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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Vivaldi’
03.06.2022
With my personal site and company siteāboth once numbers one and two for a search for my nameāhaving 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 weād see some stats?
Once again, the opposite to conventional internet wisdom occurred. Both sites disappeared from Bing altogether.
I even went and shortened the titles in the meta tags, so that this site is now a boring (and a bit tossy) āJack Yanāofficial siteā, and the business is just āJack Yan & Associates, Creating Harmonyā.
Just as well hardly anyone uses Bing then.
Things have improved at Google after two months, with this personal site at number two, after Wikipedia (still disappointing, I must say) and the business at 15th (very disappointing, given that itās been at that domain since 1995).
Surely my personal and work sites are what people are really looking for when they feed in my name?
The wisdom still seems to be to not adopt HTTPS if you want to retain your positions in the search engines. Do the opposite to what technologists tell you.
Meanwhile, Vivaldi seems to have overcome its bug where it shuts down the moment you click inside a form field. Version 5.3 has been quite stable so far, after a day, so Iāve relegated Opera GX to back-up again. I prefer Vivaldiās screenshot process, and the fact it lets me choose from the correct directory (the last used) when I want to upload a file. Tiny, practical things.
Big thanks to the developers at Opera for a very robust browser, though it should be noted that both have problems accessing links at Paypal (below).
Weāll see how long I last back on Vivaldi, but good on them for listening to the community and getting rid of that serious bug.

Tags: Bing, bugs, computing, Google, Jack Yan & Associates, Microsoft, Opera, PayPal, search engine, search engines, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in internet, marketing, technology | No Comments »
08.04.2022

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, thereās a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and I found that ZIP archives would not download properly. Getting rid of a Spotify tab somehow got me around the first bug, but I know others have not been so lucky.
In the meantime, I discovered downgrading did not workāVivaldi wouldnāt even startāwhile upgrading back to 5.2 didnāt solve that problem. Iād see Vivaldis in the task manager for a second but theyād then vanish.
Removing the sessions from the default folder helped me start the program again, but I lost my tabs; fortunately I was able to restore those, in order to duplicate each and every one on my old browser, Opera GX.
I had duplicated tabs onto other browsers reasonably regularly, and I could have retrieved a fairly recent set from my laptop, but itās always good to have the latest.
Right now Iām deciding whether to stick with Vivaldi while its techs work on the problems, or return to a stable Opera GX, which I last used as my regular browser briefly in 2020.
The type display is still really good, without my needing to add code to get the browser working with MacType.
However, I like Vivaldi and what they stand for, which is why I stuck with it for so long. According to this blog, Iāve been using it reasonably faithfully since September 2017. And I have become very used to it over any other Chromium-based browser.
Some of you may have noticed that this website is finally on https, years after that became the norm. There was one line in the code that wasn’t pointing at the correct stylesheet when this blog loaded using SSL. That was finally remedied yesterday (I hard-coded the stylesheet link into the header PHP file). I’m no expert on such matters but it’s now loading a certificate I got at Let’s Encrypt, and it seems to be working.
One of the changes in the stylesheet that controls the indents and the paragraph spacing does mean some of the line spacing in earlier posts is now off. This happened on the Lucire website, too, but it was one of those things I had to do to make posts going forward look a bit better.
Tags: 2017, 2022, bugs, Opera, software, technology, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in design, interests, internet, technology, typography | No Comments »
05.05.2021
‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’āPaul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)

