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This page attempts to list those exasperating, repetitive computer bugs which are never fixed, and which seem to be deliberately created by IT companies to show their contempt of the users. Okay, I know, bugs happen to everybody. But I am talking about those inexcusable bugs, very visible and with simple solutions. But these solutions are never implemented, sometimes for more than twenty years.
We remember those terrible ancient religions, which demanded numerous human sacrifices. The relationship with bugs? It is as if certain software companies were a terrible cult asking for dozens of human sacrifices every day. Indeed, the time wasted with clicking, searching and unnecessary debugging, multiplied by billions of users, represents dozens of human lives every day! this is, far more lives lost than with the human sacrifices of ancient times, just spread out among everybody. (This is the same scam as nuclear power or climate change: spreading their harm on everybody hides what a given individual died from). Even so, in your entire life you will have spent more than a month staring at a useless screen, trying to understand where to click.
Of course, microsoft gets the lion's share of these bugs, but it is far from being the only one, or even the worse. However, it is microsoft who, in a way, legitimized the process, allowing the others to think that they are entitled to do the same.
Some comments may seem naive to experienced computer scientists. This is because I put myself in the shoes of a random user, who is trying to do something but is wasting his time with this ununderstandable mess. But make no mistake: the solutions are those of a professional who has been soldering, coding, and working on computers for 40 years.
Page created in February 2026. Additions dated. Corrections? Well...
No freedom without practical means to exert it: Internet and freedom - Problematic computers - No tracing cookies!! - Those never fixed ritual bugs
(Permalink) For long, we thought it was Microsoft which was bad. But Android does the same.
🐨Since: always. I have heard all sorts of technical pretexts, but since SSDs, the time required is sub-second (my professional projects took 0.1 seconds). Slowness is therefore by design.
🐼Solution: remove the waiting loops.
🐊Solution: compile the system with a library for transistors, not for tubes.
(Permalink) We assume that this involves checking open files and other items. But this takes only some milliseconds, not a minute.
🐹Solution: remove waiting loops.
🐝Solution: in the event of an unexpected power outage, use the few tenths of a second of remaining power to perform these checks. In practice, I can see that my recent PC (2025) survives more than 300 milliseconds without power before shutting down. This is more than enough time to «shut down properly».
Solution: SSD drives now provide non-volatile memory (Windows has a disk partition for that, we wonder what they do with it), where we can store the working version of a file being edited, keep the point of a backup in progress, etc.
(Permalink) When the french windows starts up, we have to click on a «Se connecter» button. Yes, but what are we connecting to? It is not indicated anywhere. We connect two devices together, «connecting» a single device makes no sense.
Not to mention that this is yet another case where the user is considered a system resource.
Okay, I know, it is for when there are multiple users. But most people are alone with their computers.
(Permalink) With SSD drives, the time required is less than a second.
🐌Solution: remove the waiting loops.
This solution also prevents the «slamming windows», when a window opens on top of a task in progress.
An example of a software which took several minutes to shut down was the Second Life browser: at the time, when the RAM was full, windows put the excess into a «virtual memory», which was actually a location on the magnetic hard drive. As a result, when the browser closed, in order to clear its data from the RAM, it first had to read it from the disk! Windows did not offer a way to deallocate it directly on the disk.
(Permalink) This happens if, when dragging the cursor, the mouse pointer moves outside the scroll bar.
🐦Since: windows 95, possibly earlier.
🐦Solution: remove the code which causes the page to jump when we release the cursor. It then remains in the right position, the one the user asked for.
(Permalink) In some cases, the task at hand (usually installing software) prompts the user with several questions. One, two... three... and then the installation appears to start. The user then moves on to another task while waiting for the installation to complete. Then, finding that it is taking a long time, he return to the installation, only to find that it has not actually started, but instead it is stuck on another question.
🐱Solution: Ask all the questions at once, for example using a table. Then do not bother the user anymore. The user is a human being, not a system resource.
(Permalink) This is very inconvenient when we have lines of identical numbers, as a single notch means we no more see where we are.
🐫Solution: move the text gradually instead of jumps, or use a proportional wheel. In addition, using this wheel quickly becomes unpleasant, something less grainy would be welcome.
