Testing the browsers: can Vivaldi be succeeded?

Because of regular errors with Vivaldi, which they blame on my antivirus, I’ve been testing alternatives for Windows 11. The errors include this message, rendering the program useless.     Vivaldi’s people would have you believe that an antivirus program is deleting things out of the folder, but that doesn’t explain why, after many attempts, […]

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Vivaldi DLL disappears upon start-up; soon restores itself

Anyone getting these errors with Vivaldi? Sometimes I get them after I boot up Vivaldi and it works for a short period. Other times, they occur when the computer is booted up.   ‘The code execution cannot proceed because vivaldi_elf.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.’   ‘Windows cannot access the […]

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Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong

When you have been on this disinformation-busting journey for nine months, you can work out how Semrush got everything so wrong. Here’s one item, a bunch of SEO tools, and if you read the description, ‘Google SEO Xiaoyan’ is in the copy. Probably deeply questionable, which is why Google offers it for Chrome.     […]

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Strange behaviour on SRWare Iron, and Bing ranks phishing site first

I was led to believe that SRWare Iron was Chromium with more privacy, but this morning’s experience testing it was a bit disturbing. Let’s take a fairly common search, like Amazon seller. SRWare’s default search engine is Bing, or at least its own search takes you to Bing. And Bing puts in its first result […]

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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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