Signal
You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what canāt you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their ads.
Thatās exactly what happened to Signal when it attempted to run ads on Instagram that illustrated the targeting.
I donāt believe thereās anything in their T&Cs that disallow this, but Facebook has never been about those. You can breach them as much as you like with running scripts and creating bots, after all. One bastard streamed a massacre on March 15, 2019, which was accessible for some time afterwards; and a year later, eight copies were still on the platform. Facebook āenforcesā what it wants to, and that includes disabling accounts that show just how invasive they are.
Iāve already had a taste of this after I began deleting my ad preferences and exposing how terrible they were. And they probably didnāt like my pointing out that they were collecting those preferences long after I had opted out of their ad targeting (at a time when their own site suggested that opting out meant just that). Now that feature is gone for me.
Itās what Facebook does. It lies, and even uses those lies to plant software on your computers that never show up in your programsā list. And, like Google, the timing of when ad accounts are disabled is interesting: it’s not the first time this took place right after you do something that reveals some hard truths about them.
Personally, I believe Facebookās preferences are a joke, so Signal may have found their ad account cancelled not because they reminded everyone that the conjurer had a trick, but just how lousy the trick really was. Imagine getting one of these ads and thinking, āThat aināt me at all.ā That would get certain Facebook advertisers thinking twiceāthat is, those who give Facebookās many bots a pass, and donāt mind that Instagram is 45 per cent bot, 55 per cent human, and donāt mind that their demographic estimates have no basis in reality. I mean, weāre already talking quite a gullible bunch who are doing an activity thatās marginally above setting fire to banknotes in terms of monetary utility, or donating to Jeb Bushās presidential tilt in 2016.
Facebook wants to keep as many of them as possible, and theyāre taking no chances. You just never know where the tipping point is, when the masses finally decide to jump ship.
Tags: 2021, advertising, bot, deception, Facebook, film, Instagram, New Zealand, privacy, Signal, targeting, technology, USA, Vivaldi Posted in business, internet, marketing, New Zealand, technology, USA | No Comments »
13.08.2020
My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but thatās not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to last time. The libel posted by some Australian Wikipedia editor came up during that search.
Once upon a time, Microsoft didnāt care if you removed system fonts, but at some point, it began protecting Arial, whose design, for reasons Iāve gone into elsewhere, Iāve always considered compromised. There was one stage where you could replace Arial with something else called Arial, and as I had a licence for a very, very old Agfa version of Helvetica (do people remember CG Triumvirate?!), I decided to modify its file name to fool Windows into thinking all was well.
The last time Windows did an updateāversion 1909āI had to resort to a safe-mode boot and taking control of the font files as admin, but I really could not remember the specifics. The problem is that when you install the ānewā Arial, the existing roman one is used by quite a few applications, and you donāt really replace itāyour only solution is to delete it.
With version 2004, safe mode is quite different, and the command prompt and Powershell commands I knew just didnāt cut it. I realize the usual solution is to go into the registry keysāIāve used this one for a long, long timeāand to remove or modify the references to the offending fonts at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts. Iāve also used the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes key to make sure that Helvetica does not map on to Arial (in fact, I make sure Arial maps on to Helvetica). Neither actually works in this case; they are ignored, even bypassed by certain programs. And, really, neither deletes the file; they just attempt to have Windows not load them, something which, as I discovered, doesnāt prevent Windows from loading them.
By all means, use these methods, but be prepared for the exception where it doesnāt work. The claim that the methods ādeleteā the fonts is actually untrue: they remain in C:\Windows\Fonts.
The other methods that do not work are altering the equivalent keys under WOW6432node (which get intercepted and directed from the 32-bit keys anyway), using an elevated command prompt to delete the files (at least not initially), or doing the same from safe mode (which is very different now, as safe mode is in the same resolution and the Windows\Fonts folder displays as it does in the regular modeāso you cannot see the files you have to remove). You cannot take ownership of the font files through an elevated Powershell (errors result), nor can you do this from safe mode. Nothing happens if you delete FNTCACHE.DAT from the system32 directory, and nothing happens if you delete ~fontcache files from the Local directory.
What was interesting was what kept calling arial.ttf in the fontsā directory even after āmyā Arial was loaded up. The imposter Arial loaded in most programs, but for the Chromium-based browsers (Vivaldi, Edge), somehow these knew to avoid the font registry and access the font directly. This was confirmed by analysing the processes under Process Monitor: sure enough, something had called up and used arial.ttf.
This Wikihow article was a useful lead, getting us to delete the fonts under the Windows\WinSxS folder, and showing how to take ownership of them. I donāt know if altering these ultimately affected the ones inside Windows\Fonts, but I followed the instructions, to find that the original Arial was being accessed by three programs: Vivaldi, Keybase, and Qt Qtwebengineprocess. I shut each one of these down and removed the Arial family.
Reboot: it was still there. Then it hit me, and I posted the solution in the Microsoft Answers forum (perhaps inadvertently prompting a Microsoft programmer to make things even harder in future!). Another user had told me it was impossible, but I knew that to be untrue, since it had been possible every other time.
The solution is pretty simple: since you canāt see the full Windows\Fonts directory with Windows Explorer, then I needed another file manager.
Luckily, I had 7zip, which I opened as an administrator. It allowed me to go into the folder and view all its contents, not just the fonts called up under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts, which we know is not an accurate representation of the fonts being used by the system. From there I could finally delete the offending four fonts without changing the ownership (which makes me wonder if the Wikihow advice of changing the owner under Windows\WinSxS wound up affecting the Windows\Fonts files). Once again, I had to close Keybase, Vivaldi and Qt Qtwebengineprocess.
It took from c. 4 p.m., when my desktop PC updated to v. 2004 (my laptop had been on it for many weeks; soon after its release, in fact) to 2 a.m., with a break in between to cook and eat dinner. Iām hoping those hours of having typographic OCD helps others who want to have a font menu where they determine what they should have. Also, user beware: donāt delete stuff that the system really, really needs, including an icon font that Windows uses for rendering its GUI.

