82: Browsing, Collecting and Sharing

Following last week’s vaguely Viz-themed missive on Tabs, we’ll expand a bit on the organization of browser tabs.

Edging ahead

Microsoft decided to sunset the ageing Internet Explorer browser with a new one for Windows 10, built on more modern core technologies and codenamed “Project Spartan(when naming things after Halo characters was all the rage). This new “Edge” browser had some very nice functionality ideas, and the hope was that it would usher in a new era of performance, stability and security, at least compared to IE. In truth, it was slow, resource intensive and a bit flaky. Not all websites worked with it either, since developers would test their sites with browser versions which people actually used already.

A few years later, when Microsoft decided to ditch its in-house rendering engine efforts and move Edge onto the same core as Chrome, that meant that Edge could be every bit as compatible as Chrome but potentially differentiate with features the Google browser didn’t offer. Edge has arguably better tab arrangement and privacy controls, but Chrome has 10x the user base: let’s not get bogged down with which is better and why. There are plenty articles out there to offer their opinions.

Collections

One of those spangly new features that was part of the pre-Chromium Edge was the ability to “set aside” tabs; a step up from adding that site to Favo(u)rites, where you’d see a thumbnail of the tab when viewing the ones you’d decided to come back to later. This still sits, 7 years later, with a variety of other pretty neat features (like annotations) which have yet to make it across to the new Chromium version, or at least not to the same fidelity.

The nearest Edge/Chromium has to this tab set-aside feature is Collections.

You may see the icon of a Plus sign on your browser toolbar; if not, delve into Settings or possibly even look under More tools to either access it or pin it to the toolbar by right-clicking on the menu option.

Collections let you group sites/tabs together by topic, add notes to individual tiles or the whole collection, and they sync across multiple PCs using your Microsoft Account or work/school account (aka Entra ID). They even sync to the mobile versions of Edge for iOS and Android, if you’re committed enough to be using that too.

As well as providing a nice way of grouping sites and giving you pinned notes to serve as a personal aide-mémoire, Collections lets you quickly open the tabs in one action, so if you like to keep together several property searches, financial reports, product research pages etc, then it’s easy. You can share the tabs (including your notes) by copying them all to the clipboard as text and links, ready for sending on.

Working together

So far, we have Tab Groups that can be named and more-or-less persisted; there’s Collections which does much the same thing but with a bit more organisation. Collections is specific to Edge, whereas Tab Groups kind-of comes with the Chromium package so is common with other browsers too.

Now, the latest Edge-specific way of grouping tabs is Workspaces.  

The idea here is to group tabs that you’re using or working with, and share them with other people – again, using Microsoft Account or work/school ID, so they can collaborate too. Like Collections, Workspaces will sync across different PCs using the same login, but they are not yet supported on mobile versions of Edge.

In practice, when you click a Workspace to open it up, a new browser window will appear with all the tabs open. Any changes you make – adding new tabs, moving to a different part of the site,  closing a tab altogether – will be saved and reflected to everyone else also using the Workspace.

You do need to be mindful when using Workspaces that everything is shared, so don’t go opening tabs in that window which you don’t want other people to see. Also, when finished, close the whole Workspace window rather than closing each tab, otherwise you’ll remove the tabs for everyone else too. It’s worth having a play to see how useful this might be in sharing stuff between your family or your co-workers.

Alas, like everything else in the split-brain-identity Microsoft has with it’s MSA and Entra IDs, if you choose to invite someone’s Entra/work/school account ID, they must be in the same tenant as you. The UI will let you invite externals but when they click the link to join, they just get an unhelpful error message.

Plus ça change, Microsoft?

81: Mind your Tabs

This week we’re talking about Tabs, as in browser tabs, rather than any other kind.

Most people are familiar with the idea of having multiple tabs open in their browser – how many could be a sign of a tidy mind or otherwise (tl;dr – most people have 1-3 windows open with 5-10 tabs in each, so typically anything up to 30 open at once) – and any modern browser has added a load of functionality to make it easier to manage lots of tabs.

Having many open tabs does have an impact on the performance of your computer, as there’s additional stuff for the browser to manage, though Edge has a “Sleeping Tabs” feature (Chrome’s version is “Inactive Tabs”), which puts them into a kind of stasis if not used for a while. Look in the Edge Task Manager if you want to see just how much memory and CPU each tab is taking up…

In principal, there’s no limit on how many tabs you can have other than the resources of the machine itself – some people reportedly have used 1,000 tabs or more, at which point you have to wonder what their mailbox must be like.

