A note on Discord and Windows XP/2003

[Compa]

Your only real choice is Yandex.Browser 17.4.1 (if you care about Voice Chat), or any Chromium-based browser with a Blink engine version above version 55 will also work generally speaking as a quite stable alternative.

Note that quite a lot of the Chinese browsers use the same backport code - implying that the companies producing these forks all have access to the same repository - simply with their own account customisation and different levels of telemetry, and different but very similar user interface... it also seems like none of them want to launch properly on XP x64, throwing that OS out of the window almost entirely.

Another choice if you're looking for a non-Chromium alternative is Pidgin + purple-discord by EionRobb which a user known as "ScarletWavez" mentioned as early on as 2018 as being useful for XP machines, but hasn't really been covered. Granted, it's not very intuitive but it's something to definitely consider as it would run a lot more lightly than any web browser would. However, they apparently dislike 'unofficial clients' for whatever reason and seem to sometimes ban people for using them if detected. Use at your own risk.

All Firefox versions are basically treated as 'we don't care unless it's a major issue' by Discord, much like a lot of other 'web apps' in development using heavy JavaScript purely geared towards Chromium. For example - quoting has been broken since 2016 for instance and nobody has bothered to mention it to them as they'd only fix it if they were a longtime Nitro user and threatened to boycott the platform. Mypal used to work, however something bogged it down, much like what happened to Firefox 52 ESR which ALSO left Discord completely unusable on Debian without using a Chromium-based browser for over a year too, due to their team switching to the ESR branch in the official repo (Rust issues, IIRC).

tl;dr Don't expect Discord to work on XP/2003 unless you want to use a Chinese Chrome backport, or anything if you're not prepared to have to use Chrome in some way by force.

tl;dr2 Discord's monopoly on niche Internet communities, and the fact it has killed off much of 'personalisation' and the whole classic forum within the space of four years honestly disgusts me.

[i430VX]

Discord works fine for me in New Moon (excepting voice chat, since there is no WebRTC), and I've heard VC works fine in Serpent. The constraints of my home ISP prevent voice chat from being feasible, so I mostly use my cell phone for that.

[Compa]

It doesn't work at all in New Moon 27, does in 28 though it's nowhere near as usable as it is in any Chromium-based browser.
Probably like most web-apps that rely on things reimplementing the browser's own functionality in JS and forcing one to use Chrome.

[i430VX]

Yes, it did reacently break in 27. But aside from VC, its completely usable in NM28... unless I'm missing something...

[Compa]

It's usable, absolutely, but lags like mad even on a Sandy Bridge i3. Chromium-based browsers don't seem to have the same problem.

[i430VX]

It's usable, absolutely, but lags like mad even on a Sandy Bridge i3. Chromium-based browsers don't seem to have the same problem.

I would say you have some sort of configuration or driver issue, I'm using it on a Core 2 Duo T7600...

[Compa]

Is there any specific changes to the configuration of NM you made?

[Sparty411]

It's usable, absolutely, but lags like mad even on a Sandy Bridge i3. Chromium-based browsers don't seem to have the same problem.

I've had a similar experience with Discord and UXP on a machine with a Core i5 2400. Absolutely clunky and unusable.

[Compa]

It's usable, absolutely, but lags like mad even on a Sandy Bridge i3. Chromium-based browsers don't seem to have the same problem.

I've had a similar experience with Discord and UXP on a machine with a Core i5 2400. Absolutely clunky and unusable.

Weirdly, there's less of an issue in regards to this on Vista, though it still slows down and gets unusable relatively quickly.
I've also had a PC using that exact processor before and can confirm the exact same results as you.

It's something on Discord's end that's obviously using components only well-optimised for Chromium-based browsers - as with pretty much anything built using Node.JS or any such programming language on the web (since both happen to use Google's V8 engine). Firefox and any derivatives, particularly older forks, aren't relevant to anyone using Node.JS as a primary programming language because they're being forced to play catch-up to Chrome at most opportunities.

Not to mention Mozilla aren't at all a great organisation (Firefox copying Chrome more and more ever since version 4.0 at the expense of basically everyone using the product, killing SeaMonkey and Thunderbird off in favour of pushing Firefox and Pocket, marketing Firefox these days similarly to the likes of 'Brave' and 'SRWare Iron' or whatever trendy 'PriVaTe ChRoMe FoRk!!1!' some are using these days, ugh...), and the less said about Pale Moon's bullshit shenanigans on how they treat forks they don't like and stubbornly refusing to implement things that they don't like regardless of whether it means their browser stops adhering to better web standards (like WebRTC for example), the better.

tl;dr NodeJS and Google Chrome using the same engine + everything switching to Node-based web-apps and/or Electron *puke* = instant killing of competition, and the competition is godawful now anyways

[i430VX]

Is there any specific changes to the configuration of NM you made?

The usual... UOC Patch, uBO, NoScript.

[Compa]

I'll have to give the UOC patch a try, and see if it improves anything... never even heard of it until this point

[i430VX]

I'm not sure. The usefulness of the patch gets lower as the CPU you're using gets more powerful. I'm not sure if it will be of significant difference on your system, but certainly do try it and see how it goes.

[Compa]

It seems to make some kind of positive difference, from what I can tell (on Vista x64 using the 64-bit New Moon 28). Given I'm on an i3/formerly an i5 maybe some kinds of processor features are disabled on those, I dunno. I remember the i7 Sandy Bridge I had for about a year in 2018 or 2019 chugged on New Moon and not on Mypal back then but things obviously changed since then so...

[Compa]

I genuinely am getting the impression later Pale Moon 28 builds upstream are part of the cause here.

I remember some time ago Mypal worked really well with Discord, then it completely broke around the 28.12.x line and never really seemed to pick back up. The same happened with New Moon earlier on in my own personal testing somehow - and I'm also noticing a lot of "sluggishness" overall in both browsers in more recent revisions.

Might try to revert to 28.9.x or some earlier revision of Mypal and see what happens there, since I remember it working extremely well even on a much lower-end system for a prolonged period of time, while now it just hangs after a few minutes of use. Seems to be a very 'Mozilla-esque' issue which seems to result in the user being forced to constantly purge the user profile (which started since v4.0 and only somehow got fixed with v57.0, that's six years of the same, ever-worsening bug in FF).

Anything that seems to be a 'web app' making tons of persistent connections the way Discord, YouTube and Twitter do these days seems to bog down any Mozilla-based browser, Pale Moon is just the worst culprit due to it being based on pre-Quantum Firefox (and forked from possibly the worst point, 52.x - by that point the codebase had effectively became an unusable pile of shit, most people were on Chrome, and FF were just removing/purging things in later versions in preparation for Quantum switch.)

I still remember being blown away by Firefox 3.5 back in the 2000s, it's so sad to see how awful it is now, and that PM seems to be continuing this 'legacy' of late-era old FF further.