Well, if you ever find yourself with a few spare minutes and nothing to do, you can always access porn with a smartphone. Try that with a flip phone.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to clear my browser history.
My wife and I shared an email account in the early days of the internet. It worked for us, and when we each got our own accounts through work we maintained the original email for personal stuff.
So when my wife was convinced by some friends to sign up for Facebook a number of years ago, she used this account to do so.
She didn’t ever quite see the point of Facebook and found it exhausting, so made only a few posts and then pretty much gave it up. However! Facebook does not like to take no for an answer, and so it continued to send her notifications long after her account had gone dormant.
My wife passed away a couple of years ago, but I have kept the email account as my primary account. The notifications of course have continued. I get notifications about my cousin Martha’s (highly curated) Facebook page, as well as my grown daughter’s stream-of-consciousness postings, and Bruce-from-church’s ultraliberal political memes, and onetime-friend-Andrea’s recipes, and a whole host of other notifications I neither want nor need, but it has been easy enough to ignore and delete, ignore and delete, even when they show up once a day for three or four days. I’m an easygoing guy, mostly, and this has not been an undue hardship…
But this week it felt I was constantly deleting the same notification. “Kelly Marie posted a comment on Leah Warner’s photo.” I don’t know Leah Warner at all; Kelly Marie is my cousin Kenny’s ex-wife. Delete, delete, delete. I finally went back into the trash and looked it up. Seventeen individual notifications. Over the course of three days! Seventeen! Come on, Facebook!
I instructed them not to send me any more notifications. Of any kind. Ever. Enough is enough. Should’ve done it years ago…
What ought to have been a huge red flag, as far as I am concerned is this:
At least up through Windows NT 4.x, the way you got updates to the operating system itself was to go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com using IE as your browser. The browser could then determine which updates you needed, download them and install them.
Think about what this means: The very same browser that you might have been using to surf to sites of all levels of legitimacy or dodginess has the power, itself, to download and install changes to the operating system. It if has the power to download and install legitimate updates from Microsoft, then it easily had that same power to downloads and install all manner of malware from any dodgy site that might try to feed it to you.
This brought to yo by Microsoft, the same company that gave us Outlook, an email program that allowed executable code to be embedded in an email, and run when you read that email.
In the early days of Windows, it seems that Microsoft went out of its way to make it an absurdly-easy target for malware.
And the relevance of that now 30 years later is ???
I guess commiserating about how much IE sucked is somewhat cathartic.
That it is. Besides, I wasn’t aware rants worthy of this thread had expiration dates. 
Also currently relevant to why there is lingering distrust of the current M$ browser, since anyone who screws up their software as badly as IE was needs to be viewed with some suspicion until they prove that they’ve learned from their mistakes.
Hell, I had been a Windows user since 1992, and I nearly got burned so badly by Windows “Backup and Restore” that I cheerfully joined the Apple Cult. I have to use Windows 10 at work, of course, and I do have a ‘legacy laptop’ somewhere upstairs that has Windows XP (and some really cool software) installed on it…but otherwise I haven’t missed it.
Here we need to cue the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch. Directed to my good friends @LSLGuy and @Atamasama regarding Microsoft Edge. No, Edge is not dead and nailed to its perch, and I’m not returning it, but I do have some critical observations.
Let’s keep the record straight that this does appear to be an excellent browser – I’ve been using it consistently for nearly three days, and my impression is that it’s faster than Firefox and so far hasn’t shown any signs of any of those annoying bugs that infest Firefox. I like it. It has many nice features and works well. I’ll probably keep using it.
But, gentlemen (or any ladies as well, if present) gaze upon this screenshot I just took:
At that point I was just running the normal apps I always have open, like Outlook for email, Wordpad for a scratchpad, and the browser itself with just two tabs open. Edge spawned no less than 14 processes during that time. And some of them are eating even more memory than Firefox. I have never before – never – seen 49% physical memory utilization with just my normal stuff open.
If I close down Edge and restart it (it’s configured to restart with the same tabs open) the consumed memory is in the 30%+ range, which is almost exactly the same as with Firefox. But then it grows. And from what I can tell, it grows even faster than Firefox. You can see from the image the humongous memory grabs.
But hey, at least it’s a browser that seems to work well, fast, and reliably. But like anything from the kids at Microsoft in the last few decades, who have never learned to respect the value of conservatively planned memory utilization, it is a memory hog.
One of my cousin’s husband is a real tool. He has three girls roughly 2-5 years old. Despite the fact that he feels compelled to offer unhelpful parenting advice, such as “starve your kid until they eat what you want them to eat” all signs point to him having some really fucked up ideas about parenting. He told us that he has forbidden his girls to be friends with boys until they become adults. They are not even allowed to talk to boys. He is utterly serious about this. One day his little girl was sitting on a big chair and my son climbed up beside her. These are two kids, age three. The little girl turns to my son, realizes, with horror, that he is not a girl, and shrieks, “EW! A BOY!” and dives off the chair.