One handy tip for Edge and/or Chrome is that you can search open (and recently closed) tabs – press CTRL+SHIFT+A and you can jump to or reopen a tab easily.

Arrangements

One of the simplest and most effective things you can do to deal with many tabs is to display them vertically, especially if you a nice big, wide screen. The vertical tabs pane can be pinned so you can see the page title (and can be resized by dragging the edge right or left), or you can let it collapse back and just see the icons for each site. Hover over any of them and the whole list will reappear.

Enable vertical tabs from the settings or by clicking on the Tab Actions menu on the top left of the Edge window (if you’re in horizontal tab mode). The same menu icon moves down a little, to the very top of the vertical tabs list when that view is enabled.

Surprisingly, Chrome doesn’t offer the ability to arrange tabs vertically without installing 3rd party addons.

Grouping

It might help to organise your tabs if you put them into groups, that can be quickly expanded and collapsed or moved around; select whichever ones you want by holding the CTRL key down while clicking on them, and then right-click to add them to a new group. Or drag and drop the tabs into an existing group.
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Edge has a neat “Organis|ze tabs” feature which will suggest how to group open tabs together – it’s accessed from the Tab actions menu.

Run the organise tabs option and it will suggest groupings for you based on the titles of each open tab. Click on the pencil icon to the right of each to change its colour and name, and after applying the grouping you can move things around as you like.

Grouping tabs makes it easier to close them all at once, or to move them between browser windows in one block.

Microsoft has had a few goes at building functionality which lets you persist groups of tabs better, arranged into Collections or Workspaces: that’s fodder for another tip.

#77: Should you eat that Cookie?

a young man with a quizzical expression on his face is holding a cookie in his hand. He has a though

As Sesame Street moves to Netflix, we might be reminded that cookies are often ravenously delicious even if you’re left counting the empty calories.

Web users might be familiar with a different kind of cookie, signified less like a tasty snack and more an annoying pop-up. Non-Californian American browsers might be less susceptible to this kind of nonsense, but European users have – in the name of “privacy” – been compelled to deal with prompts before they can see a site they’ve clicked on. Like just about any T&Cs or software licensing EULAs, most people just want to get rid of the prompt as quickly as possible so might be drawn to the most-prominent “Accept” button.

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It can be pretty eye-opening if you do pay attention – many sites potentially share the way you browse with thousands of third parties. Dive into the more advanced settings on each of the se prompts and you might be able to enable and disable individual “partners” or tweak exactly which kind of information is being tracked. But who’s got time for that?

Mmmmm. Cookies.

Back in the mid 1990s, when the web was taking shape, telecoms company MCI was developing an early e-commerce application with Netscape, but didn’t want their web server to have to track every stage of incomplete transactions. So, the developers took an idea that had been previously used, called a “magic cookie”, as a way of temporarily storing a block of data on the user’s computer. Thus, the HTTP Cookie, aka web cookie and so on, became a standard in 1997.

In general, cookies are supposed to make browsing the web more seamless – when you go to a website, a cookie from a previous visit could be used to continue a previous process or remember some preference you had – like how many items you want in a list or how to sort it – without needing to log in.

But cookies give website developers a raft of ways to silently track users, while also opening the door to all kinds of nefarious behaviours either on behalf of the site owners or unknown 3rd party players.

Look in your browser settings and you’ll see various ways where you can control the usage of cookies, and see what sites have put on your machine…

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Visiting a single site, you can see what cookies are in use, and individually inspect, disable or delete them.

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Using addins to stop foul play

Even if you are a trusting soul, it makes sense to use some common addins to limit what 3rd parties can see and know about you while browsing the web. Popular tools that might reduce tracking, cookies and block ads include Privacy Badger, I Don’t Care About Cookies, uBlock Origin and many more.

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Most of these kind of tools will give you the option to “whitelist” a website, in case turning off all its tracking and cookies actually breaks the site, so there’s little risk in using the well-known ones. Be very careful of any unsolicited add-ons trying to install themselves via popups or any other means.

Check out the EFF’s “Cover Your Tracks” page as well – it gives you a report on how well tied down (through addins or configuration) your browser really is.

Should you Accept, or Reject All?

