When confronted with a statement like that I’d immediately start arguing. “But why don’t you like frogs? Frogs are so cool!” Etc. Those are the best conversations. Adults never try to come up with reasons to dislike frogs on the spot.

I thought this might be an interesting read until I saw the blurb with 4 hashtags and 4 emoticons in just 4 sentences.

The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.

Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.

I … Wha…. WHY??

I did, once. It didn’t work.

Literal decades ago I bought Sennheiser headphones. They were great. They later orders of magnitude longer than anything I had before. They fit well, and were foldable, making them very compact when not used. And they were cheap too.

When they finally broke down I naturally wanted Sennheiser again, but they referred me to their new brand Epos. I bought a headset this time, not just headphones. It was a lot more expensive, and I was terribly disappointed by the ergonomics. It’s also rather big, making it unwieldy when not in use. And they broke already, though I was able to fix it - they broke just out of warranty of course.

Of course this is just one anecdote, but it really does feel like another great brand sold out and became crap.

Note that since I don’t use Firefox some of these may actually be available, but I don’t know about them.

• Mouse gestures.
• A status bar that stays on screen.
• The ability to select part of a link’s text.
• Tab stacking.
• Tab tiling.
• Opening a link in either a foreground or background tab. This is available as a toggle in the settings only.
• Ad block.
• Spatial navigation.
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.

These are the ones that matter to me, there are more that I don’t personally use.

Ever since the first release, I’ve tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.

Don’t get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.

The points made in the article are that server admins should have policies regarding privacy and data retention, that users should be aware of this possibility, and that developers should ensure more of the users’ data is encrypted at all times.