Problem with some XF boards (as a user).

[ThornInYourSide]

I read the thread about marketshare with a bit of glee. Nearly every board I've been using in the last five years has dropped VBB for XF. I wasn't sure I liked it at first, but it's kind of growing on me.

I have a few problems with XF though as a user. I'm sort of old school in the browser area. I got started in the 90s with Netscape and have stuck with it through the various phases and am now using SeaMonkey. To me, it's always been the best browser package. But it's long in the tooth and running on a skeleton crew of volunteers to develope and make changes. Market share is way down and it seems the newer board software packages don't pay much attention to it.

Of the ten of so boards I now use, most work OK with a few glitches I can live with. But there are three of four installation all run by a Canadian company I'll just refer to as VS. Those boards simply don't work well on SeaMonkey and I can't figure out why. The boards' Admins do not have access to the software son they can't help with problems and VS is wholly unresponsive.

One issue is a scrolling bar across the top of the page and flashing Icon in the upper right corner (I don't know what XF calls them) that appear whenever a page is loading or updating as when posting a thread. On most boards it appears for a few seconds, then stops. On the VS vboards it continues endlessly until I change pages. I can't figure out what it is to be able to try and block it, or if that's even possible.

I have a few other issues, but I'll hold off on those for a bit.

 

[R0binHood]

Just tested Seamonkey here and the AJAX loading bar seems to be working okay. You sure the boards you're having issues with are running the latest version of XF?

 

[ThornInYourSide]

You sure the boards you're having issues with are running the latest version of XF?

Yes. They were just recently installed within the last few months. All as part of a massive migration from VBB, something like 100 or more sites VS operates. It's ONLY in those sites though, so it's something in what VS is doing differently from all other XF installs.

Their VBB boards were all different but they made them all look nearly identical when the went to XF. I have an awful lot of dislike for VS, but I'm not sure how far I can go with that here.

Those boards DO work in Chromium based browsers like Brave, Vivaldi and Opera.

This board and several others work fine in SM.

Maybe if I knew how this 'Ajax loading bar' works, I could block it with an image or script blocker.

 

[R0binHood]

I presume you mean Vertical Scope?

If so, I just tested a few of their forums as a guest and the loading bar appears and then disappears as expected. Does it only break for you when logged in?

Do you have any plugins or script blockers that might be interfering with it?

 

[sanction9]

I read the thread about marketshare with a bit of glee. Nearly every board I've been using in the last five years has dropped VBB for XF. I wasn't sure I liked it at first, but it's kind of growing on me.

I have a few problems with XF though as a user. I'm sort of old school in the browser area. I got started in the 90s with Netscape and have stuck with it through the various phases and am now using SeaMonkey. To me, it's always been the best browser package. But it's long in the tooth and running on a skeleton crew of volunteers to develope and make changes. Market share is way down and it seems the newer board software packages don't pay much attention to it.

Of the ten of so boards I now use, most work OK with a few glitches I can live with. But there are three of four installation all run by a Canadian company I'll just refer to as VS. Those boards simply don't work well on SeaMonkey and I can't figure out why. The boards' Admins do not have access to the software son they can't help with problems and VS is wholly unresponsive.

One issue is a scrolling bar across the top of the page and flashing Icon in the upper right corner (I don't know what XF calls them) that appear whenever a page is loading or updating as when posting a thread. On most boards it appears for a few seconds, then stops. On the VS vboards it continues endlessly until I change pages. I can't figure out what it is to be able to try and block it, or if that's even possible.

I have a few other issues, but I'll hold off on those for a bit.

I understand sticking to what you're used to, but I believe Seamonkey currently has maybe 0.01% of the browser market share, and there's probably good reasons for that. Maybe time to finally make the switch...? But heh, you do you.

I can't comment on the scrolling bar issue, since I've no idea what that might be about, but as for the flashing icon on the upper right, are you maybe talking about alerts? If so, the flashing will usually go away if you click on on the alerts icon (usually shaped like a bell by default), but the forums you visit might be using an addon to keep them showing. You can try double-clicking the alerts icon to go to the alerts page, and there mark all of them as read, which might stop the flashing - at least until you get more alerts. You can turn them off for most things in your preferences, though.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Seamonkey currently has maybe 0.01% of the browser market share, and there's probably good reasons for that.