Most of the time, the options are straightforward, even if the Accept button is more prominent; many sites will let you Reject cookies and will still work more-or-less intact. There are both temporary cookies that only live as long as your session, and persistent ones which stay on your computer so you can be identified next time you show up. There are a few different types typically used:

· Functional – these are used to track things like your basic preferences on the site, what country you are in and so on. There should be nothing to fear here but if you use an addin or a browser setting to completely block cookies, the site might just not work.

· Performance or analytical – these track how you use the website, and are generally anonymised so just provide the site owner with a way of improving their service.

· Advertising – usually a mix of 3rd party sites which track what you do, across different sites. That’s why if you’re shopping for something one minute, you start to see adverts for the same kind of thing on different websites. Do you want to have your browsing patterns exposed to potentially thousands of advertisers so they can foist more stuff at you?

You could try disabling third-party cookies as one way of avoiding advert spam.

In Google Chrome:

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In Microsoft Edge:

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There is a school of thought which says you’d be better off rejecting as much as you can when asked for what to allow, in conjunction with anti-tracking and ad-blocking addins. Some sites will still make you jump through multiple hoops to individually disable lots of options to effectively “Reject All”.

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Some sites just won’t let you get by without either Accepting everything or by paying for a subscription; your choices then are to accept their meddling oversight, pay their toll, or just don’t look at their pages.

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#75: Mind your P@assw0rds

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Be honest: when you sign up for some website, do you just use the same email address / password? If so, you’re not alone – around three-quarters of people reuse the same passwords, even though most know they really shouldn’t.

A CyberNews study of over 19 billion exposed passwords shows that many are weak and easy to guess, too – the most popular passwords for the last 15 years are, basically, “123456” and “password”. Some of the more high-profile security breaches have come about directly because of weak and compromised credentials.

ToW has talked about passwords a bit in the distant past – #620, #656 in the old days, and most recently, #33 – Securing your Microsoft Account (MSA). If you haven’t done so already, go right now to that last link and set up Multifactor Autthentication (MFA) on your Microsoft Account.

Authenticator being Edged out

Like Google Chrome, Firefox and pretty much every modern browser, Microsoft’s Edge can offer to generate nice complex passwords for you. It also has a password store which can automatically fill your usernames & passwords next time you revisit websites, so you don’t need to remember them or write them down, and synchronise them between different devices logged in with the same ID.

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In shock news bordering on marginal enshittification, Microsoft has decided to remove a useful component of the Authenticator app that it prefers to use for managing 2FA/MFA on its various types of logins.

Thus far, if you have Authenticator set up with your Microsoft Account or an Entra ID, you can sync your passwords from the PC and be able to review them in the app, just as you would by going to Settings / Passwords options in the desktop Edge browser (or entering edge://wallet/passwords into the address bar).

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This means that it can be handy to find a username/password when you’re mobile, in case you need to enter it manually, but also it allows Authenticator to provide an “autofill service” for other apps on your device, not just web pages. When you get unceremoniously signed out of an app just because it’s been automatically updated, the autofill service can recover and re-enter your username and password.

It’s this bit that is being yanked from Authenticator – for reasons unknown, other than “Microsoft is streamlining autofill”. Maybe nobody uses it? Maybe Microsoft would prefer anyone who does use Edge on their PC and who wants to access passwords while mobile, to be compelled to use Edge on their Phone also?

Similarly, Payment info that is synced from browser to Authenticator will be removed in July 2025.

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The workaround (other than moving to a completely different password management system) is indeed to switch autofill provider on your phone to use Edge instead (having first installed it and synced it with your ID, if you haven’t already). In mitigation, the mobile versions of the browser are pretty good, and if you do use Edge on the PC or Mac, it makes sense to sync stuff across to your phone as well.

The password autofill is pretty much indistinguishable when using Edge in place of Authenticator. The UX for password management, however, isn’t so good (go into mobile Edge, Settings, and look for Passwords) but maybe that’s the price of progress?

#72: Sending pages from your pocket

Browsing on mobile devices is the main way people use the web. As mentioned in ToW #62, the last decade has seen a complete shift from PC & Mac being used for nearly 70% of web traffic to the dominant platforms being Android and iOS.

One nuance the stats don’t take into account, though, is that most of the 30% who’re still on Windows & OS X will also be browsing on whatever phone they have. It’s not uncommon to see people sitting in front of a desktop or laptop, while using their phone for other things – be that reading stuff in a mobile web browser or using a dedicated app.