(Permalink) We always feel like windows is hiding something, with these unknown and uncontrollable tasks which slow down the computer (less so these days, but back in the days of magnetic hard drives, it was ridiculous—we could hear them scraping almost constantly). We even heard of nonsense like viruses calculating bitcoins. Some of these tasks make constant calls to the microsoft website, and we wonder why, and especially what they are sending. For this reason, no one with secrets trusts microsoft computers, banned in safety uses and in administrations.
(Permalink) Today, with windows 11, the task manager no longer shows any programs running in secret. But there is a very curious little exercise that you can still do easily: copy and paste a large number of files from one location to another, and watch the progress bar. It shows a variable rate and a wavy green graph. This is normal, considering that this transfer is competing with our other programs running at the same time. But the problem is that even if we close all our software, the progress bar continues to show variations. This supports the idea that programs are running silently on our machines, not indicated in the task manager. Another method would be to check the instantaneous power consumption using an ammeter on the power cord (try this only if you are an electrician).
Another interesting exercise here is to calculate your electricity bill for these parasitic tasks, more the CO2.
(Permalink) These lead to disorder. Anyone who uses a PC to do anything knows that files should be organized by theme or project, not by document type. Having a single folder for vacation photos, work documents, and hospital X-rays is a recipe for chaos. Or intimate photos in a folder that the children also use. Despite this, these folders continue to appear on every new PC, as if someone wanted to deprive us of the ability to create our own filing system.
🐀Solution: remove the code which creates these folders.
(Permalink) Your download wants to put your photo in the imposed default «images» directory. But you want to store it more logically in «vacation2024», which also contains videos, emails, music, etc. So you press the «go up in the tree structure» arrow. But surprise, surprise, nothing happens! You then have to search for your D: drive, which typically takes 5 to 15 seconds, sometimes longer if it is well hidden. Several monthly human sacrifices to the computers companies.
🦊Solution: remove the code which deals with these directories differently than with the others.
(Permalink) (In french: Menus dérouTants, a play of word on menus déroulants)
🐠Since: 2010, and spreading ever since.
Drop-down menus are one of those brilliant inventions which allowed people without training to master the many software tools available on computers. However, this simplicity is under a constant fire from a barrage of «innovations» all as useless as idiotic, making learning much more difficult:
🐱Options which are not always in the same order, forcing us to search for them each time.
🐠Inactive options which are deleted instead of grayed out, so that we think we are in the wrong place and we waste time looking elsewhere.
🐛Menus scattered in several places, or in unexpected places, or hidden under hieroglyphs.
🐫Functions scattered across several menus.
🐩Cryptic little drawings (zigouigouis) that new users are supposed to know from birth.
🐺Menu entries with meaningless names, or which do not indicate what they contain: «Advanced», «Other», «Special», «Privacy», etc.
🐡Hidden menus. The bane of Android, but they also exist in windows. For example, who would have imagined that we have to right-click on the clock to set it, instead of looking in the normal left-click menu?
🐯Solution: stick to the original concept of drop-down menus, in a menu bar at the top and left of the window, or on the concerned object.
(Permalink) Libre Office, Blender, Audacity, Second Life...
The fact that a software is free should precisely allow its developers to avoid making all these blunders, and to create stable interfaces which only change when new features are added.
(Permalink) In a software window, we can open a sub-window, for example to search for a file. But as long as this sub-window is open, we can no longer work on the window underneath!
🐴Since: windows 95, maybe earlier. This feature made sense at the time, because software was much less powerful and computer culture was new. Today, it is more of a nuisance than a help.
🐘Solution: programmers should only use these blocking sub-windows if modifying the main window underneath actually causes problems.
Or at least we should be ale to copy an element from the page below, instead of having to close and repeat the whole operation.
(Permalink) The problem here is that every time we open windows, we have to move them, click on them, resize them, etc. Four seconds multiplied by a billion users equals 120 years, or two human lives sacrificed every day to microsoft.
🐱Since: windows 95. But windows 11 adds that we have to resize them too.
🐴Solution: open a new window next to the previous one. If we open two windows in the same time, it is to compare them or to perform operations from one to the other. Of course, the software cannot know what we want to do, but windows' «cascading» method ensures that we always end up with the worst case scenario: any window which is already open is automatically hidden. Any other solution would be better, including placing them randomly.
(Permalink) We open one, then another while waiting for the first one to appear. But when we want to click on the second one, the first one finally opens, and it gets our click instead. Click, clack, windows'' windows slam shut!