I have one forum where quite a number of members use Seamonkey and I still find I have to accommodate for their needs while the forum works perfectly well for everyone else. The only common denominator that I can find is most of them are a similar age to me i.e. one foot in the grave

 

[sanction9]

I have one forum where quite a number of members use Seamonkey and I still find I have to accommodate for their needs while the forum works perfectly well for everyone else. The only common denominator that I can find is most of them are a similar age to me i.e. one foot in the grave

I sympathize with you! I don't know where you're getting them all from, though. Maybe just bad luck?

Seriously, that number I quoted for market share is maybe being generous. I did a search and the only thing I found about market share for it was from 2008, and back then it had around a 0.48% percent of the market share. I couldn't even find it listed on any current comparison charts, and the lowest on the ones I did see were at around 0.05%. So it definitely doesn't have a big user base.

 

[sanction9]

I was reading up a little on Seamonkey and it uses much of the FF source code, and it looks as if it has received very recent updates, so I'm not sure exactly what the problem is with using it on certain sites, at least the XF ones mentioned here. I see on the Seamonkey website that they blame problems with many sites on "incorrect browser detection." You could try using a user-agent switcher addon, or make whatever changes in the config settings, to spoof another browser, and see if that would help.

There's an old addon here, not sure if it would still work : https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/seamonkey/addon/user-agent-switcher/?src=search

 

[ThornInYourSide]

I was reading up a little on Seamonkey and it uses much of the FF source code,

Common ... and unfortunate misconception. SM was around long before FF was a blink in Daddy's eye. SM is a direct descendant of Netscape Navigator which at the time all browsers dreamed of being. It remains the last (to my knowledge) full service browser suite including email and web page composer elements. FF was an offshoot of Mozilla for people who wanted the browser portion only. Thunderbird was the stand alone email component. For some reasons I'll never fully understand, FF took off like wildfire and left the full Mozilla Suite in the dust. But when FF people wanted email, they added Thunderbird so they had two programs instead of using the full Suite that had both.


Unfortunately, in their infinite stupidity, the Mozilla Foundation focused on FF and cast out the developers of the full Suite which led them to go off on their own, unfunded to carry on as SeaMonkey. In recent years as Chromuim assimilated the browser world and the Evil G started calling the shots and demanding compliance, SM was forced to adopt certain elements if they wanted the product to work at all on new websites. Even some the most commonly used addons won't work on the newer versions with the newer engine under the hood.

I used the old Opera for a long time until they destroyed it (around v 12) by going to a Chromium flavor and dropped the email component. I use the new version to an extent and have tried Vivaldi and Brave. While they all have some advantages, none of them come close (in my view) to SM whcih to me remains the Grandaddy of browsers in more ways than one.


I'm fully aware many people won't agree with my short history recollection, but that's how I recall it.

 

[Pete]

The principle reason given at the time was the perceived bloat of the legacy codebase - and if you’d used Netscape 7 at the time on reasonable hardware, I suspect you’d agree. Seamonkey is faster (comparatively) than NS7 was, though. But FF was considerably faster at browsing than NS7 was.

Not surprising though, NS7 was the first draft of Gecko, FF made it usable.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I see on the Seamonkey website that they blame problems with many sites on "incorrect browser detection.

Many of the issues we get with Seamonkey and/or their users do seem relate to something along those lines. It's not uncommon that we get asked to fix an issue where the member is unable to log into their bank account or similar. On the bright side we haven't been asked to unblock their plumbing yet

 

[sanction9]

Common ... and unfortunate misconception. SM was around long before FF was a blink in Daddy's eye. SM is a direct descendant of Netscape Navigator which at the time all browsers dreamed of being. It remains the last (to my knowledge) full service browser suite including email and web page composer elements. FF was an offshoot of Mozilla for people who wanted the browser portion only. Thunderbird was the stand alone email component. For some reasons I'll never fully understand, FF took off like wildfire and left the full Mozilla Suite in the dust. But when FF people wanted email, they added Thunderbird so they had two programs instead of using the full Suite that had both.


Unfortunately, in their infinite stupidity, the Mozilla Foundation focused on FF and cast out the developers of the full Suite which led them to go off on their own, unfunded to carry on as SeaMonkey. In recent years as Chromuim assimilated the browser world and the Evil G started calling the shots and demanding compliance, SM was forced to adopt certain elements if they wanted the product to work at all on new websites. Even some the most commonly used addons won't work on the newer versions with the newer engine under the hood.

I used the old Opera for a long time until they destroyed it (around v 12) by going to a Chromium flavor and dropped the email component. I use the new version to an extent and have tried Vivaldi and Brave. While they all have some advantages, none of them come close (in my view) to SM whcih to me remains the Grandaddy of browsers in more ways than one.