Sharing is Caring

One feature common to all the main mobile browsers and their desktop equivalents is the ability to send pages (or tabs) from one to the other, assuming you’re signed in on both using the same account. While the meedja appears to work on the assumption that everyone+dog has an iPhone, around 2/3 of mobile browsing is done with Google Chrome and variants, and over 70% of the browsing devices are running Android.

For those reasons, we’re going to use Android and Windows as the use case for this week’s tip, but the same things can also be done on Mac + iOS. Probably.

Mobile apps -> desktop

If you’re sitting on the sofa flicking through stuff, there will be times where it’s easier to look at the content on a bigger screen. Sure, you might be able mirror the device on the big TV, but who ever does that?

Let’s say you’re browsing an eBay listing and want to send it to your laptop so you can see the pictures better. One option is to try using Google’s Quick Share to send something straight from a phone app to the PC, once you’ve set up the software and signed in.  Mac users need to jump through some additional non-official hoops.

Quick Share is the new name for “Nearby Share” –  start by clicking the sharing icon on the top of the eBay app (or from whatever app you’re looking to share something).

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How the app behaves will differ from one to another; in the case of the eBay app, it will offer to send a link to this listing to some other app on the device, including the ability to share it elsewhere.

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The list of apps (and contacts) will vary depending on usage. If you have Microsoft’s Phone Link already set up between your phone and PC, you can just fire it to your PC using the Send to PC command, and it will open a new browser page right away. If using Quick Share, you’ll get a prompt to open it.

Mobile browser -> desktop

Another more general and consistent use case is when you’re on the phone using a web browser rather than an app. Clicking the Share icon in Chrome will let you copy the link to the phone’s clipboard or send it to a variety of other contacts or apps (just as in the previous eBay app example), or “Send to devices”: in this case, any other device where you’re also logged in to Chrome with the same Google ID. You could also screen grab the page or generate a QR code, so if you want to share the link with someone nearby, you can do that more easily than faffing about with Bluetooth.

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After tapping this option and choosing the relevant PC, you’ll see a notification show up in Chrome.

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You’ll also see “Your devices” if you expand Chrome’s History either in the menu or by pressing CTRL+H…

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From Edge to Edge

Some small proportion of Microsoft fans might be running the mobile Edge browser on their Android or even iOS phones. It’s a surprisingly good mobile browsing experience with built-in ad blocker, password saving integration with Microsoft Authenticator and an inevitable smatter of Copilotry.

Edge Mobile was built on the Chromium browser engine and released a year before the main desktop Edge was ported to Chromium too. As a result, many features in Google Chrome are also carried over (since it, unsurprisingly, is also based on Chromium), except that you’d be running Edge on your mobile device and signing into Edge on your PC or Mac using a Microsoft Account.

Similar to how Chrome does it, Edge will also let you send links to your PC or Mac – the quickest way is to go to the “hamburger” 3-line menu in the bottom right, and choose “Send to devices” to get a list of potential target computers. The menu that appears on the mobile browser may be several pages wide; swipe left and right to see the others and press and hold anywhere on the menu to edit it, allowing you to reorder the icons or hide/show them.

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Just as Chrome behaves, having sent the link to one or multiple PCs, a notification will appear in desktop Edge inviting you to open it…

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… and if you have the browser on PC and phone both set up to sync with your Microsoft Account, you’ll also see previous pages browsed on the phone by looking in the History page (CTRL+H) in Edge on the PC, which makes it easy to go back to pages you had previously viewed on the phone without needing to deliberately send them across.

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#62: Will the web become exclusively mobile?

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Looking back over the last 50 years of technology progress, the internet must surely be the most significant change enabler. When the developing ARPANet adopted TCP/IP in January 1983, the ‘net as we know it started to really take shape. TimBL wrote up an idea of how to connect pages of info together, and within a few years the Worldwide Web started on one of Mr Jobs’ NeXT machines.

As the web evolved to become more consumer-centric and people got PCs in their home which could connect, life started to shift online, especially when broadband replaced dial-up in the early 2000s. Laptops and WiFi helped to unshackle people from their desks and enabled working and playing from nearly anywhere. Coffee shop owners of the world rejoiced; up to a point.

But the most significant trend has surely been mobile connectivity – initially providing access to the same stuff just on a smaller screen. Now, we’re beginning to see the web and info on it become desktop-free zones. The decline in relevance of the desktop or laptop computer has been coming a long time, as smartphone usage around the world exploded. In the future, we’ll potentially be forced to use phones where a better user experience could well be delivered on a big screen, as service providers try to reduce costs while trying to provide a secure, easy to use experience.

