Normille

The other 10% said "I'm the Emperor Napoleon. I don't do surveys!"

ADDED: While I'm on a "Why are all browsers so shite, these days?" rant... what is it with the so-called 'Sync' festures that they all tout? None of which actually sync everything properly anyway. Yandex is probably the worst in this regard. It syncs hardly anything. Most annoyingly it doesn't sync your extensions. So you have to manually re-install these on each new device.

Most of the other browsers do sync extensions but will not sync some settings or other. So that, even after syncing when installing a browser on a new device, I always have to trawl through all the settings anyway, just to find the ones which haven't synced properly and fix them.

I've just this morning given up on Vivaldi. I'd switched to it last week as part of my recent search to find a browser that doesn't annoy the hell out of me. So, at the risk of going off on a ranty tangent...

I have been using Yandex since forever as it's been pretty good on OSX and is the least shit Android browser I've found [Damning with faint praise, indeed!] However, over the past several months it's become slower and slower, to add to its longterm ongoing annoyances such as randomly switching parts of the interface to Russian.

So I went searching for an alternative

Anyway...

First of all I tried Brave.

1: On the plus side, it was nice and 'snappy'. I used Brave for about a week until I found that I couldn't login to Google Photos at all using Brave. I'd be logged into my Google account and could view Drive, YouTube, etc. But as soon as I switched to Photos, I'd get an error telling me I couldn't login until I cleared cookies [even though I was already logged in. My ugly mug was there at the top of the page]. And, needless to say, clearing cookies didn't work.

2: Brave's 'Shields' feature breaks a ton of websites. I already use uBlock Origin and, over the years, have it tweaked to perfection, so I just import my uBO settings into $NEW_BROWSER and I'm good to go. I found myself constantly having to turn off Shields on sites to un-break them. But couldn't find any setting to just disable them globally, as more hassle than they're worth.

So, onto Vivaldi.

Not as 'snappy' as Brave. But 'snappier' than Yandex. However, there too some show-stopping annoyances soon revealed themselves:

People complain about Brave's dubious pracitces re all the crypto bollox etc. But, this is pretty easy to switch off in settings. And those same people often recommend Vivaldi instead as being less shady.

1: The first time I fired up Vivaldi, it stuck a load of shitty icons for websites I'd never visit in 100 years on my homescreen. Instead of a nice button saying "Get rid of this sponsored crap" I had to annoyingly dismiss each one, one by one.

2: Vivaldi has a similarly shady habit of autocompleting what I enter in the address bar with sites I've never visited in my life.

I'm so used to typing cr.. in my address bar and having it autocomplete to cryptocompare.com then hitting RETURN to go there. So it's absolutely infuriating that Vivaldi autocompletes this every time to crowdspring.com --a site I've never visited in my life.

Ditto my habitual ne... + RETURN to take me here to news.ycombinator.com. Vivaldi automcompletes that to newlifeauctions.com another site I've never knowingly visited in my life and which looks like some spam site that's fallen through a time-warp from the 1980s.

This annoyance is compounded by the fact I can find no way to stop these autocompletion suggestions. No matter how many times I type ne... in the adress bar and then [annoyingly] have to select news.ycombinator.com from further down the popup suggetions menu, Vivaldi will still aoutcomplete to newlifeauctions.com --every fuckin' time!

It's like a browser which brags about its privacy features, but has the spam built-in!

3: I can't rearrange the extension icons on the toolbar. Vivaldi's help forums say [on Mac] to hold down SHIFT and drag them. This doesn't work at all. Holding down CMD and dragging them looks like it should work. The extension icons move and a blue insertion bar appears where they're going to move to. But when I release them, they just go back to where they were. A minor annoyance maybe. But when I have my extension icons arranged in a certain order on every browser I use, it's irritating to have to go against that muscle memory.

4: Oh. and the crowning turd in the cess-pit. And a major reason why I'm complaining about all this stuff here. I can't login to Vivaldi's support forums to report any of these annoyances/bugs because it's been giving me an 'Internal Server Error..' since the weekend. Even though [as with Brave and Google] I'm shown as logged into Vivaldi if I visit any of their other account related pages.

In sheer desperation to find a web browser that is not broken in some way or another, this morning I opened up Firefox, for the first time in months. It still takes longer to open than any other browser I use [so much for the messianic promise that re-writing your application in Rust would fix everything!]. But, at least it seems to work on all the 'problem' sites I've tried so far. And, once it's actually up and running, it doesn't seem to be noticeably slower than all those Chrome-based alternatives.

