Author Topic: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?  (Read 913 times)

Pete

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Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« on: July 19, 2025, 02:03:18 pm »
Hi All

While browsing osnews.com I saw this:-


Mypal68: Firefox 68, maintained for Windows XP
Thom Holwerda 2025-07-17 Mozilla, Gecko 9 Comments

Do you have a Windows XP retro virtual machine or, god forbid, run Windows XP on your primary machine? You’re going to need a sort-of up-to-date browser, and it turns out Mypal68 offers just that. Terrible name aside, it’s Firefox 68 ported to and maintained to run on Windows XP SP3; SP2 and lower are not supported, but some people do seem to have some success getting it to run on those.

There are issues, of course: there’s a 1.5GB memory limit, and the browser will crash when it reaches that limit, and 64bit builds simpy don’t work at all, so there’s only a 32bit build. Version 74.1.0 was released a few days ago, but that version number doesn’t actually mean the browser is now based on Firefox 74; they had to change the reported version number for extension compatibility.



Could "a sort-of up-to-date browser" currently "maintained for WindowsXP" be of interest to us OS/2 users?

Would it be easier to port than Dooble + qt5/6?

If any of our "Mozilla experts" fancy taking a look: https://codeberg.org/Theodor2/Mypal68


Regards

Pete

Roderick Klein

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Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2025, 03:54:10 pm »
Hi All

While browsing osnews.com I saw this:-


Mypal68: Firefox 68, maintained for Windows XP
Thom Holwerda 2025-07-17 Mozilla, Gecko 9 Comments

Do you have a Windows XP retro virtual machine or, god forbid, run Windows XP on your primary machine? You’re going to need a sort-of up-to-date browser, and it turns out Mypal68 offers just that. Terrible name aside, it’s Firefox 68 ported to and maintained to run on Windows XP SP3; SP2 and lower are not supported, but some people do seem to have some success getting it to run on those.

There are issues, of course: there’s a 1.5GB memory limit, and the browser will crash when it reaches that limit, and 64bit builds simpy don’t work at all, so there’s only a 32bit build. Version 74.1.0 was released a few days ago, but that version number doesn’t actually mean the browser is now based on Firefox 74; they had to change the reported version number for extension compatibility.



Could "a sort-of up-to-date browser" currently "maintained for WindowsXP" be of interest to us OS/2 users?

Would it be easier to port than Dooble + qt5/6?

If any of our "Mozilla experts" fancy taking a look: https://codeberg.org/Theodor2/Mypal68


Regards

Pete

A extremely big chance that this game over. This Firefox 68 version most likely contains RUST code. The question is how far it will help as Firefox 68 was end of life
August 25, 2020.  Before OS/2 VOICE started on the Dooble browser BWW and I looked at Firefox 52 ot 54. That would take at least 6 months of full time work to get from 45.9 to 52.
My initial thought with the very limited resources the OS/2 community is that it will most likely not help to port a 5 year old browser to the platform.

Dave what are your thoughts ?

Roderick
« Last Edit: July 19, 2025, 05:44:53 pm by Roderick Klein »

Dave Yeo

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Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2025, 05:48:30 pm »
52ESR was pretty well the last Mozilla that built without Rust so anything newer is out of reach. Going the 52ESR route, there is PaleMoon which was forked off of 52ESR and in theory buildable on OS/2 but it would be a lot of work and while a lot of  modern stuff has been back ported to it and it will handle a lot of sites, it is still limited.

mauro

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Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Reply #3 on: July 26, 2025, 08:58:26 am »
I use latest release of Mypal68 since its first version has been released, on a XP SP3 vm.
I'm very satisfact with it; stable, responsive, well working on any webpage I need.
Guess by now that if it ever worked on Warp 4.52 / ArcaOS as it does on XP SP3, seems to me a good progress* under the item "browser".
 if

* Dooble QT5 still engages me with instability, random traps and hidden characters in the webpage
« Last Edit: July 26, 2025, 09:06:58 am by mauro »

Dave Yeo

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Re: Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?
« Reply #4 on: July 26, 2025, 07:31:53 pm »
It's an interesting project. Looking a bit closer, it claims to be based off of PaleMoon but as far as I know, PaleMoon was forked from 52ESR and promised no Rust. I haven't kept close track to see if the no Rust is still there.
Mypal68 has a source.stamp file that points to the last checkin for ESR68, so yes based on ESR68 with I guess a lot of code from PaleMoon's Goanna web engine. Goanna is a fork of Gecko. Yet https://www.mypal-browser.org/ says based on Quantum. Confusing, especially as it says it can use the old XUL based add-ons as well as PaleMoon add-ons.
I couldn't quickly find any build instructions but it seem to use some version of the MS compiler and the GitHub page says 1.2% off the code is Rust.
Out of the various Gecko forks, PaleMoon is the only one that might compile with our tool chain. There's also lots of sharing of code so they all should have similar capabilities. I mostly use SeaMonkey, both on OS/2 and Linux. The Linux version also displays most pages but was forked from 60ESR and contains Rust.
The problem is that we need a knowledgeable developer to spend a lot of time porting even PaleMoon. We have the advantage of all the OS/2 code is in history and our forks but it is a big code base. Also most of these projects have gone 64bit only, including Qt6. Not a show stopper but upstream developers  stop worrying so much about memory.