I was simply saying what the Seamonkey website itself says about the browser: "Under the hood, SeaMonkey uses much of the same Mozilla Firefox source code." My intention wasn't to argue which came first, but to point out that they share much of the same code and that therefore one would think that Seamonkey would be as, or mostly as, compatible with modern websites as FF. That was the only reason for the mention. Hopefully you paid as much attention to the rest of what I wrote, since it might aid in compatibility if you're going to stick with Seamonkey.

By the way, I started out on the internet using Netscape Navigator. But right now, in 2021, I believe there are better browsers one can use, and plenty of ways to get email - and get it within your browser if you want, and multiple addresses on one account if you want. Not that I'm trying to convince you to switch, mind you! I still have friends who insist on using CD's for music in their cars, and I gave up on trying to change their minds years ago.

 

[Pete]

Too many devs go 'this isn't Chrome or Firefox therefore I don't care, bye' because that's easier than doing it properly.

 

[sanction9]

Too many devs go 'this isn't Chrome or Firefox therefore I don't care, bye' because that's easier than doing it properly.

Well, to be fair, I think they base their decisions more on which browsers are used by the most people, rather than on their personal loyalty to Chrome or FF, which arguably makes good business sense. I mean, if you and I teamed up and created our own browser tomorrow and it was used by exactly two people, us, what kind of support could we reasonably expect? A bit of an extreme example, but how low does the usage have to go before it's fair for them to decide a certain browser is not a priority? I'm not saying that they're right or wrong in this particular case, just speaking in general terms....

 

[Pete]

To be fair, that's really not my experience of having spent the last decade working with other web devs.

Most of them test it in whatever their default is and if it works there, that's good enough - even if it doesn't work properly in whichever of Firefox/Chrome/etc they don't use. As long as the client doesn't notice immediately, it's usually fine.

Chrome is the default people go to these days, so very likely that's the only thing it's tested on - not any of the Chrome derivatives, mind, just full fat Chrome.

I have interesting memories a couple of years ago of having to deal with one governmental-level customer whose entire fleet of machines still relied on IE11 and of course no-one was coding for IE 11 any more... that was fun. They're doing better now I gather.

 

[ThornInYourSide]

^^^ I saw a lot of the problem come into play years back when G started throwing their weight around as far as search prominence. They threatened to derank sites that didn't do things a certain way, including coding for Chromium. Few sites had the resources financially or legally to fight, so they capitulated.

That's why I and quite a few others moved to other search engines.

As far as I'm concerned, Chromium is little more than spyware, but Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and some others seem to have defanged it enough to use. Other that Mozilla and SeaMonkey, I don't know of any non-MS browsers that are independently developed on their own platform and now even they are being drawn into the collective.


Not to get political, but this is the kind of thing that should cause Alphabet to be split up.

 

[Nev_Dull]

As far as I'm concerned, Chromium is little more than spyware

Expecting a browser that is developed and released for free by a data company to not collect data is a bit silly. You get what you pay for. Rather than opting for more obscure browsers in the hope that they aren't also gathering data, perhaps it's time for the emergence of standards based, commercial browsers. Shouldn't we be willing to pay for the level of security and confidence we might need?

 

[R0binHood]

Shouldn't we be willing to pay for the level of security and confidence we might need?

Only if we can box them up and wrap them in cellophane like the good old days so I can feel like I'm getting something for my money

 

[Pete]

As far as I'm concerned, Chromium is little more than spyware

Chrome and Chromium are two different things and the latter is not considered spyware, especially given that all the other things you mention directly build on Chromium, not Chrome. Including the most recent builds of Edge, developed by MS.

 

[mysiteguy]

^^^ I saw a lot of the problem come into play years back when G started throwing their weight around as far as search prominence. They threatened to derank sites that didn't do things a certain way, including coding for Chromium. Few sites had the resources financially or legally to fight, so they capitulated.

That's why I and quite a few others moved to other search engines.

As far as I'm concerned, Chromium is little more than spyware, but Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and some others seem to have defanged it enough to use. Other that Mozilla and SeaMonkey, I don't know of any non-MS browsers that are independently developed on their own platform and now even they are being drawn into the collective.


Not to get political, but this is the kind of thing that should cause Alphabet to be split up.

There's enough about them as a company not to like without making up stuff, and your post is better fertilizer than fact.

Google has never threatened to derank sites if they didn't code for Chromium. Such a thing would instantly put them in the target of government agencies worldwide as an egregious restraint of trade. They have stated many times the exact opposite of your claims: they do not use any HTML standards including W3C validation as a ranking factor.