🐭Since: always
🐉Solution: remove the waiting loops, so that windows open instantly, and they do not change size later.
This applies to the Files Explorer, but also to software.
(Permalink) Corollary to the administrative form style
Alert messages are the same white color as the background, and they appear in random locations on the edges. This means that they are impossible to see, even with lateral vision, leaving you wondering what is wrong. With windows 95, they were always in the middle, and with the color system I had set them to red on a yellow background, so they were impossible to miss.
(Permalink) We then have to guess what they mean. This happens in windows which are too small, such as windows alerts. A classic example was the «erreur de prote» (Prote error) in the french windows 95. I never knew what it meant, it appeared randomly with floppy disks. It was never explained or corrected, and it only disappeared with floppy disks. No one seems to have done anything more cryptic since, but YouTube titles are often truncated in this way. We tend to click to see the full title, only to realize that it is a ploy: the latest form of click bait.
A variation is the alert which disappears before we have time to read it.
🐒Since: windows 95, infecting other software since around 2025.
🐨Solution: always allow enough space for the text, or limit it to the available space, or add a scroll bar.
🐼Solution: a message should be self-explanatory. If we have to search for its meaning, then the person who wrote it would be better off planting potatoes.
(Permalink) Some windows system alerts disappear within seconds, leaving no time to read them. Since they are also the same color as the background, it is easy to miss them completely.
(Permalink) See they are only visible when we hover the mouse over the area. This is especially true for the scroll bars, which have become tiny and light colored. In LibreOffice (despite being a «free software»), there is a large, useless black button right where we expect the cursor to be, which is tiny and light gray, forcing us to squint to find it.
(Permalink) Very handy when you have several files with the same name but different types, such as a text, an image, a video, etc.
Libre Office has the same angering bug. Yet it is a free software, with no need for monkeying microsoft.
🐘Since: windows XP (approximately).
🐅Solution: remove the useless code which does that.
(Permalink) Recently (February 2026), this idiot bug has disappeared in some cases. Has Microsoft fixed it? No: true to their brand image of never fixing a bug, they simply removed the «open» menu so it would no longer be visible.
🐌Since: windows 10.
🐝Solution: Put back the ancient windows XP code, which worked properly.
(Permalink) Very useful for hackers, or for finding out which one is being used (http, https, hop, etc.).
🐕Since: around 2020.
🐰Solution: remove the unnecessary cutting code.
(Permalink) The address of an email is hidden under the name of its owner, to the point that it is sometimes difficult to find (the record: gmail, where I once had to search for my own address for several minutes!). These unnecessary layers of abstraction make the web less and less appropriable to the non-technicians, and they are driving the computer savy crazy. What is the point of creating alternatives to Microsoft, if they imitate it to the point of having the same flaws? Well, the reason I am using Thunderbird and gmail is that Outlook Express had become completely unusable, I don't remember why.
🐝Since: Around Windows XP, with Outlook Express, has expanded to gmail, Thunderbird, etc.
🐐Solution: have a bit of common sense, put the name next to the address, not on top of it.
(Permalink) This annoying behavior has become increasingly common in the recent years: buttons have a delay, so that you think you have clicked incorrectly, and sometimes you have enough delay to click again several times. We even see this behavior spreading on household appliances and other devices. Probably someone came up with an «ergonomic principle», and everybody follows it without thinking. I even have a curious case at home: a shutter control which requires to press harder and harder.
(Permalink) The progress bar is one of those little essential accessories which gives us an idea of when a download, task, software installation, etc. will be completed. This is valuable information, which saves us from waiting around unnecessarily, while doing something else. However, in order to further dispossess us of our computers and our time, some people have devised ways to neutralize this function:
🐶Replaced by a spinning thingy, with no indication of progress (windows since version 10).
🐐Sometimes split into several bars. We think we are done, but another bar appears. If we really need several, then we have to display them all from the start.
🐫The «Zeno's arrow» progress bar (the search in windows Explorer) slows down as it progresses. This disrupts our time by encouraging us to wait for nothing, just watching it and hoping for it to end. But no, it still needs another minute just to cross the finish line! Time wasted, but also anger at such ineptitude. Pure sacrifice to the cult of bugs.
Solution: return to the simple function. Okay, it is often difficult to predict how long a given task will take, but users understand this when they see the variations in speed.
(Permalink) Mamma mia! What to do?
