nyan

Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it's a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.

Hmm. Using the search term "small website discoverability crisis" . . . On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm's longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with. On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it's possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results. My conclusion from that, combined with other people's searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine's algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.

Or do a little more research and find somewhere that the infrastructure was so trashed by war or natural disaster that some records are completely gone. Happened a lot in WWII, and it must have happened in other places since.

If you use Windows, you agreed to the TOS.

If your employer is forcing it on you, chances are you never even saw the TOS.

Easier ≠ better. Granted, most amateur-written UIs aren't that great, but I find anything created specifically for the web is almost always worse. They're massively bloated, they reinvent wheels all the time (and ship them out while they're still egg-shaped with off-centre axles), and they don't adapt well to systems with non-default settings. As for Java UI coding, well, I did enough of it, back in the day. Tedious, sometimes nitpicky, but far from the worst thing I've ever done, codewise.

There are other options for that, though, and I'd rather have Java, with all its issues, any day. I think it's more "people who trained only in web development can produce what they fondly think is a desktop application".

With the LLM pushers driving hardware prices through the roof, will any of us be able to afford these?

It is, but it’s so divergent these days that 90% of Mozilla patches won’t even apply to the codebase (and presumably vice-versa). My conclusion is that Pale Moon and Goanna are capable of surviving if Firefox development ceases.

Rather like the proportion of spam to legitimate email.

To be exact, there is a noun “affect” whose plural would presumably be “affects”, but it’s a term of art in psychology and absolutely not the word that is wanted here.

Because they fired the QA department years ago, in favour of non-rigorous testing by users crazy enough to run whatever Microsoft’s version of a nightly build is. Because there’s no testing plan, some sets of conditions never do get tested.

The “O” word, actually: oligarchs (or their relatives or best buddies). Chances are that at least some of them are under sanction in more civilized countries.