JorgeA

I recently installed IE11 on a laptop, and noticed that the 3D button on the scrollbar is now flat and hard to find. I posted in the "Deeper Impressions" thread about finding a Technet discussion of how to make the scrollbar button easier to see, but I haven't come across anything anywhere that would bring back the 3D aspect of it. Does anybody know a way to restore the 3D scrollbar button to IE10 or 11? Supposing that (for example) the Classic Shell folks wanted to do that, is it even possible? --JorgeA

Yeah, that was kind of a silly title, wasn't it? Meanwhile, back on the dumbification front, I just discovered this thread from Technet where people are complaining about the scrollbar button disappearing into almost nothingness in IE10. I came across it while searching to see if there was a way to bring back the 3D scrollbar button in IE11, which I recently installed on a laptop. (IE10 wasn't any better in that respect.) It's so faint, you can hardly tell it's there. Can somebody explain to me how this constitutes an improvement in usability? I did apply the CSS idea mentioned towards the end of the thread. The black scrollbar button I came up with is definitely easier to locate on the screen than the dim gray default one, but it's still a boring solid black rectangle. Selected comments from the Technet thread: . --JorgeA

The spirit of Metro lives on: First it was Firefox, now it's Chrome and even the search engine DuckDuckGo that are looking at dumbing down their user interfaces, giving less information and making things harder to use: Google Chrome flirts with killing URLs DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you, finally challenges Google Note in the image below how the new version (on the left) gives you only the domain name rather than a fuller URL for each specific result. This could be a bear if you're looking at multiple results from the same site. For the fuller URL now you will have to hover over each item individually. What a time-waster. Oh, and the page titles are no longer in a distinctive blue, making it easier to tell apart from the rest of the text. Everything blends together and you can't tell what's what with a simple glance. Image search is also less informative and useful. Until now, if you over over an image result, it has given you the site where the image is located. In the new version of DuckDuckGo (to be fair, still a work in progress), it merely gives you the pixel dimensions.

<raising hand> I have two lightly used Vista installations where IE7 rules. One of them (a laptop) had gone as far as IE8, but the HDD died (the computer was so secondary that it wasn't worth having a backup) and when I put in a new HDD and reinstalled from the recovery disks, I left IE7 untouched. I actually prefer the look of IE7 even to that of IE8. In IE8 you can already see how Microsoft was messing with the interface, in this case getting rid of some of the visual contrast or 3D/convex effects up in the toolbar region. With IE9 this region became completely flat and featureless, and the horizontal borders between levels of toolbars (I'm not sure of the nomenclature here) were removed altogether. --JorgeA

Thanks for the scoop Flasche, that does sound promising. Wonder why the requirement to create the account on a mobile device first. Let us know how you make out with Shazzlemail. Anything that might protect users from the snoops (official and unofficfial) is welcome and topical on this thread. --JorgeA

Thanks, I may try that. I remember looking at WOT some years back and wondering how accurate the ratings are. The concern was that websites could be unfairly boosted (or maligned) by campaigns to give them good (or bad) ratings unrelated to how safe they actually are. Maybe that concern has been addressed since then. --JorgeA

I've been a fan of Norton/Symantec products from way back when Peter Norton published his guide to MS-DOS, which was my computer "bible" at the time. When he/they came out with Norton Antivirus, I signed up at once. (When I heard about it, anyway.) I stuck with them through the difficult years when NAV became a resource hog, but hung on as SystemWorks was a useful PC housekeeping suite. (I neither knew nor trusted any other AV vendors during my personal "PC dark ages.") Today's Norton Internet Security is once again light on resources. However, as of late I fear that they've been losing the thread: first they Metrofied the UI into big hideous blocks. Then they changed the password manager so that it stores your critical info in the cloud instead of locally, as it used to. And they seem to be completely impervious to their customers' repeated pleas to bring back the lost features. Even Norton 360 itself, the most complete suite, in the name of simplicity has actually become harder to use, for example by hiding scan results and by breaking up tasks that you used to be able to run together. It used to be I could tell N360 to run a custom set of tasks that included a full system AV scan and in the same session pick and choose maintenance functions such as cleaning up temporary files, defragging, and such; but any more you can only select either all tasks or else you have to do them in two separate sessions (AV and then maintenance separately). Moreover, they refuse to support alternative browsers such as Pale Moon. I used to think that Norton simply failed to provide a working "safe browsing" add-on (you know, the feature that gives you green check marks or red X's next to search-engine results), but I just discovered that the actual protection module, Vulnerability Protection, doesn't even show up among the add-ons in Pale Moon -- which leads me to suspect that I'm completely unprotected by Norton if I browse the Web with Pale Moon. To top it all off, in the most recent sets of AV comparative tests, Symantec has refused to participate. They claim it's because they disagree with the testing methodology, but I am not convinced. So I can easily see myself jumping ship. <sigh> --JorgeA