(Permalink) I know it is a feature, but it happens so quickly that in 27 years I have never been able to figure out the key combination which causes it. And, anyway, what is the point of duplicating the same files in the same directory?
(Permalink) It took me several years to figure this out.
A very general principle of ergonomics is that commands and functions should be in the same place.
Remember Piper Alpha.
(Permalink) Everyone knows that windows can crash, or that repairs may require reformatting the c: disk. There even are technicians who know only to do that. For example, an Acer technician reformatted my c: drive without warning me, because of a problem with… a worn audio connector! Fortunately, I had backed up my data, but anyone who has been caught out will insist on always having a d: drive for their data, so that windows can crash as it feels good on c:.
Despite this, almost all software continues to open on the c: drive, and there is no way to change that. You might say that switching to the d: drive only takes a second. But three times a day, multiplied by a billion users, that is one human life sacrificed every day on the altar of the IT companies.
Since: probably MSDOS and Windows 3.
Solution: at the minimum, open on the last directory used. This works very well… save when we change disk.
Solution: to have a d: «data» drive. Never buy a computer which don't have one.
🐹Since: windows 10
🐗Solution: It worked before. Please restore the old code.
(Permalink) That way, we have to search for it every time. I bet we will soon have it at the bottom.
🐥Solution: stick to the habits that everyone has.
(Permalink) Since windows 11, the file explorer menu has been split in two, forcing users to click a second time to access the useful functions. This time, microsoft did not back down in the face of the outcry, but took revenge by placing the important menus on a kind of horizontal bar, Quasimodo's hump. worse, this bar is randomly at the top or at the bottom, and with the administrative form style, it blends into the text below, so that it takes several seconds to find it. In short, we have to sacrifice many hours of our lives to microsoft every day, for the sacrilege of forcing them to fix a bug. Although I would not call it a fix, as it is worse than the original bug. All they had to do was put the useful functions in the first of the two menus and the rare (or useless...) ones in the second.
🐬Since: windows 10
(Permalink) Whoever came up with this thought it would make life easier for people who want to select an entire word. But it has made life difficult for people who only want to select a part of a word. It would have been better to do nothing at all, or at least to use a key such as Ctrl to extend the selection to the entire word.
At the very least, extending the selection to the word should not move the text, otherwise we no longer know where we are, we have to reselect, etc.
(Permalink) These features are dangerous, because they can change the meaning of a text, or even transform a common word into an insult, without our knowledge. I have seen words like «prostitute» appearing in my Elvish texts! In one case, scientists were even forced to change the name of an animal species because a common (and «free»!!) software program insisted on turning it into a date.
To be deleted.
In theory, these features can be disabled. But you have to know how to do it. In more they reappear randomly, without warning.
🐌Solution: remove these functions. The computer must not think for the user, it must only execute.
🐨Solution: at a minimum, an auto-correction or auto-completion must be accepted by the user.
(Permalink) They clutter up the menu and make legitimate functions difficult to find.
Apparently, the outcry led to their removal. But they can still be seen in Second Life's «Firestorm» browser. They are used to ignore the outcries.
(Permalink) Some examples:
🐧The Android flower. It took me months to figure out that it is a cogwheel. To indicate the «technical» part? They must have asked Disney for advice in 1950.
🐨The three dots, or three bars, to indicate a menu. All they had to do was to put a menu.
🐝The boss of rotten translations is without hesitation amazon, to the point that sometimes we do not even understand the description of their products.
🐼In the French version of the Second Life browser, there is a «voltigement» (flimsy flying) menu. No, it doesn't make butterflies fly, it adjusts the avatar's ground clearance. Using this expression would have been clearer and would not have cost more to produce.
🐼The user symbol in windows 11 is probably the most incomprehensible: a circle above a quarter of an orange. Without the context, no one would guess what it is supposed to represent. I still don't know. My best guess: the symbol of Islam, as seen from the James Webb.
🐀Another downright idiotic message I have seen several times is «(a program) cannot be started because it is already running». Completely useless message, all they have to do is to move the focus on the software in question, as everybody does. But it still takes two seconds to read and click on it, plus five seconds to stare in amazement at such nonsense (several minutes if we exhibit this stuppiddity to the colleagues). Multiply that by ten million users, and this is two and a half years spent in the temple of the god of the idiots.
🐪If you cannot find a function in a menu, you usually have to look for it in «privacy» or «security». It usually has nothing to do with it, but it makes look as if the developers care.
