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cwizardone 11-13-2021 10:53 AM

Basilisk for Slackware Users
 
The Basilisk browser is developed by the same group who created Pale Moon.
https://www.basilisk-browser.org/
Quote:

Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust.

Basilisk is primarily a reference application for development of the XUL platform it builds upon, and additionally a potential replacement for Firefox.

Basilisk is development software............
With the release of Pale Moon 29.2.0, they announced,
Quote:

Starting with this version, we will no longer be supporting unmaintained legacy Firefox extensions that are not updated for/targeting Pale Moon directly.
https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml

At that point I switched to Basilisk, as it still supports the above mentioned extensions, and haven't looked back. I use it for almost everything but video streaming.
Your mileage may vary.
:)

kgha 11-14-2021 01:47 AM

Basilisk is indeed an interesting alternative to Palemoon for the reasons mentioned by cwizardone. Palemoon drawbacks made me switch to Vivaldi as my default browser some time ago, but Basilisk has become my second choice, allowing for some convenient extensions (e.g. the slightly outdated djview plugin).

Rendering github pages has been a weakness for Palemoon and Basilisk alike, but I recently found a plugin that sorts this: https://github.com/JustOff/github-wc-polyfill

New Basilisk version today with a few bug fixes:
https://www.basilisk-browser.org/releasenotes.shtml

JayByrd 11-14-2021 06:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kgha (Post 6301150)
...Rendering github pages has been a weakness for Palemoon and Basilisk alike, but I recently found a plugin that sorts this: https://github.com/JustOff/github-wc-polyfill...

Yeah, I experienced this, as well. The strange thing is that the github site's functionality got progressively worse (viz a viz palemoon) over the course of time.

At first, only certain functionality was lost. Eventually, it got to a point where all I could do on github was click the big green "Code" button to get a link to a zip-file snapshot of a repo. And a few months ago, even that "Code" button became unresponsive.

Finding that "polyfill" extension was a life-saver, as it restored pretty much full functionality to the github site--at least, as much as I have ever needed.;)

There was some discussion on the Palemoon forums that MS may be going out of their way to break the github site for all but the Big4 browsers. Moonchild reports that when he asked github admin for a list of the specs that Palemoon would need to implement to make it github-compatible once again, he was told in no uncertain terms that that was not an option. They simply told him: "Switch to Edge or Chrome!"

cwizardone 11-14-2021 07:40 AM

FWIW, there are two SlackBuilds for Basilisk over at .Sbo,

http://www.slackbuilds.org/repositor.../basilisk-bin/

and

http://www.slackbuilds.org/repositor...work/basilisk/

FTIO 11-14-2021 07:56 AM

I've been using Basilisk for quite a while now, sometime earlier this year, at least since April I think. It starts far quicker than SeaMonkey (which is my second-use browser if Basilisk doesn't do a page/site right), and I also found that plugin for both of these browsers I use for git sites by the suggestion for it from kgha, if I remember right.

Until I find Basilisk or SeaMonkey are not protecting my privacy, keeping things (relatively) simple, and not following the herd or caving to any government 'suggestions' to do or be certain ways, I'll stick with them, they do a great job.

TheRealGrogan 11-15-2021 06:44 PM

1 Attachment(s)
I did a build of this. I like it! I miss old appearances, behaviours and functionality and it's good to have a "legacy" browser again :-)

However, there seems to be a font rendering issue in the GTK+3 UI parts of the program (not on the browser's canvas itself) for me.

The fonts are faded (that's supposed to be #FFFFFF), mis-weighted and misshapen in some areas with some characters, and there is some colour bleeding. You can probably see it in the screenshot.

My guess is that it has to do with bundled cairo vs. system GTK and friends. This does not occur on my LFS system where I have a somewhat older cairo and GTK stack.

Anybody else seeing this?

TheRealGrogan 11-15-2021 09:29 PM

It seems to be font antialiasing itself, whether with hinting or subpixel rendering or not. Whether done by Kwin or system wide with the /etc/fonts/conf.d symlinks, using any window manager. If I turn that stuff right off, the fonts display normally but of course too ugly to use like that. I also tried recompiling my freetype without the never enabled by default subpixel rendering define, and it has nothing to do with the problem.