Using Google as a last resortāexcept this search, which I did again as an illustration, now displays in CG Triumvirate rather than Arial. Normally, Google is a big Arial user (Arial and sans-serif are in the CSS specs) and Chromium browsers are all too happy to circumvent the registry-registered fonts and go straight into your hard drive.
Tags: 2020, Agfa, Chromium, Compugraphic, fonts, Helvetica, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Windows, Monotype, software, typeface, typefaces, typography, Vivaldi Posted in design, technology, typography | 9 Comments »
25.04.2020
With my last two cellphones, Iāve not used the default browser. I usually opted for Firefox, and in December 2018, I believe thatās what I did on my then-new Meizu M6 Note.
I donāt recall it being too problematic, but the type on some sites displayed a tad small, so I sampled a few others. I must have tried the usual suspects such as Dolphin and definitely recall seeing the Brave icon on my home screen, but my friend Robin Capper suggested Edge.
You might think that thatās a ridiculous option given what Edgeās (and IEās) reputation has been like, but it actually worked better than the other browsers I sampled. It played the videos I loaded on it, and it displayed type generally well, but there was one very regular bug. If I left a session and came back to it later, or let the phone go to sleep or standby, Edge would almost always falter when I tried to pick up where I left off. It would stutter and close. When I opened it up again, it was fine.
The latest version began displaying in my notifications that it wouldnāt work properly without Google Services, which was a blatant lie, since it was still stable other than the bug above, and all previous versions were absolutely fine. I wonder if this was some leftover from the Chromium base, but, as with the overwhelming majority of Android apps, Google Services are unnecessary.
The other bug that began happening on a more recent version was Edge getting confused by stylesheets and not knowing what size to display type at. It might change as you browsed, and when you scrolled back up the page, the text that was legible before had turned minute. It did this on Lucire, and it is serious enough for us to redevelop a template for the site.
I began wondering if there was life outside Edge. I returned to Firefox to find it stable but utterly incapable of playing videos. I donāt remember it being like this when it was my default, but like so many software programs, the more they upgrade, the crappier it gets. I also believe that a lot of these boffins donāt test with older gear, for reasons Iāve outlined elsewhere on this blog.
Four browsers were suggested to me as replacements: Vivaldi (which I went to anyway, since I use it on the desktop), Duck Duck Go (which I had heard was slow, but I downloaded it anyway), Brave (they have a programme where they claim to give money to publishers but itās impossible for a publisher like me to sign up to), and Bromite (hadnāt heard of it before today). I had already tried, and rejected, UC Browser on another occasion.
Vivaldi has been and gone from my phone as I write this post. Itās buggy as heck. Twitter displays about half a centimetre off, so you think youāre clicking on one thing you see on the screen but youāve just activated the link thatās 0Ā·5 cm above. YouTube will crash the browser (two out of four times). It loses the tab you were browsing on when you come back to a session. It gives the same BS about needing Google Services when it doesnāt. I was very disappointed considering it syncs with Vivaldi on the desktop, the settings seem comprehensive, and the interface looked pretty good.

