Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years

Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’.     Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified.     I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]

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From the fediverse: saving the news from Big Tech, and why you shouldn’t use Brave browser

Excellent links by way of the fediverse today. First up, Cory Doctorow about saving the news from Big Tech, with sentiments that aren’t far off my own, many of which have been recorded on this blog. His post is from June 2023. Highlights include this on contextual advertising: In studies, these contextual ads perform slightly […]

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Why an SVG logo does not render in Firefox

Thanks to the participants at the Mozilla forum for answering why my name, rendered in SVG, did not show up in Firefox on this website. It turns out that Chromium is a lot less strict (remember the days of Internet Explorer?). As a result, it rendered the SVG file even when it really wasn’t supposed […]

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Bing Webmaster Tools: how to make sure you vanish from a search engine completely

With my personal site and company site—both once numbers one and two for a search for my name—having disappeared from Bing and others since we switched to HTTPS, I decided I would relent and sign up to Bing Webmaster Tools. Surely, like Google Webmaster Tools, this would make sure that a site was spidered and […]

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Opera GX wins over Firefox in typography; Über’s still a lemon

I’ve had both Firefox and Opera GX running as replacements for Vivaldi, which still crashes when I click in form fields, though not 100 per cent of the time. It’s running at about 50 per cent, so the fix they employed to deal with this issue is only half-effective. I see Firefox still doesn’t render […]

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Browser history

In 2011, I was definitely on Firefox.   I believe I started browsing as many did, with Netscape. But not 1.0 (though I had seen copies at university). I was lucky enough to have 1.1 installed first. I stuck with Netscape till 4.7. Its successor, v. 6, was bloated, and never worked well on my […]

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Vivaldi 5.2’s bugs: time to go back to Opera GX?

Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night.   Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down. Sadly, there’s a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and […]

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Finding an Android browser that works without fuss is harder than you think

With my last two cellphones, I’ve not used the default browser. I usually opted for Firefox, and in December 2018, I believe that’s what I did on my then-new Meizu M6 Note.    I don’t recall it being too problematic, but the type on some sites displayed a tad small, so I sampled a few […]

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Fixed Vivaldi’s poor type display, thanks to wmjordan

It took two months but I finally got there.    Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But I’ll take good type display, thanks.    On the MacType forums, a user in China called wmjordan was in the same boat but had found a solution. In their words: For […]

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Directwrite isn’t the culprit

That was confusing. Yesterday’s blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite […]

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