Wait until they discover that Windows Server 2022 exists. Also, Windows 2000.

Ah, I see. That makes sense. One of the perks at my workplace is reimbursement for TurboTax purchases, so luckily that’s not an issue for me.

Similarly, GDPR is referred to as DSGVO in Germany, based on the German name of the legislation. Same legislation, just a different name in one country because they didn’t want to use an English acronym.

What’s the advantage of the desktop version? I switched to the web version years ago and it seems to handle everything just as well.

For your third point, it’s way easier to cross-compile for a Linux target on Windows than the other way around, as you can just run the compiler in Docker or WSL, which is even easier now that Visual Studio has native Docker and WSL support. WSL is pretty good.

It was a huge hit.

It had 200 million monthly active users at peak, which is a decent number but still smaller than every other major social network. I don’t think that’s entirely due to monetization. I think one of the factors is that a lot of people still had small data caps at the time it initially launched (2013), which is not really conducive to spontaneously consuming and uploading video from mobile phones.

Do websites count? Vine fizzled out but it would have been a huge success with today’s TikTok crowd.

I definitely don’t miss having to install codec packs.

VLC does use ffmpeg (or more specifically, libavcodec) for some of its codecs, but it uses a bunch of other libraries as well, including VLC specific ones.

Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today

This is the case for a lot of software, and it drives me crazy. We used to have slow, relatively unreliable hard drives, single core processors, and significantly slower RAM, and yet some things feel slower today than they did 20 years ago. Try Windows 98 on an old PC (or a VM with a single throttled core) and compare it to any modern Windows OS. Try Visual Basic 6 and compare the startup and build speeds to any modern IDE.

It feels like some software has been getting slower more quickly than hardware has been getting faster…

Opera also invented full page zooming. Originally, browser zoom would only increase text size - everything else (including images, the actual page layout, etc) would remain the same size. Opera was the first browser to instead zoom into the entire page.

It also had a lot of features that either require extensions or don’t even exist these days. Things like being able to disable JavaScript or change the User-agent per-site, basic content blocking before ad blockers existed (like modern-day ad blockers but you’d manually build your own list of things to block by going into content blocking mode and clicking on them), an option to only show cached images (useful on slow dial up connections), a fully customizable UI (literally every toolbar, button, and status bar segment could be moved around), and many more.

It was truly a web browser for the future, far far ahead of its time. I miss those days.

IMO there’s still nothing that’s quite as good as Flash. Efficient vector animations that perform consistently across all major browsers are still unusually hard for non-developers. There are some solutions, but they usually aren’t as designer or animator-friendly and require a huge JavaScript library to be loaded. The barrier to entry for non-developers (or inexperienced developers) creating games that run well cross-browser is still quite high too.

I remember creating a Flash-based chat system back in the day. Before WebSockets and Server Sent Events, Flash was the only way to get bidirectional sockets in a web browser, other than Java applets of course (which were pretty locked down by that point).

I remember using an app called Kai’s Power Goo, which is assume is made by the same person.