Better challenge: Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Back in 2003, Microsoft looked like they had won the browser wars, with Internet explorer having some ridiculously high share (IIRC, something like 95%). Part of the high share was due to the fact that IE came pre-installed on just about every version of Windows, and many people just didn't seem to find the need to change web-browser. This caused Microsoft to stagnate development on IE at around version 6. Not only did some features remain so buggy that they became unusable (CSS-implementation, I'm looking at you), but certain web-standards had to be modified just to avoid IE's bugs (IIRC, this is how CSS 2.1 developed from 2.0). For a web-developer, working around the quirks of IE 6.0 was the most stressful part of their job. Meanwhile, Netscape had been in decline for a while, and the new Mozilla browser just came across as too bloated. And then, along came Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox as a lightweight fork of Mozilla (Mozilla later morphed into SeaMonkey). Firefox was getting momentum just at the precise moment when IE was becoming notorious for it's security bugs. FireFox somehow managed to ride this momentum and capture a huge share of the market - even before FF 1.0 was released back in late 2004. Web-developers felt more confident in using things that broke on IE, and even more people moved to FF to see the web with a working web-browser. Fast forward a few years ... FireFox was becoming slower with each new release and was leaking memory like an incontinent toddler with their finger in a bucket of hot water. Meanwhile, Google started to push their Chrome browser as shovelware meaning that it ended up on a lot of people's machines as their default browser. At first, Chrome was behind FF and IE, but it quickly caught up, and around 2010 or thereabouts, became faster and more responsive than FF ... and so, the decline began.

AFAIK, there are no major security bugs in Chrome (unless you count it's data-harvesting as a 'bug'), and Chrome can render just about every website flawlessly and keeps up with the latest web-standards, and EDGE is probably the same nowadays, so the niche that FireFox had in the days of IE's stagnation in the mid 00's just doesn't exist anymore. There is still the niche of power-users who want a hyper-configurable browser or users who prefer old-skool UIs, but FF has been turning it's back on these users for many years, so they've moved to FF-forks such as Pale Moon, WaterFox, etc.

So basically, FireFox only became as popular as it did back in the day because it filled the gap left by the stagnation of IE. Now, CHrome and the other major browsers are not stagnation, so the wave that FF originally rode does not exist anymore.

To the FireFox devs, I'll say this. What made your browser great was it's configurability and the fact you could extend it to do just about everything you wanted. You took this away from us and messed around with the UI just because you could (just because you could doesn't mean you should), and in doing so, either took things away from us or made us jump through all sorts of hoops to get them back. Also, please don't add things (eg. Hot Pocket) as a default feature that is not part of the main browsing experience (if someone really wants it, it should be an extension and not part of the main browser). These days, I now use Pale Moon - "Your browser, your way".

Brendan Eich was ousted in 2014, and the decline of FireFox began long before then. In 2011 (or thereabouts), FireFox began their rapid release cycle. Not only did they start the version-number madness (presumably to prevent people from being seduced by Chrome's unfeasibly high version-number) (which had the effect that unmaintained versions of extensions stopped working because of the version-number and extension authours needed to keep updating the extensions to keep up with this (you could modify the XPIs themselves to give a higher max version but this didn't always work)), but the rapid release cycle was done in such a way that a new version of FF _had_ to be released every 3 months regardless of whether or not it was ready. This meant that many .0-releases were buggy. Also, it meant that FF was adding new features nobody wanted just for the sake of adding something new. Also, the 'Hipsterization' of the UI also begun in 2011 when they replaced the familiar dropdown menu (FIle, Edit, VIew, etc.) with this so called 'hamburger' menu and started taking things away that people needed (such as the status-bar).

https://xkcd.com/949/

Why are we still limiting ourselves to a file-format that limits us to 256 colours in 2022? APNG / MNG have been around for ages and serve the same functionality as an animated GIF but without the 256 colour limitation. And more recently HEIF has appeared which also supports lossy compression.

Before the UK changes how it measures goods, it should make sure it can get goods on the shelves in the first place. The lack of farm-labourers and lorry-drivers means there's nothing to measure.

Mosaic used black text on a grey background, and somewhere along the line, we switched to the default settings being black text on a white background. Des anyone know why this change occurred, and why the background was originally grey?

That's perfectly fine until someone chooses to make their default background-colour "Mosaic Grey" so they can read txt-documents and html-documents without a background-colour in old-skool grey and then realises that someone changed the foreground text-colour but did not bother to change the background colour, making the page hard to read. That's one of my pet peeves about the modern web (that, and the fact they make the fonts too big, and don't get me started on unified desktop/mobile experiences).

(BTW I can understand why the default proportional-font was changed from Times New Roman to Arial - TNR looked fancy on computer-displays back in the day, but when we switched from showing-off to pragmaticness, Arial was found to be easier to read on a screen than TNR)

Because before the first lockdown, Boris was trying to pursue a herd-immunity strategy before he changed course and ordered a lockdown. Boris Johnson likes to name things after himself (Boris Island, Boris-bikes, etc). So the first UK variant should be named after him.

Neural Networks work by recognising patterns rather than following a fixed set of rules. For example, while writing a physics simulation means programming in the laws of physics using an exact set of rules (or an approximation thereof (eg. using Newtonian physics without taking relativity into account)), training a Neural Network to distinguish cat-pictures and dog-pictures involves training it by showing it pictures of cats and dogs, letting it guess and telling it if it was right or wrong. None of this involves explicitly telling the Neural Network anything about the essence of cat-ness or dog-ness. It's just pattern-recognition based on reinforcement. Pattern-recognition is how intuition works in humans, which use a brain - hence why I believe Neural Networks should be classified as Artificial Intuition, rather than Artificial Intelligence.

I'll just leave this here...

I'll just leave this here (It was originally a Flash cartoon) - http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/...

I remember about 10 or so years ago, there was talk about making a Flash-interpreter (or maybe even a Flash-compiler) coded using a combination of JavaScript and HTML5. Whatever happened to that? There's still plenty of Flash content out there that will become unplayable if no alternative exists.

...instead of being distracted by this stunt.

Unreal Engine 5 is just waiting for an FPS to show off it's capabilities.

If Planet 9 really is a black hole, then wouldn't one way of detecting it be to see the effect it's gravitational lens is having on the positions of known stars. If there is a small area of the sky where a cluster of stars appear to be in the wrong position, then that may mean there's an object whose gravity is strong enough to significantly bend light. We just need to keep scanning the sky and look out for any distortions in the pattern of fixed stars.