🐕This problem is also contaminating many devices' notices.
Okay, guys, when you want to explain something, just say what it is, don't use convoluted language which needs to be decoded. Think about what you would say if your victim came into your office to ask what your gibberish means.
(Permalink) This useless feature took up a lot of space and ruined our desktops without making text any more readable. They are still used by some software, such as Opera.
It is the only windows bug which has ever been fixed, following the outcry they caused. But microsoft's revenge was terrible: they removed the entire color customization system and gave the whole computer an administrative form style.
For the bookmarks, you can create an HTML page (or a LibreOffice page), and set the browser to open it when it starts up. Nice, practical, and quick to modify.
(Permalink) Yes, this exists. There is an old one against Comic Sans MS, which some people wanted to outright forbid.
Since then, in 2025 with the clown president in the USA, there has been an ukase against the Calibri font, considered «woke». Which finally allows us to know what that word means: it is being normal.
(Permalink) The aim here is to exclude visually impaired people from society.
🐹Solution: use text which contrasts with the background, and large enough. Generally, a light color and a dark color. Contrasts between bold colors are less effective and can penalize colorblind people.
(Permalink) The OS, software, and content are all rendered in white spaces, without clear separation, so that we do not know who owns what. This allows the computer to escape the user's control, in order to better guide them towards the imposed content. And working on a computer becomes as enjoyable as filling out our tax return (and even then, in France, these forms are in color).
🐨Since: windows 10 and Android.
🐟Solution: windows 95 to XP had a system for customizing colors, which was removed to punish us for rejecting the tiles in windows 8. For people who don't want to customize colors, we can offer some ready-made skins.
In any case, it is essential that the OS and browser have a specific and stable graphic charter, so that even an inexperienced user can immediately tell whether what they are seeing comes from microsoft, the browser, or the website. For this reason, this website you are reading has pastel backgrounds and «sculpted» colored bars. Initially, this was purely aesthetic, but now it has become a defense against hostile browsers.
(Permalink) This makes us do mistakes. This is a beginner's mistake in website design. Basic HTML allows us to position buttons precisely on a page, so that they normally don't move. But if they are positioned relative to an image or a video which size is not known in advance, then the buttons move when the image loads.
🐻Solution: a web developer must use fixed positioning in HTML. In the case of an element of variable size (e.g., YouTube videos), the buttons must be positioned relative to a fixed element which will not be affected by the movement of the image. This is basic website design.
(Permalink) Yes, I found one which blurred the text with other browsers. For a site providing vital medical information, it could have killed people. Well, it was quickly corrected, and I imagine the developer was fired.
🐡Solution: if a site does not work, try it with Edge-Internet Explorer, and oh miracle, it works!
Today, all the browsers read HTML5 standards correctly. For them not to do so, the site has to detect the browser and serve different code for each one. In other words, working differently has to be done on purpose. Clearly, if a site is not working with a given browser, it is on purpose.
(Permalink) For example, those requiring a specific browser. The strength and robustness of the Internet lies in its absolute standardization: any browser can display any website, for anyone, in any country. Any exception introduces discrimination, data loss, etc.
HTML5 and CSS are the only standards of Internet.
Apps are non-standard websites.
(Permalink) In more, they can pass on much more information to their creators, monitor what we look at, what we write, etc.
They are only useful if they perform a specific function that an HTML site cannot do, such as accessing the camera.
(Permalink) Android (google) and Apple. And of course, the app we need is only on the other system...
(Permalink) To view the content, you have to accept cookies which will spy on you for the benefit of unknown blokes, perhaps even tracking you in behalf of dictatorships. This is not just a minor inconvenience; it is a very serious problem related to the control of the Internet by a small group of rich sickos and sociopathic dictators. Therefore, never click «yes» on these banners.
Solution: A website with advertising is not a reliable source of information. Such a site hides who really controls it (for example through overcharged ads).
Solution: To open a site with a cookies banner without letting it install spying cookies on our computer, open the link in a private page, or better with a VPN (Today this has become a legitimate protection against the takeover of the internet by a small group).
Solution: A clean and honest website does not need to spy on its visitors (but hiding the WHOIS information is now needed because of scammers).
See here other protections against internet corrupters.
