Posts tagged ‘Waterfox’


Browser history

11.04.2022


In 2011, I was definitely on Firefox.
 
I believe I started browsing as many did, with Netscape. But not 1.0 (though I had seen copies at university). I was lucky enough to have 1.1 installed first.

I stuck with Netscape till 4.7. Its successor, v. 6, was bloated, and never worked well on my PC.

Around this time, my friend Kat introduced me to Internet Explorer 5, which was largely stable, so I made the leap to Microsoft. IE5 wasn’t new at this point and had been around for a while.

I can’t remember which year, but at some point I went to Maxthon, which used the IE engine, but had more bells and whistles.

By the end of the decade, Firefox 3 was my browser of choice. In 2014, I switched to Waterfox, a Firefox fork, since I was on a 64-bit PC and Firefox was only made for 32-bit back then. A bug with the Firefox browsers saw them stop displaying text at the end of 2014, and I must have switched to Cyberfox (another 64-bit Firefox-based browser) around this time.

I went back to Firefox when development on Cyberfox stopped, and a 64-bit Firefox became available, but by 2017, it ate memory like there was no tomorrow (as Chrome once did, hence my not adopting it). Vivaldi became my new choice.

There are old posts on this blog detailing many of the changes and my reasons for them.

I’ve always had Opera installed somewhere, but it was never my main browser. Maybe this year Opera GX will become that, with Vivaldi’s latest version being quite buggy. We shall see. I tend to be pretty loyal till I get to a point where the software ceases to work as hoped.


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Switching to Cyberfox, after Waterfox and Firefox stopped displaying text

23.12.2014

Since the Firefox for Windows updates in November, I’ve had a big problem with the Mozilla browser, and the Waterfox 64-bit version based on it: they won’t display text. I had to downgrade to Waterfox 32.0.3 for the last month or so, but it’s begun crashing more and more regularly (from once a day to thrice today—I visit largely the same sites, so why does software “decay” like this?).

   On the latest incarnations of Firefox and Waterfox, linked fonts work, but the majority of system fonts vanished from the browser. And, for once, I’m not alone, if Bugzilla is any indication. It is probably related to a bug I filed in 2011.
   I’ve had some very helpful people attend to the bug report—it’s great when you get into Bugzilla where the programming experts reside—but sadly, a lot of the fixes require words. And, unfortunately, those are the things that no longer displayed in Firefox, not even in safe mode.
   As many of you know, there’s no way I’d switch to Chrome (a.k.a. the ‘Aw, snap!’ browser) due to its frequent crashes on my set-up, and its memory hogging. There’s also that Google thing.
   After some searching tonight, I came across Cyberfox. It’s not a Firefox alternative that comes up very often. Pale Moon is the one that a lot of people recommend, but I have become accustomed to Firefox’s Chrome-like minimalism, and wanted something that had a Firefox open-source back end to accompany it. Cyberfox, which lets you choose your UI, has the familiar Firefox Australis built in.
   I made the switch. And all is well. Cyberfox forces you to make a new profile, something that Waterfox does not, but there isn’t much of an issue importing bookmarks (you have to surf to the directory where they are stored, and import the JSON file), and, of course, you have to get all your plug-ins and do all your opt-outs again. It also took me a while to program in my cookie blocks. But the important thing is: it displays text.
   You’d think that was a pretty fundamental feature for a web browser.
   The text rendering is different, and probably better. I’ve always preferred the way text is rendered on a Macintosh, so for Cyberfox to get a bit nearer that for some fonts is very positive. It took me by surprise, and my initial instinct was that the display was worse; on review, Firefox displayed EB Garamond, for example, in a slightly bitmapped fashion; Cyberfox’s antialiasing and subpixel rendering are better.

Firefox and Waterfox on Windows 7
Firefox_Screenshot_2014-12-23T14-14-06.693Z

Cyberfox on Windows 7
Firefox_Screenshot_2014-12-23T14-13-23.809Z

Here’s where the above text is from.
   Gone is the support for the old PostScript Type 1 fonts (yes, I still have some installed) but that’s not a big deal when almost everything is TrueType and OpenType these days.
   The fact Cyberfox works means one of two things: (a) Cyberfox handles typography differently; or (b) as Cyberfox forces us to have a new profile, then there is something in the old profiles that caused Firefox to display no text. That’s beyond my knowledge as a user, but, for now, my problems seem to be solved—at least until someone breaks another feature in the future!

PS.: That lasted all of a few hours. On rebooting, Cyberfox does exactly the same thing. All my text has vanished, and the rendering of the type has changed to what Firefox and Waterfox do. No changes to the settings were made while the computer was turned off, since, well, that would be impossible. Whomever said computers were logical devices?
   Of yesterday’s options, (a) is actually correct—but how do we get these browsers behaving the way they did in that situation? In addition, the PostScript Type 1 fonts that the browser was trying to access have since been replaced.


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