arantius

I use wolphin. Biggest thing for me is the seeking. I press < or > and it seeks, now. Default Android Jellyfin client seeking is really unpleasant. Some other smaller niceties, too.

This is just language being language. Humans are lazy, and over-abbreviate and over-shorten. "United States of America" is long. There are a few ways to shorten that, and they're all used.

No one will ever see this (probably) but I remembered this comment, and just had this experience:

I've been learning the eBay developer APIs. Recently (i.e. within the past few hours) I looked up the "Browse API" specifically. My first or second try failed so I typed just [ebay brows] and didn't find it! But when I finished [ebay browse] that document (within ebay.com and titled "Browse API | eBay Develo...") did show up!

I can't reproduce now so I can only guess but it's possible this was a timing thing. I was typing several things, and changing/re-typing "as soon as" I did or did not see what I wanted to show up. But there was definitely a moment where I'd expect "that page I just had open an hour ago" to be at the top, but instead search suggestions (ugh, search in the address bar ...) were all that was showing.

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.

I guess they've never heard of select-and-drag? Which isn't universal, but is common. And should be universal. I use it frequently. So many one-time-password forms break it in various ways, like wanting the value to go into six separate input boxes (why is this so common!?).

This is a fantastic claim. I've been making web pages since the '90s and using web browsers just as long, and I can't think of a single instance of this. Perhaps it existed and I never knew about it? Can you provide some evidence for where and when this was the case?

I've thought a little bit about this, and I agree that always on is a big part of the problem. I think if I were the time lord, I'd aim for crippling wireless computer networking. I think I want everything we have computing and internet wise, if it's not available wirelessly, and thus always.

I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:

* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around. * Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.) * I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.

The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".

What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)

Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.

IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.

For one piece of anecdata:

I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.

They're not all awful?

IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.