TLDR: Why are all browsers so shite, these days?

Not according to George Benson or Whitney Houston

This is complete bollox. My [small] crypto portfolio has lost about a third of its value since the beginning of the summer and, outside of the normal daily fluctuations, has shown no signs of recovery at all, since the € and £ tanked.

No. But on one of my computers, StartPage will frequently block my search with some message about my IP address submitting too many requests and accusing me of being a bot. It only ever happens on that one machine. Never on any of the others. Also annoying.

Just fix the outstanding usability issues you've been ignoring for years and stop wasting time adding crap no-one needs.

Nation shall speak pro-Western propaganda unto nation

Who'da thunk sabotaging your own economy would lead to unwanted consequences?

  >Neovim ... supports LUA script for config and plugins

Except it doesn't really. Or at least it's very basic. I'll re-post a comment I made on this, when it was discussed a while back [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624308

----

I've been using Neovim for several years now. Not for any real reason, other than "Let's try 'new & shiny'" when it first emerged. Last week I thought I'd finally get round to converting my existing Neovim init.vim config [which had itself been inherited and developed from my earlier Vim .vimrc one] to Lua [not a language I'd ever used before. But the syntax looked fairly straightforward].

What a waste of time! The easy stuff [enabling/disabling various options] was easy. But then it's easy in Vimscript too. The difficult stuff [defining autocmds, managing my plugins] was either completely ignored in every single "convert your init.vim to to init.lua" tutorial I read... or required wrapping the existing Vimscript block in

  vim.cmd[[ ... ]]

in Lua because Neovim's Lua support can't yet do a lot of this stuff natively. Oh, and this also had the brilliant side-effect of removing syntax highlighting from great swathes of my config file as everything inside vim.cmd[[ ... ]] is rendered as a comment. I spent the best part of a day wrestling with converting to init.lua, left it overnight and then, in the morning thought Why the fuck am I wasting time trying to beat this into shape, when my existing vim.init is already set up exactly how I want it?" and I reverted back to good ol' crusty ol' unfashionable Vimscript.

YMMV if you're actively developing plugins and want to use a more widely utilised language to write them in. But for configuring Neovim itself, Lua is more hassle than it's worth.

What an odd article. None of the software quoted [at least none of the ones I've ever used] has an 'infinite canvas' in the generally understood sense of the word.

Was going to make a similar comment myself. Supporting 'internet freedom' by blocking the accounts of people just because they happen to be born in a country you don't like. Talk about hypocrisy!

Padric O'Plaque might be.

Let's all hope that 'asteroid' wasn't actually a cunningly disguised reconnaissance probe, from a technologically advanced and extremely hostile race, based somewhere in our neck of the galaxy.

Call me old-fashioned if you like. But I want my note-taking app to be a lightweight launch-in-an-instant when I need to quickly jot something down' kind of thing. A ~500MB behemoth Electron app seems like a poor fit for this.

"drags" --WTF does that mean in that context?

Remember when El Reg used to be a British website?

I thought of doing something like this a while back. Yet another of my 'great ideas' that I never got round to!

While the images are cleverly done, I don't find them at all convincing. People's faces trend to fill out more as they get older and [men anyway] go bald or at least their hair thins.

I don't think Jimi Hendrix or Elvis alive today [to pick just two] would have exactly the same facial structure [Elvis was already fatter and older looking than that when he died!] and exactly the same hair style. How many 70 or 80 year old men do you see with the full head of hair and hairstyle they had in their prime?

Good effort though. I don't want to sound too churlish as the person who did these at least got further than my "Wouldn't it be fun to...?" thought experiment. But one of the reasons I never got round to trying this myself was the thought that it would be a lot more involved than just applying a few wrinkles and turning the hair white

I hope they're going to call it Leshp.

Not really going to help the unemployed or people on a low income though, is it?

ASIDE: yet another example of the spread of shoddy journalism there. The article says:

  >He also said he would cut the basic rate of income tax to 19 pence in April 2023, one year earlier than expected... 

without actually telling us what the current rate is. I see this all the time these days; an article will say something is changing to X, without telling you what it was beforehand.

"From now on I'm going to have 3 slices of toast for breakfast" is pretty meaningless if you don't know whether I currently have one or six!

i s'pose they're using a clinical definition of 'Dehydration' but I certainly feel that coffee does dehydrate me. For a start it, goes right through me. I always need a massive wee about 10 - 15 mins after having a coffee. And, without wanting to get too graphic. the amount that comes out seems to at least equal, if not exceed, what just went in.

