Recently GoG pushed updates to their CSS which makes the front page look like a stretched abomination. I've been trying to see if they would continue to support the older browsers, but they seem unwilling so far.

This is sorta the result (older image from when it first happened).

If anyone still wants to use the older browser for mostly the front page and stuff, I've been working on a script replacement which forcibly replaces the CSS by doing bulk replacements of a number of elements to use different values. It's not perfect, but it certainly makes the page still workable, but only on the front page.

Also to note it's somewhat buggy. So if there's enough users that don't want to upgrade the browser for looking at the front page, i'm willing to share my simple (yet semi-working) script, which mostly replaces the css links to modified ones (meaning later when they filenames, i'll have to update them)

note: Missing blocks about Galaxy and the like are hidden from ABP-element hiding and won't be removed unless you are using those same hiding elements i use.

Yeah, Web designers tend to change all their CSS crap every other week to prove how good they are at showing some useless "fancy" effect on newer browsers' version.

I don't give a flying fuck, I do NOT want to upgrade the browser every time Web designers change something so the GOG homepage can go to hell :-P

But the two big security issues currently you might encounter, is Flash, and Scripting, both when turned off things are considerably safer...

Honestly though until I've gotten the page to be decent again (in my opinion) I've had to try a newer browser and it's half the speed. Not sure about memory consumption since I wasn't using it to browse anything other than GoG...

In all honesty the push for constantly updating and getting the 'newest' is annoying as hell. Once we got to a decent browser and configuration we should have just done bug fixes and security fixes. I personally don't care about HTML5, and I don't care about web pages that force you to have tons of JS and Flash enabled in order to view or use their pages as it's counter-intuitive. We really don't need to make our web pages our applications, and yet that's what's being pushed.

I hate technology as much as the next person, but what you're basically saying is "let's stay at this point forever and may nothing advance because I don't really like it". HTML5 is a great leap forward and actually helps in getting rid of moronic things like Flash. And without scripting, be it JS or otherwise, web pages would just not be functional. We might as well go back to hosting them on GeoCities. As far as security fixes on browsers go, they don't concern "Flash" as you put it, because Flash isn't a web browser problem, it's an add-on and thus it's the problem of its publisher, in this case Adobe. There are also usually several vulnerabilities found between each browser, any browser, update, and they don't all have to do with "scripting". Protocols, file handling, memory leaks, etc..

No, more akin to 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

If we compare to a car, I'd be happy with the same old car I've always had vs say the new car that insists I need a 6 stacking cup holder next to the driver's seat, a boom box in the back, 5 wheel drive, a dozen thermometers, cameras on the roof, a back massager on every seat, heated seats, GPS guidance system, and a bobble-head of Jesus. HTML itself is simply a formatting language; 'divide these blocks here, make this a header, bold this' etc etc. Often you could describe the general layout and the browser could decide the best way to display what you've given it. However it seems everyone wants so much control over how something looks that it removes the flexibility of the standard. CSS was a great way to force site-wide styles so you don't have to keep adding bunch of formatting to everything, but I'd be much happier overall if JS wasn't a thing, or at least wasn't pushed so much. Yes you might not have as many dropdown windows and boxes and instead do a little more navigation via pages, but if those pages load instantly rather than taking 5+ seconds to load all the other pages it's trying to load, what's the problem?

Seriously, the newer browser I was trying out was taking close to 8 seconds to load every page on GoG vs the 2 seconds the older version was doing. I really don't care about the advancements if it makes things slower, more memory hungry, and forces me to move on from what I'm comfortable with. Every program has tens of thousands of bugs. Often however these bugs don't take effect except in extreme circumstances, or when the API is violated; But in normal use the bugs never are triggered.

As I said I'd rather they pushed for more security updates & bug fixes, and not constantly updating the browser with other stuff. It's sorta the big difference between applications it seems for say Windows than applications that are much older. If I update a package for unix utilities, I'm 99% sure it's going to function identical for things that are written before it, be it a scripting language or copy utilities or compression, the tags used to call features, etc. However every version of FireFox I keep seeing where they keep forcing UI updates where it looks odd, they change the location of buttons and looks of them, sometimes options move; And making the applications fundamentally different is quite an annoyance.

Let's not forget a number of addon-scripts aren't always supported so trying out the newer browser I didn't get to keep half of them, which is a bigger annoyance than the newer browser itself. No I don't think I'll upgrade, not at all.

It's your head... don't.

So why are you sticking with an older browser? And why should I support your version that has say, 0.~% of market share?

the problem is not you accidentally triggering the bug. The problem is the armada of "evil people" out there who try very hard to exploit these bugs on as many systems as possible. It's irresponsible to avoid updating software like the browser that is that much exposed to any kind of attacks.

That being said, I agree with your point about the development of firefox. I would gladly get rid of all the "feature-bloat".
Looking at firefox now it is hard to imagine how it started from this cute small & fast browser called phoenix a long time ago.

Though I think that web designers are equally as much to blame for the sluggish web browsing experience these days.
Allmost all sites are buried under a absurdly huge amount of crap. You tend to load several megabytes just to read an article of a few hundred words :/.

about:config and you can disable all new "feature" that's the great of Firefox, that's why I use it.
just google what you want to disable (for example you can disable firefox hello).

The about:config is a lot like the registry, there's far too many entries that it's daunting just to look at...

if you're going to use a browser that old you're going to have to accept sites breaking on you. I'd recommend upgrading and backing up your profile and using a system restore point or reinstalling ff25 if you don't like the current version.

just use google... it's really easy...

"disable firefox hello about:config"
"disable firefox pocket about:config"

I can do that and english is not even my native language.

Also many html5 feature (like form check) can replace javascript...
Many html5 feature can replace video/audio plugin (like flash player)...
Html5 is really a good thing. I've done a website project for university this month... with only html5 we could finish that project in a week... but since many people still use old browser we were forced to add javascript scripts.

There are two issues I have with some web sites:

1. Sites that fail to provide basic functionality on feature limited browsers. I am not necessarily expecting a video to be playable on lynx (although a transcript would be nice if applicable), but I still expect to read the text on the website and browse articles this way. (Last time I checked, gog.com was guilty of this; the links to articles would not work without JavaScript.)

2. Sites that refuse to serve content to less common browsers, typically with 403 or 417 errors. Facebook, for example, redirects lynx to the unsupported browser page, even though lynx is fully capable of displaying text from the website. (Note that this is not the only issue I have with Facebook; The site's real name policy is another issue, and there are obvious privacy concerns with that site.)

I am fully with OP on upgrading browser. I had to upgrade Firefox to latest version to be able to use one important plugin, and latest version changed the whole interface entirely, so I had to install additional plugins so that Firefox looked somewhat closer to its classic version, because I couldn't use new version of Firefox at all. I was literally horrified when when I saw that upgraded Firefox was 10000% different from classic version and I had no distributive for old version. Trying to work with new Firefox was like trying to swim through the earth. Thanks for "Classic Theme Restorer" though it didn't fix all the broken things.

And yeah, I'd gladly trade all the new useless features of Firefox for better performance.