SpiderWeb browser for Snow Leopard released (32-bit)

[Varjak]

Okay, I see where I went wrong. I was downloading it and extracting it on my Windows laptop, so it appears as two file folders: the add-ons folder and a "SpiderWeb.app" folder, so it didn't appear as an app icon. I will transfer it to the Mac and I'm sure it will look as you describe. Thanks and sorry for the questions.

 

[wicknix]

No problem.

 

[rampancy]

Just wanted to chime in and say how much I really appreciate the work you've put into SpiderWeb, InterWeb, and ArcticFox (even though rmottola is how handling it). On my Core Duo MacBook, I thought I'd through all through all three browsers through my (admittedly modest) YouTube viewing test, and they all performed really well. Now to see if eBay, Amazon, Dropbox and Gmail all work... (For some reason, in the past one of the four would straight up lock up or crash them.)

 

[wicknix]

Thanks. My guess would be dropbox as i dont use it. The other 3 work ok for me. A few months back i implemented tls1.3 to IW and SW which probably helped a little as well.

Cheers

 

[Varjak]

I installed everything (I think correctly); but it doesn't seem to want to play YouTube videos in 1080p High Definition. The audio plays, but the video freezes. I'll play around with it to see if I can improve the performance. I'm also going to go back to playing with Arctic Fox to see if I can get that block ads and still play videos.

 

[Gilbert Guldlock]

Thanks a million for your work. I wish I could donate or something.

I couldn't find a thread about InterWeb, and I don't feel like registering to GitHub to make reports/requests there, so I'll put them here instead.

I use InterWeb 60.9.8 on Snow Leopard. Recently, two pages that are important to me have stopped working completely:

• https://www.svtplay.se/ is Sweden's state television streaming service, no login required, but most videos are IP-geographically locked to Sweden. Upon loading, the browser stalls for a few seconds on my C2D 2.0 and then gives a server/page generated error message saying the page could not be loaded ("Sidan kunde inte laddas") or a Firefox generated error message that refers to the console that in turn refers to a web page; "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred", https://nextjs.org/docs/messages/client-side-exception-occured I used 60.9.3 without issues until this happened, then I upgraded to 60.9.8 but to no avail. Interestingly, the page is accessible in Safari 5, but naturally rendered badly and don't play videos. It's also accessible in InterWeb if subdomain svtstatic.se is blocked by NoScript, but it works almost as bad as on Safari 5 then. I have been in contact with SVT, asking them what they have changed and what their system requirements are, but they've been most unhelpful, only referring to a dismissive statement that the latest version of Firefox is always required. But I haven't given up, it's public service FFS.
• https://www.tradera.com/ is a Nordic auction site (Ebay thing). Just gives a blank page. Worked decently well 2-3 weeks ago. Searches were a problem, a "mist" layer wouldn't go away after dynamic loading finished, but it could be removed from the console, and messages couldn't be accessed. But it was good enough for me.

Unlike many others, I don't care if they don't render correctly, or don't work with some plugins or can't play any high resolution videos or display messages. At least SVT Play is crucial for me. I would be forever grateful if you could make it work. If not, then I will sadly have to finally migrate away from the lovely Snow Leopard, the greatest OS ever made.

While I'm here I might as well throw in a pair of minor issues that might affect more users.

• https://damfotboll.blog/ is a WordPress page using a thumb voting system in the comments. Those thumbs disappeared during a platform upgrade in the autumn last year.
• https://cornucopia.se/ is a blog about military and economics, has a great coverage of the war in Ukraine with continuous updates everyday, highly recommended, worth the hassle of a translator. I think there are supposed to be links to the comments in the time stamps, but they don't render.

If there's anything I can do to assist, especially in contacting the hosts, just let me know.

 

[wicknix]

Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately as the web moves forward, and lazy webmasters who use those pre-canned google site tools which target chome, there will be an increasing amount of websites that will start to break or are already broken on legacy browsers. There isn't much else i can do. Short of updating certificates here and there i implemented what i could (like TLS1.3 support).

Your other option, if you want to stay on snow leopard, is install virtualbox and set up a lightweight Linux VM. From there you can install the latest firefox or chromium and use those when you stumble upon a site that gives our legacy browsers the finger. I created a small .iso just for this purpose last year. Have a look. You can either A) install it in virtualbox so you dont have to reboot, or B) just boot the cd for a live linux desktop for casual browsing.

Linux recovery CD or Virtual machine for old Macs.

I created a custom Slax Linux iso for the sole purpose of using it in VirtualBox on Snow Leopard for that occasional website that requires "Chrome" to work properly. Currently posting this from my 1.83ghz mac mini running this live cd. Would also make for a great recovery OS, or if you frequent...

forums.macrumors.com

Cheers

 

[Varjak]

I came back to this thread to say that, for some reason, SpiderWeb now seems to work. I was desperate, since YouTube seems to have prevented Firefox from working entirely on their site today, so I tried Arctic Fox again, which didn't work. So I tried SpiderWeb again, and it seemed to work. Even the adblocking seemed to work, which is fantastic. I don't know why it didn't work in my previous attempts.