It's not just my build, I unpacked official binary tarball and ran ./basilisk and the font rendering in the UI is the same.

It's not just on Slackware.

--enable-system-cairo is ignored now (I wouldn't expect that to work anyway) so that's no longer an option.

I guess it doesn't matter, it's just the program UI (which includes the address bar unfortunately). What counts is the text in the browser itself (pages, input forms etc.) and that renders just dandy.

cwizardone 11-15-2021 09:36 PM

I haven't had any font problems, but I'm seeing odd behavior when on this board. If I click on, "Yes, I found this post helpful" an error message pops up saying I have to have at least one post before I can use that function. If I click on the "go back on page" button or reload/refresh I get thrown back to the sign on page, as if I wasn't signed in.
Not a problem with Firefox.
This just started yesterday after updating to the latest version. This morning I removed yesterday's update and installed the previous version, but the problem remains.
:scratch:

TheRealGrogan 11-15-2021 11:44 PM

That works in my build :-)

It sounds more like a session cookie type thing. Have you tried clearing all of this site's cookies?

cwizardone 11-16-2021 06:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRealGrogan (Post 6301726)
That works in my build :-)

It sounds more like a session cookie type thing. Have you tried clearing all of this site's cookies?

Yes.

cwizardone 11-17-2021 07:19 AM

Ah, ha!!!
:)
Basilisk-2021-11-14 has been released.
Quote:

v2021.11.14 Published 2021-11-14
This is a bugfix update.
Fixed overall browser bustage due to branch confusion and telemetry removal.
https://www.basilisk-browser.org/releasenotes.shtml

That fixed some problems, but it still doesn't properly display wsj.com. As long as I've been using Basilisk or Pale Moon neither one has been able to properly display safeway.com.

FTIO 11-17-2021 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwizardone (Post 6302061)
Ah, ha!!!
:)
Basilisk-2021-11-14 has been released.

https://www.basilisk-browser.org/releasenotes.shtml

That fixed some problems, but it still doesn't properly display wsj.com. As long as I've been using Basilisk or Pale Moon neither one has been able to properly display safeway.com.

The Safeway site completely locks up my Basilisk to the point I have to kill it in sysguard. I watched it in sysguard before I did kill it and it was taking up 6% of the CPU and was eating my RAM after starting at 2GB and going upward 100k every couple of seconds.

The WSJ site looked good to me here except for the one and only spot on the page - the 'search'...it was garbled with something else and had no 'search' window to type anything into.

cwizardone 11-17-2021 09:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FTIO (Post 6302078)
The Safeway site completely locks up my Basilisk to the point I have to kill it in sysguard. I watched it in sysguard before I did kill it and it was taking up 6% of the CPU and was eating my RAM after starting at 2GB and going upward 100k every couple of seconds.

The WSJ site looked good to me here except for the one and only spot on the page - the 'search'...it was garbled with something else and had no 'search' window to type anything into.

The safeway site does lock up Pale Moon tighter than a drum, but this morning it didn't lock up Basilisk, but the site was of little use.
With Basilisk the WSJ page is missing the major new stories under the masthead. There is a few inches of blank space and then it picks up further down the page.

Edit in: Just tried to click on "Did you find this post helpful?" and received this error,
Quote:

You must have at least 1 posts before being able to rate posts.

cwizardone 11-18-2021 04:52 PM

Today's updates for -current seem to have fixed the recent problems with Basilisk....
for whatever reasons......
:scratch:

kgha 11-19-2021 04:26 AM

An oddity with both Basilisk and Palemoon:

I occasionally visit open.spotify.com (free version, I haven't bothered to open a premium account). Although the site works as intended on Vivaldi and Chromium, Basilisk and Palemoon both gets stuck on opening an ad jingle - the jingle never plays. So another one of those instances reminding us that one browser can never be enough.


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