foxPEP & Classilla (Optimized Classilla prefs.js?)

[AtaruBarreau]

Hi everyone! This is now a WikiPost for other to update the thread and share your experiments easily. Please contribute if you can do so.

Back when the last version of Classilla was 9.3.3, the only way to load this very site was to install foxPEP.
Now that beta 9.3.4 is out, foxPEP is no longer required in order load the site.

Spoiler: Speed benchmarks

Vanilla 9.3.4b:
MacRumors PowerPC subforum, 28s
Mozilla.org, 9s
Macintosh Garden, 6s
Reddit /Mac/, 15s

w/ TenFourPEP:
MacRumors PowerPC subforum, 23s
Mozilla.org, 10s
Macintosh Garden, 6s
Reddit /Mac/, 15s

Please add more of your own benchmarks and if so sites that benefited TFP.

It seems TenFourPEP/foxPEP doesn't make any difference anymore.

Spoiler: Original post

EDIT: It seems that foxPEP improves Classilla... See #5 and onward.

I'm absolutely no expert in browser-optimization or hell the "software" side of things, but as I was thinking about the sheer amount of speed that foxPEP gave to TenFourFox, I was wondering if anyone ever had the idea or tested prefs.js tweaking for Classilla. Yes, I know it won't resolve the web encryption issues and the fact it still hasn't been even slightly updated in years, but maybe we could squish some more usage out of it with some help?

What do you thing of this?

 

[James Gryphon]

I'm not an expert, but I do have an interest in retro browser talk, so I thought I'd offer my thoughts here to maybe help stir things up.

To draw up a naval analogy, TenFourFox strikes me as sort of a lumbering battleship, everything covered with inches of armor or equipment to protect against and cover any possible contingency. When you have a powerful enough engine to bear the weight (like a maxed-out G5 tower), it can move along smoothly enough to serve as a relatively modern warship. Most people don't have those engines, or like their ship to be a bit faster so that it can keep up with the rest of the fleet, so they start taking things off that they don't need to reduce the weight and increase the speed, e.g. "foxPEP".

Classilla is different, more like a coast-hugging 'Monitor'. Given that the fastest computer that can natively boot OS 9 is a G4, and it's expected to also support the G3 and pre-G3 crowd, the design goal, rather than striving for modern-browser-equivalency, is already to make something that can run with less resources. Also, a lot of the time, the libraries or extensions that would be required to make the high-end high-cost features in TenFourFox work don't exist for Classilla and/or OS 9 in the first place. Finally, you have a little less of a load to begin with just by virtue of it being made for 9. (It's easy for us to forget about this nowadays, but X and its 'stuff' use dramatically more space, memory, and CPU than 9. You could reasonably run OS 9 off of a flash drive at USB 1.1 speeds, something Apple considered to be such a bad idea for OS X that they wouldn't even let you try it.)

If I had to make a grocery list of key improvements to help modernize Classilla, it'd probably like something like this:
• Modern security protocols - essential for actually using websites.
• Improved CSS engine, with more ways to 'gracefully' strip, re-render or ignore things that are too heavy.
• Other smart 'bloat removal'/filtering features, as seen in foxPEP or favorite TFF extensions.
• A package of local JS libraries, to avoid having to load them from remote sources - or possibly 'JS equivalency' library, to translate flashier features into something Classilla can handle.

I think foxPEP does overlap with some of those goals (for instance, I know it has a list of bloatware domains that it blocks), so there are some things that Classilla could incorporate. It's possible there are other caching or network changes that could be made too, a field that I know I know nothing about. Otherwise, though - someone who has a clue absolutely please correct me if I'm wrong, but my current understanding is that Classilla's problems are more about what it doesn't have than what it has and doesn't need, and it's not clear to me how much gain you could get from about:config tweaks. I suspect the 'diminishing returns' wouldn't justify the time cost, compared to other things that could be done for Classilla.

 

[z970]

@James Gryphon makes good points. Short of Dr. Kaiser releasing a standards update, the most you can realistically do is to just use a proxy service like http://ovi.h1n.ru/proxy/about.php and call it a day. The capabilities to locally handle Web 3.0 just aren't there.

Further expanding on this, I have experimented with older Mozilla codebases in the past. Largely, I found that as there is typically less code, features, and technologies baked into these older versions, there is equally less potential room for expansion, thus decreasing your return on investment. Therefore, a hypothetical 'ClassillaPEP' would be, to a certain extent, an effective waste of time.

That said, you can still try slotting foxPEP into Classilla manually and see what happens. As a rule, the browser acknowledges whatever it recognizes and ignores the rest, so there's certainly no harm in trying.

Case in point, while still bearing nowhere near the same improvement as in TenFourFox (with itself bearing nowhere near the same improvement as in Firefox Quantum, keep in mind), I have tried pairing past iterations of foxPEP with Camino and have still seen positive results, so there is at least that.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

I had no idea that you could use (in some kind of compromised way)foxPEP with Camino! I'll definitely will try this out (actually on the last Jaguar-compatible Camino release).