But I did have one question. Is there a shortcut of some kind to close a tab or window without having to right-click or double-click and then select the 'close tab' option? Given how desperate I was, this is a hiccup at most, but I thought I might have been missing something.

In any event, thank you very much wicknix. If this continues to work, it's almost a life-saver!

P.S. As I was poking around in Arctic Fox, I saw there was a 'user agent' setting which was set for Firefox. I tried changing it to 'native,' thinking that might work, but it didn't allow YouTube to work either. There is also a 'gecko' option, which I didn't try, but probably should go back and try. Just thought I'd mention it.

 

[wicknix]

In the included spiderweb add-ons folder look for seatab and install it. That will give you a close button on each tab.

As for arctic fox, i'll forward the info to Riccardo.

Cheers

 

[ww2_1943]

In the included spiderweb add-ons folder look for seatab and install it. That will give you a close button on each tab.

As for arctic fox, i'll forward the info to Riccardo.

Cheers

Stupid question- How do I add, the add-ons? Do I move them to a folder?

 

[wicknix]

Just drag and drop the .xpi in a blank browser window (open a new tab).

 

[ww2_1943]

Just drag and drop the .xpi in a blank browser window (open a new tab).

That is simple! Thank you! I use the browser with my 10.6 install.

 

[Varjak]

Thank you, I'll give SeaTab a try.

I have discovered some other quirks. When I open a link (usually a YouTube video) in a new window, watch it, and then close it; it eliminates all my previously open tabs in the original window. I just have one blank open tab. This doesn't happen if I just open the link as a tab. I was used to opening new videos in a new window just for convenience; but I can live with just opening it in a tab.

I also realized a few other things. SpiderWeb is glacially slow. It takes quite some time for about 5 tabs to open and when I use the screen controls for YouTube (i.e. changing the window, increasing the speed, enabling captions, etc.), each click might take 30 seconds or more to activate. Normally, I'd blame my old-ish computer, but it handled 40+ tabs on Firefox before YouTube somehow disabled the ability to play videos with the old Firefox. Is there anything I can do to address this? Might there be improvements in future versions of SpiderWeb? I'm wondering what the basic browser engine is.

Finally, and this is probably the biggest thing, is that SpiderWeb will only play videos in the 480p resolution. I mentioned this earlier, but had forgotten when I went back to try it again. This probably relates to why it works so slowly. I don't need 1080p resolution, but finding a way to play videos in 720p would be hugely beneficial for me.

I know this is a lot of criticisms, but I am thankful for any functionality at all. And it does seem to block ads. In doing some more research, I came across two other browsers, OmniWeb and iCab that work with Snow Leopard. Has anyone had any experience with these?

Edit: I tried iCab and it doesn't work for YouTube. I don't know what YouTube did, but I can't understand why they'd do something that disables it on so many browsers. YouTube is a pretty basic video site that should just work. Amazingly, every other video I've tried with Firefox on the Mac Mini still plays fine.

 

[RobJos]

Thank you, I'll give SeaTab a try.

I have discovered some other quirks. When I open a link (usually a YouTube video) in a new window, watch it, and then close it; it eliminates all my previously open tabs in the original window. I just have one blank open tab. This doesn't happen if I just open the link as a tab. I was used to open new videos in a new window just for convenience; but I can live with just opening it in a tab.

I also realized a few other things. SpiderWeb is glacially slow. It takes quite some time for about 5 tabs to open and when I use the screen controls for YouTube (i.e. changing the window, increasing the speed, enabling captions, etc.), each click might take 30 seconds or more to activate. Normally, I'd blame my old-ish computer, but it handled 40+ tabs on Firefox before YouTube somehow disabled the ability to play videos with the old Firefox. Is there anything I can do to address this? Might there be improvements in future versions of SpiderWeb? I'm wondering what the basic bro

Finally, and this is probably the biggest thing, is that SpiderWeb will only play videos in the 480p resolution. I mentioned this earlier, but had forgotten when I went back to try it again. This probably relates to why it works so slowly. I don't need 1080p resolution, but finding a way to play videos in 720p would be hugely beneficial for me.

I know this is a lot of criticisms, but I am thankful for any functionality at all. And it does seem to block ads. In doing some more research, I came across two other browsers, OmniWeb and iCab that work with Snow Leopard. Has anyone had any experience with these?

Glacially slow? That's really curious — here (10.6.8 i2, 16 GB, 2.2 GHz i7 MBP) it's faster than anything else, which is essentially ArcticFox 27.11. Also on an older 2009 i2 MBP. But if it's only YouTube that's your problem, yes, any YT page loads unfathomably slow, on both browsers (compare with Rumble, f.i.), and attempting to load several videos at the same time is a real killer.