I’d like to explain to this asshole that segregating his children from boys is going to make his girls more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, not less. I’ve been wanting to touch base with my cousin but honestly her husband is such a pain in the ass, I don’t think that relationship’s going to advance much.
I should not be able to slap your car when I am walking on a stripped yellow pedestrian right of way.
Especially in front of a grocery store.
Drivers get frustrated in grocery store parking lots because they’re made for humans not cars. So when they try to enter or leave the parking lot they invariably have to pass right in front of the grocery store door, which always has a lot of people coming in and out. They get angry and they just gas it when they see a small window between fleshy pink bipeds.
I am going to start bringing carts into the grocery store and will charge it into vehicles that don’t respect people. That, or I’ll start walking in with my car keys ready for a public keying, “Oh what? You didn’t like you car keyed? Let’s call the cops and you can explain why I was able to do it while you were behind the wheel.”
Funny thing is, that when I look at my browser, with multiple tabs open, the largest single chunk is the tab running the SDMB. If I close that tab, Edge is slimmed down by about 1/3. And that’s with a half a dozen tabs open.
On my computer, Edge is using up about 5% of my computer’s total memory. Granted, I have 32 GB, but I do a lot of gaming.
Hmmm – at the moment I have three tabs open in Edge and my total system physical memory utilization is … 22%. So who knows what was going on. Edge currently does have a lot of processes running, though.
I like Edge and unless something awful happens I plan to continue using it and appreciate the suggestion. A reasonable way to look at it is that a modern high-performance browser that works with all the complexities of today’s websites is naturally going to use a lot of memory.
In contrast to this reasonable view, there is my view. 
I am a Cranky Old Fart and my main purpose in this world is to complain, particularly about KTDs (Kids These Days). Back in my day, there was a wonderfully efficient and utilitarian high-level language for the PDP-8 minicomputer called FOCAL, which was similar to FORTRAN but tweaked so it would be more efficient as an interactive interpreted language. Wanna know the memory requirements for it? No? I’m gonna tell you anyway!
FOCAL ran in 4K. Not 4 GB. Not 4 MB. 4K (4096) 12-bit words. The source code was a marvel of creative coding, all in an effort to absolutely minimize memory use. The interpreter itself used a little more than half of that, leaving the rest for the actual text of the program. Does anyone have any doubt that the Kids These Days at Microsoft, if developing a language like that, would have a memory requirement of at least a gigabyte, or roughly 25,000 times more than FOCAL? And that it would consist of carelessly thrown together reams of spaghetti code with intractable bugs, just like MS Word and much of the OS itself?
I emailed the Jury Manager… and she lexcused me from jury duty.
My stitches hurt like a B[-----}!
.
.
.
Fine! You deal with stitches in the middle of your back to cover a fist-sized mass removal between your shoulder blades…
( I F-ckin Dare You…! )
Congratulations! (…on your life sucking a tiny bit less)
Oops – I was off by an order of magnitude. 250,000 times more than FOCAL.
Yep, that sounds about right. The efficiency, reliability, and attention to quality at DEC in the 70s and 80s was about 250,000 times better than Microsoft in the 2000s – or, indeed, Microsoft ever.
Consider also that any app built with Microsoft NET Framework, no matter how trivial, will have a minimum rock-bottom memory requirement of the framework itself, which is 512 MB. And there are many such apps.
And now, I have to go chase some kids off my lawn. 
Why does a local PD think it’s acceptable to publish official updates on Fakebook & only Fakebook? It’s fairly easy to do a one time setup such that when you make a post it goes to multiple places, like Fakebook & your official website so people who don’t want anything to do with that site can get them too.
I am amazed at how many official gov’t entities think it’s acceptable to only publish info to people who want to deal with terms & conditions (& marketing & tracking) of an unaffiliated third-party.
Paging those who use Microsoft Edge – paging @LSLGuy, @Atamasama, or whoever else can shed some light on a mystery.
I’m not sure where to post about it. When browsing the CNN website with Edge, and clicking on any of their many video clips, they are always preceded by a short (maybe 15 second) ad, like the currently running obnoxiously loud ad for Carnival Cruises. I thought this might be something new, but it isn’t – Firefox plays the same videos with no ads.
I tried it on my tablet with Firefox for Android – no ads. Then with my tablet’s native browser – no ads. Then back to my computer and tried it with Chrome – no ads. Chrome doesn’t even have any adblocker installed because I’ve never used it, but still, no ads. Only with Edge.
Any ideas? The CNN website seems to imply that you’re supposed to get ads on their video (“so that we can continue to supply the highest quality content … blah … blah …”) but no other browser delivers them.
Mick Jagger is 80 years old today.
Didn’t see that coming.
Itching is just a slightly lighter form of pain. No, really.
Received call 1 minute ago: “It’s benign”.