FF and go to Chrome, until even that
won't work on some sites in the future.

But the OP could test out FF 52.9 to see if it *might* work better than his
current version, (preferably using an image backup to restore a previous
version, if necessary).