Desktop falling behind

Even in 2014, Windows accounted for nearly 2/3 of web traffic at the start and a bit more than half by the end of the year. Android was taking an early lead over iOS and the Mac had a steady-ish 5%.

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Data from statcounter.com

Contrast to the end of 2024 and two-thirds of all traffic is from Android and iOS, with Windows & Mac together just over 30%.

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Looking beyond which mobile or desktop OS you use, Chrome is the default browser cross-platform with two-thirds of all traffic, while on the desktop, Microsoft Edge has about 13%. Looking at mobile only, Edge has less half of one percent of usage (beaten slightly by Firefox, and Opera has 4 times the usage) though it’s available for both Android and iOS. You have to wonder when Microsoft will pull the plug, even if the mobile Edge browser is a decent effort (especially so if you use Edge on Windows PC too).

Apps taking over, not always for the better

It’s not just that content is moving to be more mobile-oriented; increasingly, stuff that used to be available on the web can only be done via using an app. To a degree, this could be part of an ongoing enshittification process – a topic we’ll delve into in a future ToW.

As an example, Google has removed the “Timeline” feature from Google Maps online. Discussed briefly in ToW #638, this was a great way of checking where and when you were – handy for doing stuff like mileage claims or remembering how long it’s been since you’ve visited someone.

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This particular change has some solid reasoning behind it; rather than The Chocolate Factory storing data about where you’ve been on its servers, they announced that the data would be held securely on the device instead. Is this Google being altruistic and privacy-sensitive, or just trying to avoid being held to account for something down the line? … You decide.

From an end-user perspective, losing access to Timeline in the browser is a bit annoying and too bad if you want to share your history across multiple devices – the data is local to one device only and that’s that. Just in case your phone gets lost, you might want to back it up now

Un Appy with Online Banking

There are many other examples of websites trying to push you to use their apps (click a link on a mobile browser and it often will try to redirect you), but the biscuit is surely taken by at least one UK credit card provider.

Early digital banking services might have required special hardware or bespoke PC applications, but gradually all went into the browser, with some requiring a hardware token or other device to be used when signing in. Now, it’s very common to need some form of Multi-factor authentication like receiving a one-time SMS message to be able to login; even making a one-off purchase generally requires Strong Customer Authentication.

Users of Virgin Money credit cards have no web-based view of their account, with the options being to use the app or do everything another way. Viewing and download statements can only be done on the phone; the only alternative is to request a paper version be posted.

The in-app help used to advise that if you wanted your statements on a proper computer, then download the PDFs to your phone and email them to yourself. Fortunately, that advice has since been removed…

Happily, if you’re an Android & PC user at least, you could use the Phone Link app to browse the file system on the device when it’s connected. The phone will appear in the left pane on Windows Explorer…

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… and if you navigate to Phone Name > storage > Download, you’ll be able to view, copy elsewhere on your PC, and even delete the file from the phone storage.

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If you’re using OneDrive (the consumer version) for your personal files, you might want to enable the Personal Vault and put potentially sensitive stuff in there.

#60: The problem with coupons

Lots of online shops have promo codes that can be entered as part of the checkout process, to get a discount, free shipping or similar. Sign up to their newsletter and get 5% off your first/next order, they might say. It’s usually a reward for or enticement to repeat custom, or if you believe in more sinister motives, a ploy to get you to hand over your data and expose your very living soul.         

Use one of the many “coupon lookup” sites and you could easily find codes that can save significant amounts of money, especially if you’re buying expensive stuff. To the end user, it looks like free money but there’s a deeper and darker subtext. As we’ll learn, there’s never really such a thing as free money.

Don’t click the bottom one…

Sites like Coupert, Vouchercodes and more sometimes tell you what special offer codes are currently active; be wary of any which offer to “automatically apply all codes” or you’ll end up installing a browser extension, which you almost certainly don’t want to do.

1st party coupons

Microsoft has shoehorned “shopping” into Edge (similar to what Google does with Chrome, though Edge’s is a bit more internationally inclusive and somewhat easier to use), and has a Bing shopping site that’s similar to Google Shopping too.

If the feature is enabled in Edge, you’ll see a little shopping label icon in the address bar when you’re browsing something that the browser might have more insights on, and possibly be able to keep a track on the price too.