This is a typical case where purely technical workers have applied technical solutions to a social or philosophical problem: differentiating a legitimate email from an advertisement or a scam. Initially, it was easy, we just had to filter out «v1agra» or «pen1s». But scammers and propagandists now produce messages which sound very human. The technicians in charge of filtering have therefore adopted approximate or statistical methods. Result: many legitimate messages are lost: ongoing activities, password recovery, mail lists, declarations of love... So many missed opportunities, so many scotomised websites, so many wasted lives!
Yes, guys, people who send emails don't do it to «play at the internet», they do it to live their lives, and you are ruining our lives.
Remedy: When in doubt, it is best to leave the choice to the end users, even if it means to Inform them of the reasons to be wary.
Otherwise, these days people don't even pay attention to the «***SPAM***» mention which appears randomly in email headers. I pick three at random marked this way: Les Restos du Cœur (a French charity), a monastery, and... Facebook. All three from mailists I voluntary subscribed to.
(Permalink) It is difficult to decide, so much the publishers compete to create illogical or cryptic interfaces. But my nomination goes without question to Second Life. Of all the software mentioned here, it is probably the only one to have a bug reporting system. But I gave up contributing to it a long time ago, as reports were systematically closed, often in a contemptuous manner.
(Permalink) And there is no link or information to guide us there!
Solution: click on the snowflake at bottom left, then on (approximate translation) «private life and security», then «password», then on (approximate translation) «recorded passwords».
(Permalink) This is why the viewer is slow and it crashes, while any video game runs fifty times faster. Yes, this is what makes Second Life so slow, not our hair or clothes as they pretend. The leftist alternative, Open Sims, has not been able to create its own browser, continuing to depend on this Second Life they wanted to cancel. To my knowledge, there is currently no virtual world viewer which uses the graphics card, whereas all the games do.
This is probably the main reason why Second Life is only used today for «parties», from the difficulty of really moving. Then people just park themselves on a dance floor, with no interaction other than superficial conversations.
(Permalink) It is a growing problem, especially in search engines and ISP websites: they offer, and often impose, «news» that we have not asked for, often focusing on the far right, soccer, or horrific accidents, etc. So when we use these services, we are constantly reminded of their gray and cruel «reality». It is this process which is transforming the whole Internet into a media where there will be only one voice.
A special case was images of politicians and criminals suddenly appearing on my screen. This was a «feature» of windows 10 called «My News». I had to search for a while to disable it. It is up to us to decide when we watch the news, and which news. It is not up to the media manipulators to focus our attention on evil.
(Permalink) Internet-connected refrigerators, shoes which measure our heart rate, watches with built-in food programs… so many gadgets that we shall probably laugh at in the future.
Mobile phones which also take pictures seemed more useful, but they conceal a scam: we cannot take real photos. For example, I chose a Galaxy A20, not the cheapest, but with more pixels than the entry-level model. First surprise: the photos are blurry, due to the very small size of the camera. This makes the extra resolution useless on all phones, and any extra cost a complete waste.
Second surprise: the JPEG compression destroys the details I needed. For example, blades of grass against a sky background turn blue! And therefore impossible to properly cut out. And if they are blurry on top of that...
When I asked ChatGPT for an application which would allow access to the sensor's uncompressed files, I got the final blow: these features are locked and only available on high-end models. But even then, the tiny camera remains, with its blurry images.
Conclusion: it is cheaper to buy two specialized devices: a low-end mobile phone for making calls, and a real digital camera for photography, with a proper lens which produces sharp images, a replaceable battery, a true non-destructive digital format, etc.
(Permalink) Many developers feel compelled to constantly change the user interface or features of their software. In any case, much more often than the evolution of computers or usage would require. The problem is that these changes, which are often unnecessary, confuse users, who are forced to change their habits or to relearn how to use the software. In some cases, useful features are removed or rendered unusable:
🐺In Second Life, around 2008, they removed the classified system for event announcements. As a result, the system was flooded with DJ announcements, and participation in my own events dropped to zero. This led me to abandon my paid account, like many others who organized various events. This single idiocy much contributed to the decline of Second Life.
🐱Since: windows 10, microsoft has removed the color customization, turning our screens into administrative forms.
🐼Blender, elsewhere an excellent piece of software, has changed its appearance several times, and more seriously, the division of its functions into concepts. This requires a complete relearning each time, including basic concepts which are «supposed to be known». Fortunately, they ended up making good tutorials.
