Winaero

I'm complaining about aesthetics, ultimately.

I'm not talking about 'Flip 3D'. That was silly eye candy and served no functional purpose.

The stock Windows 10 ALT-TAB behavior presents gigantic thumbnails of the open windows. You can hold ALT and press the arrows to move focus between them. With the number of applications I usually have open it's very cumbersome. The thumbnails are gigantic, do not have a consistent aspect ratio, and do not necessarily look consistent (as they change depending on what's going on inside the app). Example: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/img_5d2fb024e91ee.png

Windows 7 presented thumbnails for the open programs with a consistent aspect ratio and at a manageable size. Example: https://www.online-tech-tips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/alt-tab-windows-7.jpg.optimal.jpg

There was also an option to display the open programs as icons: https://www.online-tech-tips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/windows-7-alt-tab.jpg.optimal.jpg

Both of these allowed you to use the arrow keys to move and were less visually jarring than the new Windows 10 ALT-TAB.

You can configure Windows 10 to use the icon-style "classic" ALT-TAB, but the arrow keys don't work to move between programs: https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/windows-10-classic-alt-tab.png

I could probably get used to the ugly stock Windows 10-style ALT-TAB. I found I was much slower than with Windows 7, but I'll probably get faster with time. It would be nice…

> The thing that annoys me most on Windows is Windows itself. After using Linuxes for almost two decades now, the notion of the OS taking tens of minutes to self update when all I wanted was to quickly reboot it is unbearable.

This is definitely a problem especially considering that the shotgun approach to some Windows updates actually hurt the performance of some machines, even breaking Windows on occasion [0]. However, in fairness I would say that I've spent just as much or more time fixing rolling release issues on Arch/Manjaro, or troubleshooting the package stopping me from sudo apt upgrade. The worst experience for me was having to reformat after the update from Ubuntu 14.04 crashed.

What annoys me most about Microsoft's overarching paternalistic philosophy is is how creepy their telemetry initiatives are. Granted plenty of companies do this now, for the same profit-driven motivations, but Microsoft goes above and beyond in terms of disabling or even ignoring opt out options [1]. I've found the Winaero blog [2] to be a good source of tools to stop some of the Windows telemetry shenanigans.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/05/19/microsoft-admits-updates-are-freezing-windows-10-computers-again/

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/a4lpg0/windows_10_still_collecting_activity_history/

[2]: https://winaero.com/

I am very happy to have shared my thoughts here (and received good feedback and suggestions!), but the best is that it finally made me look into this need - and I am not the first (big surprise :-)

It turns out that just very recently exactly what I need was made possible in Chrome (currently only "experimental") just set this flag [1]. I especially like that it's possible without the need of third party SW.

This page [2] is what alerted my attention to the solution.

NB.: It does make me wonder why this feature have not existed until now as it seems so obvious, I mean ever since the introduction of the TABbed interface in browsers (which started pre 2000 IIRC) the (over-) usage pattern of tabs existed.

Anyway - even if I have missed something pre-existing I am now extremely happy to be able to name my TABS in Chrome!

[1] chrome://flags/#window-naming

[2] https://winaero.com/how-to-name-a-window-in-google-chrome/

You forgot to mention that Mozilla can now remotely target and run code on Firefox browsers (SHIELD Studies in Firefox - https://winaero.com/disable-shield-studies-firefox/ , Mozilla ships Cliqz experiment in Germany for ~1% of new installs, collects surf data, including URLs - https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74n0b2/mozilla_ships_cliqz_experiment_in_germany_for_1/ ) and that it has now started to bundle adware in Firefox ( Firefox’s address bar has ads now - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22715179/firefox-suggest-search-ads-browser ).

(You are not alone in believing that the current Mozilla Corp. leadership are incompetent to uphold the original ethos of Mozilla, and worse, are selfishly prioritising their relationship with BigTech than their users).

I know it's a third party tool so it is not going to be as good as having the settings you want as a default but Winaero Tweaker can address a majority of these issues for you.

https://winaero.com/

2 clicks and a reboot to disable all telemetry, disabling windows update so that it must be run manually, and there are a few tweaks to windows explorer that will return some of the function that used to come in Windows 7.

If you include running some of the default Windows App uninstaller scripts you can purge a good chunk of the bloat out of Windows 10 and feel a little better about having the security patches that Windows 10 has above Windows 7.

Everyone can do whatever they want in their own editor. My personal peeve is being subjected to ligature'd fonts in code examples in programming blogs. I find it particularly egregious when the blog is explaining a new language or syntax to an ostensible beginner.

Fortunately Firefox still supports user styles. Here's how to stop the madness for anyone that cares. https://winaero.com/enable-loading-userchrome-css-usercontent-css-firefox/

Inside my userContent.css I've got this gem.

*
{ font-variant-ligatures: none !important; }