Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Fuck You, Safari

This is basically an addendum to my last "Little Things That Bug Me" post because I made a horrible oversight in failing to include it.

In addition to the usual instabilities and bugs (and the fact that it has just disabled Flash Player with no way to reactivate it), I've discovered a problem I find remarkably annoying: Every now and then, I'll try to open a page and Safari will pop up a box saying, essentially, "There was a problem loading new pages. You have to reload every page in every tab you currently have open." Agreeing to this results in a long annoying delay as Safari strains itself trying to reload the twenty-odd pages I had open; refusing to agree renders Safari completely nonfunctional, as attempting to load any page in any tab ever will simply result in the message reappearing.

Seriously, even Internet Exploder doesn't do that (as far as I know). Apple really sucks.

Addendum: Some research has turned up the cause of this annoyance. Apparently, it finally occurred to Apple that Safari tends to crash on ordinary web content. The masterful designers in Cupertino attempted to rectify this problem by splitting Safari into two independent processes— one to manage the application's inner workings and another to handle the web content. The "you must reload all tabs" message appears whenever the "Safari Web Content" process crashes.

So basically, Apple "fixed" the problem of Safari crashing a lot by isolating the part that crashes so that it merely gives an annoying error upon crashing rather than taking down the entire application, and saving me the trouble of having to click once to reload the program before waiting for all of my tabs to come back. Not, you know, by making it not crash simply by trying to display ordinary web content. I stand by my previous snark— somehow, Internet Exploder manages to load web pages without crashing.

At least I got Flash working again.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

I Have Outwitted Google.

I checked, and it turns out that Google simply has nothing to say (ie, it returns no search results) if I ask it something absurdly specific. I discovered this when I searched for something I always wanted to know, namely:
What is the sound of a woman in the 95th percentile for lung capacity using a vuvuzela to blow bubbles in a vat of turpentine while traveling at 25 kilometers per hour on the roof of a Ukrainian locomotive in the rain on a Tuesday?
Of course now that I made this blog post, it'll get incorporated into Google's search algorithms and start returning this post to anyone who searches that query. You know, in case anybody else has weird and very specific auditory curiosities.