🐍Opera is the ace of constant changes which destroy functionalities. This is likely what is lowering its popularity.
(Permalink) windows 11 has introduced a new feature in the ritual harassment of users: a window suddenly pops up, asking you to «finish setting up your computer», without specifying what it will do. You unclick it away, just to be safe. But it comes back, fortunately less and less often.
(Permalink) The specialist is facebook, when you select text: lots of things stick around the pointer, hiding the text to the point which we no longer know where we are. Since these widgets contain auto-completion, we sometimes end up writing the names of completely unknown users, who will wonder why we are talking about them. I sometimes receive notifications for this reason, from strangers on unknown pages. Of course, when we arrive on the page, the person has corrected their post and we cannot find who used our name.
(Permalink) This refers to the output of certain word processors when exporting to HTML (for example, LibreOffice, a free software program, otherwise a good software that I use daily):
🐌Still in HTML4!!!! Please!!!
🐙Probably even in «Internet Explorer HTML», for instance with the dreaded <br/>, which is a microsoft invention rejected by the W3C («Trailing slash on void elements has no effect and interacts badly with unquoted attribute values»).
🐌An overabundance of completely useless tags
🐫Illogical tags, such as </b><b> attached
🐭But above all, the construction is different in each paragraph, making it very difficult to arrange by script (ChatGPT can help you Pythonize a correction script in Notepad++, for the most common malformations)
🐊Open Office even has a very old bug where sometimes the bottom of a paragraph is hidden.
🐗Solution: Instead of making unnecessary changes, start by fixing these BIG bugs. Okay, you can easily see why it is such a mess: rename a .odt file to .zip and unzip it. The content is in «content.xml». You can check that if there are a thousand paragraphs with the same attributes, a thousand styles are defined! And in more each with the attributes in a different order! No effort has been made to avoid these repetitions. Yet it is a free and open-source software...
(Permalink) If you reload the page, the content changes. For example, YouTube's algorithm suggests music videos. You spot several, and you click on one. But if you don't like it and you go back to the list, the others have disappeared... The same is true on many news sites.
🐡Solution: going back to a page does not change its content. At least, not right away.
(Permalink) Common on news sites or in presentations: headlines scroll continuously, without giving us time to read them. But we still have to pay with our time to see the headline we want to reappear!
This is a rehash of the old <marquee> tag, which no self-respecting web developer dares to use anymore.
🐩Solution: the value of a website does not come from wriggling gadgets, but from its content. A list of links works much better, or thumbnails for images. Relevance does not need to be gesticulating.
(Permalink) The idea is that the various elements of a web page automatically arrange themselves to fill the window, regardless of the size and shape of the screen (square or rectangular). The technique uses HTML placement as a percentage of the screen size, and some special CSS attributes which move the elements automatically.
Is it really useful? Perhaps it was when computers already offered more than 2000 pixels in width, and cellphones only 500. At that time, my websites actually served four formats, m, a, b, f, depending on the screen size. It was responsive design before the term existed, just in PHP instead of CSS. Today, I have removed this complicated system, since all devices, mobile or fixed, offer at least 1200 pixels wide, with easy ways to adjust the scale. The only difficulty is the elongated shape of cellphone screens, but we are already seeing more logical shapes appearing.
As for moving elements around, this is only useful for a small minority of web pages, arranged in «newspaper pages», where articles can be moved without affecting the layout. But in most cases, it destroys the layout.
An example of pages in responsive design are the product list pages on amazon. This is the reason why they often open on a product, then they jump on another before we can read.
The big problem is that google is pushing hard for responsive design, to the point of giving lower rankings to sites which don't use it (this is clearly stated in their indexation reports). Why? Because responsive design allows them to cram advertising harassment between relevant content. Let us not forget that google is essentially an advertising stalker, using its position as a search engine to be able to mock at us everywhere. It is currently targeted by several antitrust lawsuits, for this reason among others.
🐥Solution: design your websites as you see fit, without google shame.
🐈Solution: use any other search engine. No one cares for the responsive design.
🐅Solution: any other search engine gives better results. Indeed, by only indexing the sites it likes, google is now among the worst, as my tests show.
(Permalink) Some designers of video system seem not to have understood what subtitles are for, and they use them as graphical effects, to the point that they often become unreadable, flashing too briefly to read them. Frequent on youtube propaganda «shorts».
Solution: a subtitle must remain visible for at least the same time as the sentence it transcribes, and in synchronism with the said sentence.
