Sigh, I really need to get my act together because almost every week I’ve said to myself, “this week will be the day I take my laptop in to get the keyboard replaced” but each week the weekend goes so fast and then I find I’m back in the office working again. At this rate it’ll be next year before I eventually get there…well ok, maybe not that far away but I really do need to get my act together.
I was so optimistic about Safari 15.4 until things started to break – I went to YouTube, searched for a video and found that none of the thumbnails were loading. I have the Adguard extension installed however I have YouTube on my ‘Trusted Websites’ so it shouldn’t have interfered with the loading of the website but I decided to uninstall it anyway. After uninstall Adguard I thought I would take it safe by also clearing all cookies and cache to ensure that I start with a clean slate. Went to YouTube, logged in and then tried to search – same thing happened again. I have also found that it keeps falling back to low quality playback even though I’ve got plenty of bandwidth (gigabit connection) and the issue doesn’t occur with Chrome. What that tells me is that the issue isn’t related to the operating system itself but instead something in Safari itself which is causing the problem.
There has been a lot happening in the world of Windows 11 (link). There is a lot of changes that are occurring ‘above the hood’ with the ‘under the hood’ pretty much at a state that the heavy lifting changes were more or less complete by the time Windows 11 was released. That probably explains why Windows 10 was such a rollercoaster in terms of reliability when compared to Windows 11 where all the changes so far has been about keeping the same ‘backend code’ but replacing the ‘classic’ UI frameworks with a single unified one, WinUI, which now forms the foundation of Windows going forward – after years of stopping and starting with various ideas it appears that MIcrosoft, with the leadership they have in place, know where they want to get to and how they’re going to get there. I think the big lesson that has been learned is not to re-invent the wheel, take what you already have and build upon it because otherwise you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt and many unhappy end users unhappy that you’ve re-written an app from the ground up but is missing features that the old version had.
Work has been chaotic all this week with people having to stay at home due to being immunocompromised along with those who have COVID but are well enough to work from home. It’ll be interesting to see what the upcoming opening of the border will result in considerable increase in infections or whether it stays on the same course. It’ll also be interesting to see whether the government will go for a 4th booster shot although strange enough they’ve got 10.72 million units of Novavax on order (link) – are they going to shift over to Novavax with a booster shot being the start of a Novavax regiment? I guess time will tell but I’m hopeful that the work being done to bring about the second generation vaccines (link) will result in decreased transmission and higher numbers of antibodies resulting in a longer period of protection. If in the long term we can get to the point that COVID vaccination becomes a once a year or once every two years regiment then that’ll go a long way to getting things back to normal – we’ll still need to be smart about protecting ourselves and others but it should result in a flattening of the curve.
When it comes to Manifest V3 the discussion regarding the WebRequest API (link) so it’ll be interesting to see whether eventually see the major parties realise the foolishness of ramming something through that will detrimentally impact millions of end users. Hopefully they can get this all sorted out by January 2023 (the date when Manifest V2 stop being distributed by the Google extensions store).
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