Greetings, fellow XPocalypse survivors!
I apologize for commenting on a thread that received its last reply in August, but was hoping to introduce myself and share where I personally stand on the browser situation with regards to WinXP (I've used SP3 since 2008).
My name is Cameron. Compared to some of you, I'm a young buck, but at the same time I'm probably older than a few of the folks who use this forum (I'm glad to see so many bright youngsters have taken a vested interest in this fantastic operating system!)--I'll be 26 next month, and have been a faithful WinXP user since about 2004-05 (around the time SP2 was first released; prior to that time I was still on 98SE). I have tried nearly every major Windows release at least once, from Win3.1 to Win10, and every single time I ended up going right back to XP. It was, in my opinion, the last time Microsoft truly 'got it right' when it comes to creating an OS that lets YOU be the king (or queen) of the castle, giving you free rein to tweak nearly everything to your precise liking. Its low system requirements/overhead are the icing on the cake and it blazes on my current PC (an HP Pavilion Slimline with a Pentium E6800/4GB RAM [XP sees only 3GB, however] and a DVD+/-RW drive; it's MORE than enough for me).
For many years, my go-to browser on any version of Windows (from 3.1 on up) was Opera (way back in the Presto days before they switched to the Chromium engine). It was built for speed, fully featured with almost no need to install extensions (I can't remember ever installing one extension on Opera, actually), and perhaps the all-time best browser for computers that had a single-core processor and/or 512MB of RAM or less. I kept using Opera 12.x for as long as I possibly could, but eventually had to retire it because its aging JavaScript engine started to suffer tons of slowdown with sites that used a lot of scripts (including websites I had to connect to for purposes of work & school). I tried the 'new' Opera for a while, but it lacked much of what made the Presto-era versions so unique and reliable, and so I dumped it in favor of Firefox 28 (the last pre-Australis version), which worked great for a while until it too began to struggle with script-heavy websites. Begrudgingly, I 'upgraded' to 38ESR, and while I wasn't big on the direction Mozilla was going in with their browser (it seemed like they were striving too much to turn Firefox into a clone of Chrome, which I wasn't a big fan of at the time and still aren't) it grew on me. From then on I kept using the latest Firefox version as my main XP browser, all the way up to a few days ago (when what for all intents and purposes may be the final security update, 52.9.1 [Tinderbox build], was released). This normally wouldn't have been an issue. I figure, even if it's the last update it's not a big deal as long as I still have access to the legacy add-on archive and I can download every extension I enjoy using for a new installation (or add extensions, which I do from time to time, on a current installation). But then I find out that Mozilla is not only cutting off support for WinXP but they'll also take down the legacy add-on archive in October (which means that anything that hasn't been archived before the cutoff date [I believe it's October 5] is gone for good). Way to alienate a longtime user! I did find out about efforts to create a catalog of these add-ons, and I applaud all who are striving to make this happen, but from the looks of things the archive is not a searchable site but a giant file (around 35-40MB) with tens of thousands of different versions. I had six extensions I enjoyed using (a UA switcher, CTR, QuickJava, uBlock Origin, & a couple HTML-5 content blockers). It seemed counter-intuitive (and wasteful of bandwidth) to download such a big file just to find six extensions (with no guarantee that each specific program I enjoyed using would still be available). With Firefox now officially dead on Windows XP, & with the web standards continuing to change every day, I started doing research towards finding a successor.
roytam1's builds of Basilisk, K-Meleon, Mypal, New Moon, Pale Moon, etc. initially caught my interest, until it was clear to me that they are all forking from pre-Quantum Mozilla code (FF56,the last pre-Quantum Firefox version, scored only four points higher [478 to 474] on the HTML-5 test compared to FF52; not enough reason 2 switch). I asked him if there is any chance of a continuation of 52ESR (much like he's doing for 45ESR now), and he said "there is no new revision other than auto updates" (which I took as meaning 52.9.1, or wherever Mozilla stops, is his ceiling for all these different builds). It seemed self-defeating to switch to any browser that despite security updates would still be relying on old code; the developers of Pale Moon avoided forking past 24ESR as long as they could, but eventually had to jump up fourteen versions to 38ESR because of dwindling web compatibility. It seems that all these browsers, as applause-worthy as the effort to maintain secure browsing on XP is (and it is VERY admirable), are destined to hit a ceiling unless major breakthroughs are achieved in getting newer/more compatible source code to function properly on XP. Chrome 49/Adv. Chrome 54 worked better, but not by much.