Thanks very much, xper! MUCH better now. --JorgeA

You KNOW that the NSA surveillance situation is bad when even the principal author of the Patriot Act thinks it's too much -- House to Advance Bill to End Mass NSA Surveillance Glad to see he's doing this. But politicians of all stripes (and the voters who put them into office) need to realize that governments will take the law -- any law -- as written, and bend and stretch the meaning of it as far as possible to rationalize increased power. --JorgeA

I've seen something like that (maybe even in this thread?). Love it! --JorgeA

--JorgeA

I seem to recall an exchange at some point in the same thread that @Tripredacus quoted, where @CharlotteTheHarlot and I went back and forth embedding quotes within quotes to "test" how far one could go doing that. IIRC we went several layers deep and stopped before reaching whatever the limit might have been. But definitely the limit is now 0, as @bphlpt points out. This hampers discussion, as the context of what one's commenting on is lost. It's an issue especially in active threads where there is more than one theme or topic going on concurrently. --JorgeA

I guess that helps to explain why Norton and so many other AV vendors have been branching out into other services like cloud storage and PC maintenance. --JorgeA

OK, so I'm not the only one. That's a relief, in a way. --JorgeA

The Free Software Foundation declares: Microsoft's Software is Malware Now I don't like a lot of the things Microsoft has done or is doing, but this may be taking things a bit too far. What do you think? One of the links there takes us to another site where the writer asserts that NSA has enjoyed special access to every version of Windows "except early versions of Windows 95 (and its predecessors)." Looks like @Charlotte, who recommends hanging on to your Windows 98 systems, will have to step even further back for better assurance. --JorgeA EDIT: typo

Microsoft Explains Logic Behind Patching Windows XP After Retirement --JorgeA

I fear that you are right on this one and Mozilla won't back off its decision. I wonder for how long the Pale Moon folks can carry on with the distinctive FF interface without having to go through a lot of contortions to keep it that way as new versions of FF with the wrecked UI come out. BTW, have you noticed that embedded quotes aren't showing up when you quote somebody else's post? The same thing happened to me when I was preparing my reply to jaclaz three posts upthread (#5548). --JorgeA

Check out, too, the comments on the FF feedback page. Here's a small selection: . . . . . And finally, here's an articulate supporter of the new Firefox: --JorgeA

On that we definitely agree. To use another metaphor, there are bigger fish to fry. --JorgeA

Dedoimedo reproduced a Mozilla daily tracking chart of user sentiment about Firefox 29. As of this writing, percentages seem to be running on the order of 85% against, 15% for. He also reports that downloads of the FF add-on to bring back the previous UI have skyrocketed. If more such alternatives crop up, maybe we can open a "bring back the classic FF interface" thread... It'll be interesting to see if the Mozilla folks will be more responsive, as responsive, or even less responsive than the Microsoft folks were in view of the public reaction to their brilliant changes. . As a member of the techerati, surely Igor must know about Pale Moon and the other FF derivatives out there? --JorgeA EDIT: improved wording

So, where are all the countless XP exploits that insiders and experts told us were getting stockpiled by the bad guys for release on April 9 ? --JorgeA

Cool, thanks! I checked out their web page but didn't find many specifics there. You said that you run it without any add-ons. Does Comodo Dragon have built-in features that tell you whether a site from (say) a Google search result is known to harbor malware? I assume that, independently of this, you run AV software to protect against attacks that do strike as you're surfing the Web. --JorgeA

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the judge has interepreted the law correctly. If and as more countries adopt this principle, then critics under an authoritarian government that is not brazenly repressive but still maintains a "rule of law" veneer, will have to make sure that the incriminating documents about the prime minister get stored in an overseas server owned by a foreign company with no local physical presence: after a court ruling such as this one, an overseas server owned by a local company won't suffice any more. Just one more door shut against the possibility of opposition to tyranny. Make it harder to expose government wrongdoing, and easier to lawfully suppress the critics without actually having to bash heads. Next door to shut will be to prohibit storing your stuff with foreign tech companies, uner the same "law and order", "we need access" type of logic. For all I know about international law, that may already be an accepted legal principle worldwide and this particular die is already weighted against critics everywhere. --JorgeA

Friday's Wall Street Journal carried an informative piece on the "cat-and-mouse" game between critics and government in Turkey: Turkey's Erdogan: One of the World's Most Determined Internet Censors Too much good stuff to quote here, but some of the best parts are in the second half of the article. --JorgeA

Comment by Obi-Wan Kenobi (may The Force be with him): Other: Pretty harsh things being said in the comments section! And well deserved. --JorgeA