Has Directwrite arrived on my Chromium-based browsers four years after everyone else?

03.03.2020/09.41

After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I don’t know why I’ve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, […]

Returning to Firefox?

17.02.2020/07.56

I wonder if it’s time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefox’s and Opera GX’s text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldi’s tech people haven’t been able to replicate my bug). There’s […]

Sticking with 24 inches, but going to QHD: a pleasant upgrade

31.01.2020/08.09

The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and that’s not counting video game consoles), I’ve tended to have a screen that’s […]

Switching to Opera GX from Vivaldi: I needed the better type rendering

10.01.2020/10.47

Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadn’t notified me of any updates for months—I was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire: My font settings had also changed. Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last […]

In my experience, the only browser that works with Jetstar’s website is Safari for Mac

23.07.2019/13.16

I’ve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then. Basically, I can’t book online, and I don’t know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after […]

It’s as though Statistics New Zealand set up this year’s census to fail

04.03.2018/08.39

You have to wonder if the online census this year has been intentionally bad so that the powers that be can call it a flop and use it as an excuse to delay online voting, thereby disenfranchising younger voters. It’s the Sunday before the census and I await my access code: none was delivered, […]

Welcome to Vivaldi

07.09.2017/10.41

Earlier this week, I installed Vivaldi browser, and decided to make it my default after reading CEO Jon von Tetzchner’s blog post about the potentially corrupt practice of Google suspending his company’s Adwords campaign after he was critical of them. I have resisted browsers made from Chromium because I was never sure how much […]

Switching to Cyberfox, after Waterfox and Firefox stopped displaying text

23.12.2014/14.39

Since the Firefox for Windows updates in November, I’ve had a big problem with the Mozilla browser, and the Waterfox 64-bit version based on it: they won’t display text. I had to downgrade to Waterfox 32.0.3 for the last month or so, but it’s begun crashing more and more regularly (from once a day to […]

Google Chrome blocked us over a GIF

04.07.2012/05.06

Thank goodness for mates. Decent people out there prepared to tell me when I screw up—you know who you are—and when Google screws up. One friend had the decency to tell me yesterday that he could not access Lucire’s online edition. This is what he saw: It’s not the first time Google has […]

I’m not the only one who has a problem with Internet Explorer

21.06.2012/10.55

I realize software crashes can happen to anyone at any time, even Microsoft Windows president Steve Sinofsky, when demonstrating the new Microsoft Surface tablets in front of an audience in Los Angeles. However, it does remind me of the year where Internet Explorer 9 would not work on any of our computers. The question […]