Both browser tools are convenient way to find coupons and codes, alongside price comparisons, price history etc, even if you could probably find keener deals and info by looking around yourself.

For vouchers and deals, the browser is basically scraping other sites which purport to offer them, though anyone who has tried such sites previously will probably find out many of the codes don’t work anymore.

Margins to share

Retailers typically have a high markup on stuff they sell, expressed often as a margin – if a clothing outlet sells a shirt for $100 and they are buying it from their supplier at $40, then they have a 60% gross margin. That seems a lot relative to the cost of the actual goods, but then the retailer has to run premises, pay staff, deal with returns and annoying customers – all of which will eat into that margin and give them a much lower %age of profit. So far, so good.

When dealing with online transactions, especially if the delivery cost is charged additionally, the overheads will be a lot lower and therefore the margin could afford to be less – that’s why many online-only retailers can sell the same things at a lower price than you’d find in the shops. But at least in trad. retail, customers might be browsing – they could be wandering through a mall and decide to drop in to a store and end up seeing something they didn’t know they wanted. In online retail, that’s so much less likely, therefore they try to attract buyers in other ways.

Online retailers find it sometimes helps to share the margin they make; hence the deals with cashback sites or credit cards, and by issuing voucher codes to incentivise customers to buy now while the deal is there. They may also have referral codes or links that give a small discount to the end purchaser and a kickback to the referring source as well.

Influencers and other “content creators” can earn money by talking about stuff and linking to places where you can buy it, potentially earning $thousands for driving extra buyers into the waiting arms of the online sellers. Sometimes they’ll have a voucher code that gets money off (and which the retailer can track so they know how much extra business is coming from that source). Sometimes the code is built into links on the blog or website, that when you click through (and subsequently buy), will share some margin back to the referrer.

Honey: The sweetest deal?

Along with the features browsers have built-in, there are loads of addins which can be used to help the shopping experience. Honey was a pioneer, so much so that PayPal shelled out a cool $4B a few year back.

Recent investigations have shown Honey’s business model to be on thin ice, though – ostensibly telling users that they can find the best deals with Honey, while getting retailers to pay them to offer only a limited set of the deals which might otherwise exist… so instead of Honey telling you of a sweet 10% deal you could get, they might be taking 2% off the retailer and showing you a 5% code.

Addins like Honey also sometimes pay to have their offering promoted – including paying money to influencers to have the Honey extension featured. To the chagrin of some – even leading to legal action – it appears that Honey has also been rewriting the referral links from other sites too.

So, Honey pays Spongebob Influencerpants to say nice things about them and feature on his site; all Sponge’s users run off and install Honey and are happy they’re getting something for little effort.

Later, when a user clicks on a link to buy some tat in the description text of Spongy’s latest video, instead of him getting the kickback from the retailer, the Honey addin is intercepting and rewriting the URL and pocketing the referral fee for itself.

Even if you think most influencers are gopping eejits, do check out Marques Brownlee – who is one of the smartest and most balanced of the oeuvre – and see what he says about the “Honey Scam”. Unsurprisingly, he recommends uninstalling the Honey addin with all speed.

Whatever the reality of this situation is, it’s certainly not cricket.

#56: Hey kids, look who’s back!

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When does old become retro, and how does fashion decide when something uncool becomes drip? Brand equity rises and falls all the time; some just go out of date and are left behind, while some try to reassert themselves to speed up the cycle – see Jaguar / jaGuar’s recent hoo-hah and “Copy Nothing” brand rehab…

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[Richard Ayoade in IT Crowd c 2006, Jaguar deleting ordinary in 2024, Reeves & Mortimer c1993]

(Eddie Izzard has some mildly sweary thoughts about the whole “Looking cool…” cycle).

Retro tech

It’s amusing when old tech becomes cool again – from hipsters rocking LCD digital watches, to GenZers toting feature phones like it was the 1990s. Some brands were never fashionable, like AOL: using an aol.com email address even 20 years ago was a marker of technological unsophistication. Amazingly, you can still sign up for an aol.com address today if you feel like sending email from the past.

Many other products and services were all the rage, then just weren’t – and one good example is Microsoft’s MSN, which now seems to be coming back from life support. Well, certain elements (which are not yet part of the revamp) were very pervasive and cool back in the day … remember MSN Messenger, before Microsoft bungled it into Skype? It was so down with the kids, even a youthful Stormzy was using it (and that’s how he got his name).