Vivaldi struggles to display YouTube before crashing

Vivaldi displays everything a bit low (though it functions as though everything is fine, leading you to click on the wrong things), and the tabs I set it to show have gone
Duck Duck Go has been working quite well. Other than the pop ups that tell me about things I already know as a decade-long user of the search engine, I havenāt noticed the slowness that Iāve heard from a very reliable and knowledgeable source.
Brave was back, still telling me about their rewardsā programme, but I havenāt experimented with it enough to form a proper opinion. But it has sent a notification about my first Brave advertisement, which I actually canāt see. I admire what theyāre trying to do but if only theyād let me sign up as a publisherāyet their site doesnāt permit it. It might be short-lived on my phone, too.
Bromite, so far, has worked in a standard fashion with nothing too remarkable, and Iāll be investigating further.
The day has ended rather differently on the cellphoneāa whole lot of time invested on a device I barely use. But itās been a fun exploration of whatās out there and how some fall well short of the basics of stability, consistency and compatibility. Duck Duck Go has so far won the default slot but the jury is still out on Bromite.
Tags: 2020, Brave, Bromite, cellphone, Duck Duck Go, Google Android, Meizu, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, software, technology, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in cars, China, design, technology, USA | No Comments »
07.03.2020
It took two months but I finally got there.
Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But Iāll 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 the recent version of Vivaldi 2.10, 2.11, you need to create a shortcut, and modify the command line, append the "--disable-lcd-text" parameter behind the executable name, and MacType will work on the web page content window. The "--disable-features=RendererCodeIntegrity" parameter is recommended by snowie2000.
my command line:
vivaldi.exe --disable-lcd-text --disable-features=RendererCodeIntegrity
I used the latter method, but the type was still quite poor for me. I had to do one more thing: start Vivaldi in Windows 8 compatibility mode.
Itās messed up the top of the browser a little but itās a small price to pay to have everything readable again.
Snowie2000, the main dev for MacType, says a registry hack is their preferred workaround, at github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Google-Chrome#workaround-for-chrome-78.
It turns out that Chrome 78 (and presumably Chromium 78, too) did indeed have a change: āStarting from Chrome 78, Chrome began to block third-party DLLs from injection. But they provided a way to disable the protection either from the command line or by policy.ā
I was right to have investigated which version of Vivaldi represented the change earlier (it was 2.9, which equated to Chromium 78). After testing wmjordanās suggestions out on 2.9, I upgraded to 2.11, and it was still fine.
Opera GX is still the more resolved browser (works as it should out of the box) but there are some aspects of Vivaldi that Iām familiar with after two-and-a-half years (to the day). Looks like Iāll be going back to it for my main browsing, but I know Iāve found another great browser along the way, and Iāve updated my Firefox, too.

Tags: 2020, China, Chromium, Google, MacType, software, typography, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in China, technology, typography | No Comments »
03.03.2020
That was confusing. Yesterdayās 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 for me earlier this year? Luckily I wrote a caveat: āThereās a possibility that what I saw from 2017 actually was Directwrite, and whatever theyāre using now is yet another technology that no one has made any note of.ā
Snowie2000, one of the developers of MacType, suggested I try Cent Browser, arguably the only Chromium browser that still has a Directwrite toggle: you could still disable it in favour of GDI.
Cent Browser by default is marginally better than what I was seeing on Edge, Vivaldi 2.10 and others, but once I turned Directwrite off, I saw a very different display, with far heavier type.
Cent Browser, Directwrite switched off