(Permalink) When we want to see the page source code, it usually is to check a detail. The easy way is to select this detail and display the source code. It then opens around the selection.
But no, no browser does that, and this has been the case ever since this feature was introduced.
(Permalink) Great for those who don't know how to open it.
(Permalink) If this happens, we are without Internet: no more friends, no more banking, no more social security, etc.
(Permalink) This is completely useless, and often frowned upon: people don't connect with strangers, either in the physical world or in the virtual world. They often take it bad, as a kind of social spam or harassment.
The specialist is undoubtedly facebook, which maintained confusion with real people asking us to be our friends. But in fact, clicking «yes» on their «friend suggestions» created our friend request, toward a stranger. Who, of course, systematically refused it, or even blocked us.
The leader was undoubtedly the not-so-greatly-missed google+, which suggested several French politicians as «friends» to me. Since I unclicked them all, google responded with a cynical «you must feel very lonely...», without giving me any way to find my real friends. Now you know why google+ had to shut down.
🐱Solution: create a real search system by theme, keyword or interest, without playing the matchmaker.
(Permalink) You might say this has nothing to do with computers. But it stems from the same principle: an obvious bug, easy to fix, but which never is, no matter how annoying it is.
(Permalink) What more annoying than having to precariously balance your coat on the sink (if there is one…) and leave your handbag dangling from the door handle, its bottom touching the dubious floor? Two coat hooks would make life so much easier…
(Permalink) Anyone who has used a TENS unit knows that the electrodes must be stuck onto protective plastic. However, these plastics always have the words «stick the electrode on this side of the plastic» written on them. Why not to make both sides identical?
(Permalink) These are sweaters with sleeves which are too long and waists which are too short, with proportions suited to a chimpanzee. A sweater for humans does not have sleeves that dip into the dishwater, and it covers the top of the pants instead of leaving the belly button in the cold.
(Permalink) These are clothes which sleeves cannot really be rolled up: no matter how many times we roll them up, they always fall back down, at a nearby constant speed. And if we do something dirty, we have to roll up our sleeves again, which means touching them with our dirty hands. This defeats the whole purpose of rolling them up.
This is how we know that our «great designers» never do the dishes. If any of them had done it even once, we would find accessories everywhere to keep our sleeves rolled up.
(Permalink) This is what makes night driving unpleasant and more dangerous. But no one seems to care...
🐈Solution: put opaque barriers on the medians. Or, for the more daring, hedges. Yes, hedges.
🐅Solution: headlights have polarizing lenses tilted at 45°, while windshields (or glasses) and rearview mirrors have polarizers tilted in the opposite direction. They do not need to be high quality, because if they were, we would not see the other cars at all. Common polarizers let a violet light filter out.
(Permalink) Besides the obvious sexism of a different system for each gender, there are many inconveniences:
🐊Handbags immobilise one hand
🐩Handbags can easily be stolen
🐠Pockets have a limited capacity
🐫Solution: A shoulder bag can carry more, with less effort, and is much harder to rip off (if the strap goes on the other side of the neck). And they carry no sexism. To do shopping, we can use a rucksack.
(Permalink) (Added February 2026) or Microsoft shoes, as manufacturers have gone to great lengths to find bizarre and illogical shapes to torture our feet:
💩The 95 sole, too rigid, which causes corns
💩The XP pointy tip, which compresses the toes, causing pain, bunions, hallux valgus and other deformities. And then they tell us that these are «illnesses» with specialist doctors and medications to treat them...
🐷The worst ones are the 8 tiles for women, which do not protect the feet from the cold and force the body into an abnormal position (and then they tell women that it is their breasts which cause back pain). We imagine the torture of having the whole body weight forcing the toes in this kind of funnel...
🐒The version 11, obsolete after two months. At least it prevents the accumulation of bad smells...
🐮Solution: Make shoes shaped like feet, which keep around the feet where it is large, instead of forcing on the toes.
(Permalink) If at least it was good music... but no, it is «music» from the television, endlessly stirring together stupidity, bad politics and emotions without object. And why all the time reminding us of the last horrible accident or the epstein affair? At a moment where we have no time for a critical perspective, so that we unconsciously accept anything.
🐭Solution: Music, informations, it is when we are available and we decided to do that. Otherwise, it is brain force-feeding, as with force-feeding geese.
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