You should try these addons: http://sebaro.pro/ . I use SaveTube, start the download, have a cup a coffee, come back to open the files in QuickTime (or QT 7, or VLC).

OmniWeb and iCab, I have them both installed, but I never got to use them very much, and by now as far as I'm concerned, they're pretty much passé.

 

[wicknix]

The new youtube polymer interface is dog slow regardless of browser. It's even slow with chromium on my 12 core mac pro. If you really want to speed it up use a mobile browser user agent. You lose some functionality, but it's 10x faster. As for being stuck at 480p... that's probably due to spiderweb's uncommon user agent string. Change it to something better known to enable other options like 360p/720p etc. You can use the included user agent switcher browser extension, or manually add it via about:config.

Cheers

 

[Varjak]

I agree, Youtube was always slow to load, partially because it 'fills in' so many elements: the thumbnails of other videos, comments, the playback controls, etc. But with Firefox (until last week or so) they all kind of filled in pretty quickly, and I had many more tabs than the minimal 5 I have now. I had my main Youtube channels, plus some extra channels and random videos I had saved in that particular session. To make things easier, I slimmed that down to the most commonly used channels (and the lists of videos, not actual videos, so it doesn't try to play a bunch of videos at once, which mucks up any browser on any machine I've used).

SaveTube sounds awesome, because all my previous video downloaders have lost functionality, so I'm eager to try that one. In reading the site, I see that I supposedly can add that from the Mozilla Add-ons link, but my experience has been that the version of Firefox I was using on the Mac stopped letting me install add-ons. I think it has to do with certificates, etc. I encountered that when trying to install various adblocker options mentioned in another thread here. In looking at the installation and usage instructions, I think the script stuff is far beyond my ability to execute. Someone had previously recommended Youtube-dl to me, but I couldn't figure out how to operate it.

From reading the ViewTube stuff, I'm not quite sure what it does. I don't want to embed Youtube videos or watch embedded YouTube videos. Is it possible it allows me to use something like VLC to stream Youtube videos? That might be a workaround, but one that would be somewhat time-consuming to load the video on SpiderWeb, activate ViewTube and then play it via VLC. Somewhat clunky.

I see that the user agent switcher is in that add-ons folder? I'm going to check.

 

[RobJos]

I agree, Youtube was always slow to load, partially because it 'fills in' so many elements: the thumbnails of other videos, comments, the playback controls, etc. But with Firefox (until last week or so) they all kind of filled in pretty quickly, and I had many more tabs than the minimal 5 I have now. I had my main Youtube channels, plus some extra channels and random videos I had saved in that particular session. To make things easier, I slimmed that down to the most commonly used channels (and the lists of videos, not actual videos, so it doesn't try to play a bunch of videos at once, which mucks up any browser on any machine I've used).

SaveTube sounds awesome, because all my previous video downloaders have lost functionality, so I'm eager to try that one. In reading the site, I see that I supposedly can add that from the Mozilla Add-ons link, but my experience has been that the version of Firefox I was using on the Mac stopped letting me install add-ons. I think it has to do with certificates, etc. I encountered that when trying to install various adblocker options mentioned in another thread here. In looking at the installation and usage instructions, I think the script stuff is far beyond my ability to execute. Someone had previously recommended Youtube-dl to me, but I couldn't figure out how to operate it.

The way ST (and for that matter VT) is installed is through the Greasemonkey addon, both in AF and in SW — in my installations, respectively v. 3.31.4 and v. 3.10.0.1rc3pre. Don't ask, they're each doing what they have to do, and I haven't touched them for years. For that matter I don't remember how you install ST in Greasemonkey (maybe our friendly wicknix can help here.) At this point, I update it manually by downloading the file from Sebaro's site (savetube.user.js) and overwriting the existing one under Profiles/~/gm_scripts/Save Tube/

Yes, Youtube-dl is murderous, I also gave up on it.

There's one neat little addon called Autoplay Toggle that stops YT videos from starting automatically, but as far as I'm aware it only installs in AF.

 

[RobJos]

In all 10.6.8 browsers, with the exception of SpiderWeb, the Odysee platform used to give an error. The appearance was succinct, but sufficient to see the videos' titles and descriptions and download them. “Was”, because yesterday it suddenly decided to give a blank page.

This led me indirectly to realise that I was still using SW's 60.9.0 of Jan. 2021 and that the 2.2.5 upgrade of Oct. 2022 had somehow escaped my attention. 2.2.5 comes with an extension called palefill-1.22.xpi, which I happily installed — only to get this:

​

What's wrong? Incidentally, Odysee still gives a blank page in this latest version.

Added: Odysee seems to have biennial quirks — I had already posted some about its errors back in May 2021.

​

 

[fspkwon]

depending on what about:config settings i use located in /Users/Username/Library/Preferences
->: it causes the html5 video to flicker but the buffer is actually virtually lag-less;