Cent Browser, default

Edge

It wasnāt what I expected to see, and without taking issue with those who support GDI rendering in Chromium, it lacked fidelity (at least for me) with what the type looked like in print. I can see clearly why it has its adherents: it is superior to the default. But, in other words, what I experienced on Vivaldi between 2007 and January 2020 was using Directwrite, and whatever is going on now is using something else, or ignoring other settings on my PC.
Yesterday I theorized that if the change happened between Chromium 77 and 78, then I should see that in the source browser. I installed a v. 77 from the repository. As you know, these are stand-alone and can run without a full installation. What I saw was the inferior rendering, so the āswitchā didnāt happen then. It may have happened, as I was told on the Vivaldi forums, with Chromium 69, something I am yet to confirm.
Therefore, whatever Chromium is doing isnāt something thatās been documented, to my knowledge, except for here. And Opera and Opera GX, if they are based on Chromium 79, seem not to be afflicted by this bug. Or they are interacting with other programs I have in order to keep the type rendering faithful, with decent hinting and contrast.
The question is: what is causing the far inferior type display on Chromium today?
PS.: Trials on Chromium 68 and 69āthey’re the same (i.e. poor type display). This may have gone on for quite some time.āJY


Tags: 2017, 2020, Chromium, MacType, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in design, internet, technology, typography | No Comments »
03.03.2020
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 donāt know why Iāve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, my experience is unique.
Itās a good position to be inānot unlike being one of two people (that I know of) who could upload videos of over one minute to Instagram without using IGTVāthough itās a mystery why things have worked properly for me and no one else.
When I switched to Vivaldi in 2017, I noticed how the type rendering was superior compared with Firefox, and it was only in January this year when it became far inferior for me. Looking at the threads opened on type rendering and Chromium, and the screenshots posted with them, most experienced something like this in 2016āa year before I had adopted Vivaldi. If my PC worked as theirs did, then I doubt I would have been talking about Vivaldiās superior display.
There’s a possibility that what I saw from 2017 actually was Directwrite, and whatever they’re using now is yet another technology that no one has made any note of.
Iāve posted in the Vivaldi and MacType forums where this has been discussed, as my set-up could provide the clue on why things have worked for me and not others. Could it be my font substitutions, or the changes Iāve made to the default display types in Windows? Or the fact that I still have some Postscript fonts installed from the old days? Or something so simple as my plug-ins?
Tonight I removed Vivaldi 2.11 and went to 2.6. I know 2.5 rendered type properlyāBembo on the Lucire website looks like Bembo in printāso I wondered if I could narrow down the precise version where Vivaldi began to fail on this front. (As explained earlier, after 2.5, no automatic updates came, and I jumped from 2.5 to 2.10.)
It was 2.9 where the bug began, namely when Vivaldi moved from a Chromium 77 base to a 78 one. This is different to what Ayespy, a moderator on the Vivaldi forums, experienced: version 69 was when they noted a shift. Yet Opera GX, which works fine, has a browser ID that claims itās Chrome/79.0.3945.130 (though I realize they can put whatever they like here). Brave, Chrome and Edge look awful.
We can conclude that not all Chromium browsers are created equally (goes without saying) but I understand that the rendering isnāt something that each company (Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) has fiddled with. Therefore, something Iām doing is allowing me to have better results on Opera, Opera GX and Vivaldi versions up to 2.8 inclusive.
Vivaldi 2.8

Opera GX

Firefox Developer Edition 74.0b9

Tags: 2016, 2020, Chromium, Opera, software, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in design, internet, technology, typography | 1 Comment »
31.01.2020