I've also noticed that, a lot of mornings, I still wake up with a massive thirst on me, despite the fact that I stopped drinking booze last year. The same kind of symptoms as I used to get after a night on the sauce. I put this down to the fact that coffee has the same dehydrating effects, if drunk too close to bedtime as booze does.

But wait... the scientists were Chinese. So presumably they got lured to the US in the first place, with financial and other incentives. That was OK. But when China lures them back home again with [presumably] even better financial incentives, that's wrong?

That TV station definitely needs more animated text flying about. I could almost see what was happening on-screen at one point.

Pot. Meet Kettle

That pretty much echoes the reputation Ryobi tools have. ie. the tools themselves are really good but the batteries don't last.

  >Right, but home users will.

Agreed. I've got about half a dozen Makita cordless tools taking the LXT battery. I'm pretty happy with the brand but I do kind of feel like I'm trapped using whatever Makita offers from now on.

The charger cost about £70 and the 3 batteries I have were a similar price, each. So, for me, changing brands for a particular tool would mean an outlay of 'Price of Tool' + 'Price of Charger' + Price of n Batteries' which just isn't worth it, unless the rival company's tool was 2 or 3 times as good as the Makita offering.

I've sometimes thought that maybe Metabo, DeWalt or Milwaukee's version of a certain tool I wanted was slightly better than Makita's one. But, as I say, not twice or three times as good, to justify that kind of outlay.

So, like quite a few people commenting here, I'm kind of stuck with supporting the blue team now --even when they occasionally get outplayed by their opponents.

  >But that's not Google's fault. They can't make Samsung have brilliant ideas about how to rearchitect the OS core.

Of course not. But that's the point I'm trying to make. The illusion of choice. Out of all eleventy billion versions of Android you can get, who has actually produced something that is truly different, as opposed to just another skin on top of what everyone else has, or a slightly different layout of the same functionality everyone else has?

Here's one example: text editing on mobile. I'm sure I'm not the only person who finds this excruciating. Especially things like selecting text / copy & pasting etc. And, it's 2022 and we still have no 'undo' function. But, every single variant of Android [and iOS] uses the same horribly flawed text editing functionality. Do any of the eleventy-billion 'alternative' versions of Android address any of this? Of course not. It's so much easier to throw a new skin on top of the same old crap than to actually innovate and make real changes.

That's a bit of a disingenuous comment though. I'd make a distinction between forcing standardisation on something like a power supply connector and forcing standardisation of actual products themselves.

Standardisation of the former means we don't have to have half a dozen sockets on the wall because every domestic appliance manufacturer uses a different design plug... or have each of those sockets provide a different voltage because every appliance manufacturer opted for a different voltage.

Standardisation of the latter leads to waiting 15 years for your Trabant.

  >Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?

I wasn't specifically referring to the Google [and other] anti-trust measures. I was thinking of things along the lines of abolishing roaming charges for mobile phone use, the right to open a bank account in any EU country, the right to work and reside in any EU country, the introduction of the Euro [which I know a lot of people are ambivalent about, but it did get rid of currency conversion charges]. All of which I consider to be 'consumer friendly' actions.

I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?

  >Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts

The fact that you can buy adaptors to allow one brand's batteries to be used on another brand's tools would seem to back up your theory. However, with the adaptors costing around £20 each and being produced by no-brand 'warranty voiding' unofficial third parties you've never heard of, it would be an expensive business if you wanted to be brand agnostic in your power tool choices, as you'd need a heap of adaptors to cover all the various combinations of tool & battery. Added to which is the potential for a dodgy 3rd party adaptor to damage tool or battery.

I'd like to see the EU designate a common battery interface for all newly manufactured tools & batteries. That way we could buy the best tool for the job each time, instead of being locked into using whatever the Blue, Yellow, Red or Green team are fielding in that area.

The manufacturers would doubtless also produce their own adaptors to allow their existing tools & batteries to work with this new 'One Interface to Rule Them All'

  >The AOSP ecosystem has a healthy range of ROMs to choose from on many devices. 

But it's not true choice is it? It's just the same old same old with a different skin on top. Much the same as the similarly claimed 'choice' in Linux distros pretty much boils down to the same old same old collection of apps running on the same old same old collection of desktop environments. But with eleventy billion superficial skins layered on top, to choose from.