Looking at different threads on MSFN about the future of XP browsing led me to one particular thread which had a reply (by roytam1, ironically enough) about a browser called Maxthon (which I'd tried many years ago when it was nothing more than a glorified IE shell and didn't care for at all). Supposedly, the latest version still supported XP, AND had Chromium 61 code. It seemed too good to be true, and of course an immediate caveat was pointed out: Maxthon is coded by Chinese programmers (which is to say, security may not necessarily be guaranteed). I always tweak any browser I use for security/privacy as much as I can possibly do and clear my browsing data before closing out of a session, so it actually didn't make me nervous in the slightest to find this out. After biting the bullet, downloading, and installing it, I was pleasantly surprised. I checked to see how Chrome 61 had fared on the HTML-5 test. It scored a whopping 526 points, more than fifty more than FF52 (and nearly forty more than Chrome 49). After configuring the settings as much as I possibly could and installing the only useful extension I could find (Adblock Plus; sadly, Maxthon has a very barren collection of extensions), I began to see how useful Maxthon could be as my primary browser. So far it's worked great! The only snag I ran into was when I tried to use mobile Facebook (
https://mobile.facebook.com). For years in Opera & later Firefox, I used a special legacy Facebook version designed for older browsers (in many ways it's similar to Facebook as it was in its earliest days). Try that link in Presto Opera or any version of Firefox and you'll see what I mean. When I tried to access the same page in Chrome 49/Adv. Chrome 54, I got a different kind of site, which seemingly has been optimized more for smartphones. This was no issue in those browsers, because I was able to download a UA switcher similar to the old Firefox one and get the legacy page. Maxthon has no third-party extension for UA switching & the built-in one changes your UA in name only, as opposed to also altering how pages are rendered. I was able to get around this by switching to the IE core for Facebook, which renders the legacy site through IE8 (not the best solution but it works well enough). While using Twitter I noticed that a .gif that someone had posted hadn't redirected to an error message. Same thing with a video right below it. I clicked on both. They worked with no problems! I subsequently went to a friend's Instagram page and tried to view a clip they'd recently uploaded. It played all the way through with no issues! With this ended a drought of never having been able to view H.264 and AVC content properly on Windows XP (at least not without going through a multi-step process which did not always work; in this case, everything worked right out of the box). The cherry on an astonishingly good sundae!
I can confirm that Maxthon 5.2.4.3000 is fully working on XP SP3, and the talk about it having Chromium 61 code is not hearsay. I'm not sure what the future is going to look like for browsing on XP, but for now this seems to be the best browser out there for those who want/need the best possible compatibility with modern web standards and have a sufficiently fast machine (if you have two or more single-core processors with SSE2 support, or one or more dual-cores, and 2GB or more of RAM, it should work fine). Of course, it all depends on what you like to have in a browser--all browsers have their own pros/cons. If you only go online to look up something on Google or Wikipedia, and usually find yourself going to pages that aren't filled with a bunch of widgets or tons of scripts, it should still be possible to get by with older versions of Presto Opera (I recommend 12.18, though all versions from 9.x on up are worth a try) and/or Firefox (I recommend 28, though all versions from 2.x on up are worth a try). If you expect more out of your browsers and plan to keep using XP for serious tasks as long as you can, I advise using a more recent browser (Firefox 52ESR, Chrome 49/Opera 36, Adv.Chrome 54, Maxthon 5.2.4, etc; roytam1's browsers are worth a look if you crave security, but bear in mind that a ceiling could well be reached as far as how compatible the code is with modern web standards). I'm not sure who's going to see this, but I pray that this will be of interest to someone! My apologies for writing a long novel! May Jesus Christ bless you always!
Respectfully,
Cameron M.