The Microsoft Network

MSN first arrived 30 years ago as part of the Windows 95 (“Chicago”) beta program; it was a “walled garden” network service providing proprietary content through a dial up network. Market leaders AOL and CompuServe had similarly restricted services – using them wasn’t really “being on the internet” other than you could browse pages written for those services, use email and later, instant messaging. Win95 initially didn’t even have a TCP/IP stack built-in, so without 3rd party software, you couldn’t be directly connected to the ’net.

MSN’s late 90s paid-for dial-up service became a regular ISP and there was a Premium subscription available to netizens who wanted additional security and the likes.

From that closed offering, the MSN brand morphed into something applied to lots of Microsoft’s consumer-oriented web experiences – from the Yahoo!-like attempt to establish a homepage, to in 2001 rebranding the first mass free email service which Microsoft acquired 5 years earlier, as MSN Hotmail.

Legacy users of the Win95 MSN service were ported over to Hotmail and given short @msn.com mail accounts. Other users could at one point choose a variety of domain names when signing up for a Live ID / Hotmail account, including @msn.com and @msn.co.uk. These have long since gone away and the only options now are outlook.com and Hotmail.com.

At one point, there were numerous “MSN …” apps for Windows and mobile devices, from MSN Travel to MSN Money. Most of these were subsequently killed off or renamed to something else, like Microsoft News.

Amazingly, you can still buy MSN Premium today – for £7 a month you get, er, lots of stuff that’s available, better and/or for free from other places, including other bits of Microsoft itself.

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Microsoft Stop Start

At one point, Microsoft appeared to want “Start” to become the new MSN brand; the homepage for Edge browser (unless you do yourself a favour and set it to something else) was “Start” and the single mobile app which merged MSN News, MSN Money and more was just “Microsoft Start”.

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Now the Start apps have been renamed to just “MSN” on mobiles, alongside MSN Weather and MSN Money which avoided the previous cull; PC users don’t have an “MSN” app but might expect to see the same content on Edge homescreen or on the Widgets on their taskbar.

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Sadly, renaming the app and service doesn’t appear to have done much for the quality of advertising or the myriad click-bait “news” providers, though it does appear to have gotten less insidious and you can at least hide sources you don’t want to hear from again.

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The daily email newsletters are not bad – see https://www.msn.com/en-gb/personalize/newslettersignup to manage your subscriptions. Let’s see if Microsoft starts to re-launch other MSN services in due course…

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#52: The Power of the Cloud

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Being shown around a modern datacenter is a pretty awesome experience. The huge rooms full of servers, networking gear and storage can be reminiscent of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s the power systems that are truly jaw-dropping; how much power the DC uses when it’s running and what to do if the power supply goes away is a big part of building these operations.

At one point, Microsoft used huge Caterpillar diesel generators, each of which could generate several megawatts and was kept ready and waiting by continually pumping hot oil inside, so the machine could be started and running at full tilt in a fraction of a second in the event of power failure. Moves are afoot to use hydrogen fuel cells or other means of storing and generating backup power.

AI and Datacenter boom

As much traditional computing has moved into the cloud over the last decade or two, and faster and more mobile internet access drives end-user demand, datacenters have been getting bigger and more numerous. They almost can’t build them fast enough. About 1/3 of all worldwide DCs are in the US, and together they soak up about 6% of all electricity.

Datacentres worldwide used about 460 TWh of electricity in 2022; that’s 460 billion KWh, or enough to run 35 trillion lightbulbs continuously – about 4,300, 24×7, for each person on the planet. That’s quite a lot of power. Expect that amount to double by 2026. Google and Microsoft reportedly consumed 24TWh each in 2023.

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[source – Electricity 2024 – Analysis and forecast to 2026]
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

Generative AI is VERY power hungry: estimates vary but research showed that generating one image used as much power as over 500 smartphone charges, averaging around 3KWh per image. Better make sure your ChatGPT / Copilot / Microsoft Designer usage is worthwhile and not just creating stupid images of cats and dogs.

To put the commensurate CO2 output into context, however, 1,000 of such images would be the equivalent emissions of driving a car for 4.1 miles. It’s thought that Generative AI on its own could well consume 100TWh or more by 2027.

DC providers are also looking for ways to ensure they can get enough power into the datacenter – Microsoft has even committed to restarting one of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors and buying all of its power for 20 years. A nod to the old commitment of being carbon negative by 2030, perhaps, but the massive DC expansion to fuel demand for AI makes achieving that target seem increasingly unlikely.

