Now we have no browser capable of searching in anything - not even Firefox. I routinely try, in several browser, to find a tab among open tabs, a bookmark among open bookmarks, or a history entry (both from "omnibox" and dedicated history pane), and it never seems to find it - not by name, not by URL - until it gets a 100% unique match.
It's like there's a timer or a cache somewhere, with aggressive limit, saying "only scan these top 100 results and then abort if it takes more than 10 ms to findf anything", or something. Making this completely useless.
That's on top of occasional deletion of browsing history past few weeks.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by saying "I routinely try, in several browser, to find a tab among open tabs, a bookmark among open bookmarks," but if you - like me - keep hundreds of open tabs in a couple of dozen windows and you can't find the tab you need at the moment, then you may be happy with the Firefox extension tabFx...
For things I access often, the Firefox address bar does function like a near-perfect search for me. Some things I type [ab cd] and the page with the words _starting_ ab and cd pops right up.
A while back I looked up a manual for an old Singer sewing machine, which turned out to be the model 15. So I typed [sin 15] in the address bar and -- yep, first result! A week ago I looked into the game Metroid Dread. Typed [met dre] and two relevant pages from my history came up, immediately.
I don't know what you mean by "100% unique match" but, this feature works for me, and in fact I regularly use it and find it very worthwhile.
Maybe stop using the mickey mouse browsers? I mean Firefox is pretty much a lost cause.. unless you start using extensions. I agree those are basic features that should be built-in. In qutebrowser I use them reliably all the time. E.g press T (keybinding for :tab-focus command) - type keyword (matches against tab ID, page title, page URL & the tab's process ID) - press Tab - menu is populated with results - cycle through them using Tab/Shift+Tab - press Enter to jump to it. Similar workflow for history, different bookmark types, etc. History can also be loaded as an HTML page and jumped through with regex, etc. If you want to stick with
Yes. Try it regularly, against inputs I know correspond to things visited or bookmarked within last couple months. Almost never gives the actual result unless it's literal full-string match. That's why I'm complaining.
Not sure if the same product. I think the one I used was Google Desktop.
I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.
I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.
It was so much faster you could not believe it. It was a revelation and even though "degoogling" was already a thing, Chrome was so much better than the rest that you just had to use it. Tabs actually worked without crashing your PC.
The risks were clear from day one but Google and Chrome were great to both users and devs, and it stayed like that for a long time.
When chrome was literally first released it was in fact faster than IE and Firefox, by quite a lot, and had some nice features that neither had, too. But that gap didn't last for long.
Main caveat is that ZKPs are probabilistic. The protocol (number of rounds etc) determines how sure, e.g. 99.9%. But never 100%.
Second caveat: tech- and crypto-bros play fast and loose with the term "ZKP", either because they don't know any better (marketing) or they straight up lie. Whether any application you run actually uses ZKP (or any other cryptography scheme) is unknown unless you have the source code.
I disagree. First we got everything as HTML/Electron apps, now the trend is everything as TUIs. Cross-platform, better, but still worse somehow.
What falls to the wayside are the actual and real productivity and usability improvements afforded by "real" GUI apps over the last 40-50 years.
Don't get me wrong I'm a huge terminal user and absolutely love the clarity of a terminal and flexibility of a shell. But if I have to "learn" to use a TUI app - and they're not as simple to use as their authors might believe - I might as well learn to use the full GUI app with all the niceties available because of it.
It was so close! I could already see the end of all the predatory publishing and flourishing of open-access. Some even required by law. Knowledge was finally going to be free.
But no, it will presumably get much worse as LLMs are inserted into this equation as yet another and new gatekeeper.
(Disclaimer: I have publications with ACM, non open-access. And ACM wasn't even too bad, it's the others that give me pause.)
Nobody seems to remember it, even though it was a headline feature. Was removed in 2013, I think due to technical constraints.
Will definitely try this.
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