As for the rest, yes Proxies may be the only option to use older OSes with internet.

Anyway, thanks for the two detailed responses.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

Well.

Now that's a surprise.

Just for fun, I simply tried to replace Classilla's defaut_prefs.js with FoxPep. It actually improved speed dramatically when loading, for example, Macrumors (which I can't actually load with the og prefs.js). It isn't fast by any mean, but for casual browsing it is clearly usable (be sure to disable JavaScript). I also saw some improvement in blogspot browsing, that had used to have some visual artefact. Facebook mobile remained the same, as it is already optimized. If someone could, at least, replicate my improvements and test out some other website I'd be great!

 

[z970]

Perhaps Dr. Kaiser should be notified of this, so that his time in Classilla / TenFourFox development could be potentially made easier, and that more sites might work out of the box.

A passing idea...

 

[AtaruBarreau]

Perhaps Dr. Kaiser should be notified of this, so that his time in Classilla / TenFourFox development could be potentially made easier, and that more sites might work out of the box.

A passing idea...

First of all someone should try to replicate my speed bump before bothering him I think

 

[repairedCheese]

Well, if the test is "Can Classilla access MacRumors?" Then the answer is yes because I just applied foxPEP to it and I was able to log in here to post this. I've never had a use for the browser, so I can't really say if it's working better now, but it's definitely let me do this.

 

[repairedCheese]

Well, if the test is "Can Classilla access MacRumors?" Then the answer is yes because I just applied foxPEP to it and I was able to log in here to post this. I've never had a use for the browser, so I can't really say if it's working better now, but it's definitely let me do this.

But oh boy does it look terrible at first.

It doesn't look a whole lot better once I start getting to the text. But it works. And if you didn't have the luxury of TenFourFox like my MDD does, it's certainly better than nothing.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Perhaps Dr. Kaiser should be notified of this, so that his time in Classilla / TenFourFox development could be potentially made easier, and that more sites might work out of the box.

A passing idea...

I have already reached out to Kaiser about Classila back in August - he told me that its not abandoned, just that he hasn't the time at this point to release 9.3.4 which he stated to me will allow OS 9 to browse the internet quite nicely, except for youtube and heavy websites.

 

[Bruninho]

There was a guy called Roytam1 who works on several Mozilla based browsers forks like Retrozilla and Pale Moon for classic Windows versions. He even gladly pushed to me a NSS update for Netscape 9.0.0.6 on Windows 98, which updates TLS1.2 support to a certain point, thus making Netscape 9 usable at a certain degree. I loved it. It’s nearly the same thing done to Retrozilla for https.

It’s just a few DLLs changed to conform for these updates. You are still in need of a few configuration changes for this to work better. I could access https sites again. Retrozilla is Windows browser and a tad newer than Classilla.

I have the impression that Netscape 7.0.2 (last OS9 version) and Classilla could benefit from this too. I don’t know if this is technically possible, but why don’t you guys contact him and seek for his advice on how to port his updates? I think you can find him on MSFN forums.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

There was a guy called Roytam1 who works on several Mozilla based browsers forks like Retrozilla and Pale Moon for classic Windows versions. He even gladly pushed to me a NSS update for Netscape 9.0.0.6 on Windows 98, which updates TLS1.2 support to a certain point, thus making Netscape 9 usable at a certain degree. I loved it. It’s nearly the same thing done to Retrozilla for https.

It’s just a few DLLs changed to conform for these updates. You are still in need of a few configuration changes for this to work better. I could access https sites again. Retrozilla is Windows browser and a tad newer than Classilla.

I have the impression that Netscape 7.0.2 (last OS9 version) and Classilla could benefit from this too. I don’t know if this is technically possible, but why don’t you guys contact him and seek for his advice on how to port his updates? I think you can find him on MSFN forums.

Yeah I know about Roytam1 (actually uses his WinXP browsers in real life situations) & Retrozilla which, like you say, being newer, works way better than Classilla these days. I don't have an account on MSFN but if someone has and feels like reaching out to him about Classilla or classic MacOS in general it would be nice

 

[AtaruBarreau]

(sorry for double posting)
Hey everyone, now that (sadly) the last build of Classilla has been released, I think someone (would like to do it myself but I've got work to do right after writing this small post) should try out once more foxPEP with this latest version see if it makes any differences between vanilla 9.4 and with foxPEP installed in terms of performances and compatibility.

 

[Bruninho]

I can try. Although Classilas last build from what I've read, does not seem to have the kind of improvements we could see with foxPEP. It probably has just some under the hood improvements for stuff unrelated to foxPEP? Just my thoughts.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

I did some quick benchmarks and it seems now that foxPEP isn't useful anymore with Classilla.
But it would be great if other could replicate the results and try out some other websites with and without foxPEP.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Classics needs major work to render even the simplest of sites.. the 9.3.4B did nothing at all - even tried going to Wikipedia and still won’t load.