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

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, […]

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Returning to Firefox?

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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Testing the browsers: which has the best typography?

Con Carlyon inspired this post today. He’s kept an eye on the best browser and forwarded me a test from TechCrunch where Firefox, Chrome, IE9 and Opera 11 are pitted against one another. The victors are Firefox and Chrome.    My needs are quite different from most people. For starters, the number-one criterion for me […]

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