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 thatās not counting video game consoles), Iāve tended to have a screen thatās better than average. When 640 Ć 360 was the norm, I had 1,024 Ć 768. My first modern laptop in 2001 (a Dell Inspiron) had 1,600 pixels across, even back then. It was only in recent years that I thought my LG 23-inch LCD, which did full HD, was good enough, and I didnāt bother going to the extremes of 4K. However, with Lucire and the night-time hours I often work, and because of a scratch to the LG that a friend accidentally made when we moved, I thought it was time for an upgrade.
Blue light is a problem, and I needed something that would be easier on the eyes. At the same time, an upgrade on res would be nice.
But there was one catch: I wasnāt prepared to go to 27 inches. I didnāt see the point. I can only focus on so much at any given time, and I didnāt want a monitor so large that Iād have to move my neck heaps to see every corner. On our work Imacs I was pretty happy to work at 24 inches, so I decided Iād do the same for Windows, going up a single inch from where I was. IPS would be fine. I didnāt need a curved screen because my livelihood is in flat media. Finally, I don’t need multiple screens as I don’t need to keep an eye on, say, emails coming in on one screen, or do coding where I need one screen for the code and the other for the preview.
Oddly, there arenāt many monitor manufacturers doing QHD at 24 inches. There was a very narrow range I could choose from in New Zealand, with neither BenQ nor Viewsonic doing that size and resolution here. Asus has a beautifully designed unit but I was put off by the backlight bleed stories of four years ago that were put down to poor quality control, and it seemed to be a case of hit and miss; while Dellās P2418D seemed just right, its negative reviews on Amazon and the Dell website largely penned by one person writing multiple entries. I placed the order late one night, and Ascent dispatched it the following day. If not for the courier missing me by an hour, Iād be writing this review a day earlier.
I realize weāre only hours in to my ownership so there are no strange pixels or noticeable backlight bleed, and assembly and installation were a breeze, other than Windows 10 blocking the installation of one driver (necessitating the use of an elevated command prompt to open the driver executable).
With my new PC that was made roughly this time last year, I had a Radeon RX580 video card with two Displayport ports, so it was an easy farewell to DVI-D. The new cables came with the monitor. A lot of you will already be used to monitors acting as USB hubs with a downstream cable plugged in, though that is new to me. It does mean, finally, I have a more comfortable location for one of my external HDs, and I may yet relocate the cable to a third external round the back of my PC.
Windows 10 automatically sized everything to 125 per cent magnification, with a few programs needing that to be overridden (right-click on the program icon, then head into āCompatibilityā, then āChange high DPI settingsā).
Dellās Display Manager lets you in to brightness, contrast and other settings without fiddling with the hardware buttons, which is very handy. I did have to dial down the brightness and contrast considerably: Iām currently at 45 and 64 per cent respectively.
And I know itās just me and not the devices but everything feels faster. Surely I can’t be noticing the 1 ms difference between Displayport and DVI-D?
I can foresee this being far more productive than my old set-up, and Ascentās price made it particularly tempting. I can already see more of the in- and outbox detail in Eudora. Plantin looks great here in WordPerfect (which I often prep my long-form writing in), and if type looks good, Iām more inclined to keep working with it. (It never looked quite right at a lower res, though it renders beautifully on my laptop.)
I feel a little more ālate 2010sā than I did before, with the monitor now up to the tech of the desktop PC. Sure, itās not as razor-sharp as an Imac with a Retina 4K display, but I was happy enough in work situations with the QHD of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and having that slightly larger feels right. Besides, a 4K monitor at this sizeāand Dell makes oneāwas outside what I had budgeted, and Iām not sure if I want to run some of my programsāthe ones that donāt use Windowsā magnificationāon a 4K screen. Some of their menus would become particularly tiny, and that wonāt be great for productivity.
Maybe when 4K becomes the norm Iāll reconsider, as the programs will have advanced by then, though at this rate Iāll still be using Eudora 7.1, as I do today.
Incidentally, type on Vivaldi (and presumably Chrome) still looks worse than Opera and Firefox. Those who have followed my blogging from the earlier days know this is important to me.
Vivaldi

Opera GX

Tags: 2010s, 2020, Chromium, computing, Dell, design, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, New Zealand, Opera, retail, technology, typography, Vivaldi, web browser, WordPerfect Posted in design, internet, publishing, technology, typography | 3 Comments »
10.01.2020
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnāt notified me of any updates for monthsāI 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 night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iām used to:

Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iām missing Vivaldiās easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenāt too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXās extensionsā window isnāt as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereās that), and thereās a GX home page thatās superfluous for me.
I donāt need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnāt eat up capacity for their games. Itās not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itās important that type is properly handled. I donāt know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatās probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
Tags: 2019, 2020, design, Opera, privacy, technology, typography, user interface, Vivaldi, web browser Posted in design, internet, technology, typography | 5 Comments »
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