Maybe new governmental administrations will incentivize clean power and reward efficiency?

Local PC power usage

There is something of a dichotomy in power usage on a local computer, especially if it’s powered from the wall rather than using a battery. You want to buy the highest performing, most feature-laden machine you can afford, so (apart from preserving battery life) why would you deliberately knobble its performance to save power? Like buying a Ferrari and driving everywhere at 20mph.

Some quick wins, especially on laptops, could be to reduce the brightness of the screen and use Dark Mode. Check the Power settings on your PC for recommendations on how to lower its energy use. Reduce the number of background apps and trim the ones which start automatically.

If you have an Intel-powered computer (PC, Mac or Linux), they have a free power usage gadget which might give you some idea about the total power consumption of your system, though doesn’t really shed much light as to what’s making it do what it’s doing…

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You could try firing up Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and adding a couple of columns to its default view (right-click on the column headings); useful to know which apps or processes are causing the power usage to shoot up, but devoid of actual numbers for the more data-obsessed.

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Edge browser has an Efficiency mode – click the … settings menu in the top right and look under Browser essentials.

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If you need more data on overall system performance, try GPU-Z – it gives detailed stats on the Graphics Processing Unit and other main components of your system, including current, maximum / minimum / average power consumption …

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In the screenshot above, the Power Consumption (%) shows how much of the graphics board’s maximum power consumption is currently being used. A similar utility, CPU-Z, can give data about the TDP of the main CPU and how it’s doing too.

#51: Windowing Arrangements

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The idea of running applications in overlapping, resizable windows has been around since the early 1970s. Pioneered at Xerox PARC, along with pretty much everything else, the idea of having windows arranged side-by-side or in a variety of other ways was revolutionary. Everybody copied it.

Smartphones have mostly avoided trying to put stuff into windows, but computer users will be familiar with the motifs involved, even if you often run windows at full screen size and switch between them when necessary.

Add multiple screens or great big monitors, and how you lay your windows out might become a bit more relevant, especially when you’re referencing different documents or websites at the same time.

ToW has talked in the past about using OneNote on the side (even last week)

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… or putting windows into different sections of the screen using Windows’ own Snap Layouts feature, making it easier to show them next to each other. The biggest and higher resolution the screen, the more layout options you are given.

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There are other utilities, too – Fancy Zones in PowerToys, or Dell’s Display Manager.

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Split Screen viewing

Of course, sometimes you don’t want to arrange multiple apps, but to see things side by side from within the same application. Windows has done a pretty good job of managing apps where there are several documents open at the same time, even if there’s only one “instance” of the application and it happens to have several files open. In Excel and Word, for example, though there’s only one app on the taskbar, multiple open files show as separate windows which can be snapped to different areas of the screen for easy cross-reference. You can tweak the “combined icon” behaviour if so desired.

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Sometimes you might want to have several windows open from the same document; maybe you’re copying and pasting content from one part of a Word doc to another, or working on different tabs in the same Excel workbook.

In such cases, look under the View menu and create a new window, which can be snapped and arranged as desired.

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The same menu lets you arrange multiple open documents in a variety of ways too; try Split or Arrange All to see the output.

Edge by Edge

If you followed the advice from the recent ToW #38 and bought yourself a gigantic, curved monitor, you might want to check out another feature in Edge that is there to make thing a bit more usable – Split Screen mode (whose icon looks a bit like the Immersive Reader, so it’s easy to overlook).

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Since most people have lots of browser tabs open at the same time, Edge (and Chrome) tend to lump all the open tabs under one browser window, so you don’t clutter things up too much. You can move tabs between browser windows or even create a new window with just a specific tab (right click the tab and you’ll see the Move tab to > option), so could arrange separate browser windows using the normal snapping etc.

The Split screen view lets you quickly show 2 tabs side-by-side, and can prove very useful. While in split mode, you’ll see two URLs in the address bar…

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Exit split screen or tweak some of the behaviours using the X and the “…” options buttons on the top right…

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Finally, in Windows 11 and using Edge, you can make it show separate tabs in the ALT+TAB view of open applications, so they appear like they were separate windows even if they aren’t.

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The wording of this setting makes it sounds like many apps would be able to support this (since “tabs” are appearing in other places like Notepad or Explorer), but for now, it’s only Edge.