@joewilliams007 Actually, many people were forced to stick to an earlier version of Kiwi Browser for Android because YouTube background playback, an essential feature for productivity, was removed at some point.

If those people were to update their browser, they would sacrifice this essential productivity feature.

@myss Supporting Internet Explorer would be excessive, however, supporting a post-2015 (ECMAscript 6) browser should be no big deal.

Funnily enough, Windows Explorer's integrated FTP implementation sometimes only reads the date and not the time of files, but FileZilla solves this problem anyway and retaining the date and time attribute can be enabled in FileZilla using CTRL+U. It should have been enabled by default, but that's a different topic.

I now realize what luxury we had in 2009, back when mass storage was an option for smartphone file transfer, before it was locked away by our "benevolent" smartphone and operating system vendors.

I imagine MTP is the only allowed method of transferring files in hell.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

MTP is one of the darkest stains in the history of computer file management. It belongs to the same place in history as the Galaxy Note 7 and the Fiat Multipla.

If MTP was created by 13-year-old computer science students as a school project, it might have been somewhat respectible. But it was created by well-paid programmers from a billion-dollar corporation.

To manage files using MTP is to walk on eggshells.

Comparing Miserable Transfer Protocol to mass storage and FTP is like comparing a chinese scrapyard car to a German luxury vehicle. On mass storage and FTP, files' date and time stamps are always listed correctly and retained when transfering either way, files are actually moved within the device instead of copy-deleted, large directories with thousands of files load within few seconds compared to minutes on MTP (if it even reaches the end without hanging up in midst of the process); and mass storage allows keeping the date and time attribute when adding files.

Here is even a report of the entire internal storage disappearing:

https://reddit.com/r/Android/...

Internal storage = no data recovery software available due to lack of block-level access. I wonder how many terabytes of data MTP bugs have destroyed.

Isn't Microsoft who designed MTP for their Zune player? Then how come their file manager has a worse and less stable implementation of it than Linux file managers such as Nemo? You'd think the creator's implementation is the most stable and functional, but no. That's especially embarrassing regarding that Microsoft is a billion-dollar corporation with paid employees whereas Linux software such as Nemo file manager is largely developed by volunteers for fun. Granted, Microsoft implemented UDF packet writing (live file system) on optical discs very well starting with Windows Vista.

When trying to copy a large folder with several thousand files, Windows just indicates "calculating time to copy files" for several minutes. This apparently is intended to excuse the time it needs to get a list of paths for transfering. The Nemo file manager from Linux at least shows how many files it has counted so far. This is a huge benefit, since it lets the user know whether it is doing anything at all, or, as often happens on MTP, is frozen and not doing anything.

It almost seems like MTP was designed with the goal to be as annoying (to avoid using an s-word) and buggy as anyhow possible. It almost seems like there was a competition to design a transfer protocol that fails as hard as imaginable.

By the way, while a MTP file transfer is in progress, guess what else you can do. Nothing! That's because MTP lacks parallelism, the ability to do more than one task in background. So you would like to browse photos on your phone while files are being transferred? Bad luck! MTP can't do that! Additionally, MTP lacks random access, meaning if you want to watch that 3 GB 4K 2160p video file, tough luck. The file manager will have to copy it to your computer first so it can read the MOOV atom at the end of the file, which is necessary for playback on "program stream" video files. If your operating system runs on SSD, that's 3 GB of weardown just so you can play a video once. Technically, sequential reading could be possible without downloading the whole file, but many files require random access.

Did I mention yet that MTP sometimes disconnects or freezes up during file transfers?

Sometimes, I get a "data supplied is of wrong type". Other reports of this error:

* https://forums.androidcentral.com/s...

* https://bleepingcomputer.com/forums...

Sometimes, instead of files, blank placeholders with a HDD icon with a Windows logo appear! ( https://imgur.com/a/iosQaL5 ).

When double-clicking two folders in quick succession, it might end up showing the second folder as path but show the contents from the first folder! I hope I don't need to clarify how lunatic this is.

@electrineer Perhaps it would not have survived without being bought off by a large corporation. It had funding issues prior to acquisition.

But indeed, as history shows, economic incentives are prioritized over users' interests. Google does not just discontinue many services, but also many features within their services.

Not as good as eXerCEO ;-)

This is why one needs an eXcellent CEO, like an eXerCEO!

"full of features you won't even [_______] use"

Actually often times the opposite: often lacking features one needs due to prioritizing stupid slim design.

@Voxera It seems to be hard-coded in the "My Files" application, since the error already occurs while typing in the file name box, not when tapping on "rename", which suggests the limitation is hard-coded in the user interface.

The file manager can actually open and copy and move items with names longer than fifty characters, just not rename them to anything longer than fifty characters. An arbitrary and unnecessary limit.

By the way, "My Files" can also not change a file extension. It only lets users rename the part before the last dot in the file name. It seems like it was designed for rookie users.

Doesn't Twitter require phone verification?

That's the problem with getting married to a framework. Static server-side generated HTML with vanilla JS enhancements is universal and not affected by this trouble.

@JsonBoa I never thought of it that way. Perhaps this is the case in some areas.

However, in mobile phones, the 4.3 volt requirement comes from the chemical properties of lithium-ion batteries.

Fun fact: Some mid-2000s Nokia phones like the 6111 used a six-volt charger! It might have worked with five volts as well.

@iiii Optional, not mandatory.

@Wisecrack Do they charge you the same amount if they show you advertisements?

@CoreFusionX For that, gnome-screenshot has a "copy to clipboard" button.

From which operating system or program is this?

Text of the rant (except last paragraph) with errors fixed and improvements:

––––

Automatically copying screenshots to clipboard has never been a good idea to begin with.

The screenshot feature since Windows 8, the full-page screenshot feature from the Firefox developer tools, and many smartphones automatically copy screenshots to the clipboard, which usurps the existing content of the clipboard. If there is a clipboard manager, like on Samsung smartphones since at least the early 2010s, it usurps existing entries since clipboard managers only hold a limited number of items. On Samsung's keyboard, that's twenty.

Thankfully, some other tools like gnome-screenshot for Linux make copying to clipboard optional. There is a "copy to clipboard" button on the file naming dialogue, but it does not happen unsolicitedly. This is the user-friendly way to do it.

@jonas-w If you don't want a screenshot file, you can simply delete it after posting it.

Also, "pwd" stands for "print working directory", not "password".

First site I got reminded of: CHIP.de – full of slideshows and "your download will start in 5…", and roughly 60% of screen space is advertisement.

One could remain in the class for entertainment purposes.

MacBooks are difficult to repair, a short lifespan, and have fewer ports. So no, thanks.

Two seconds? Really?

@jackpearce "Features like exporting Data are vanishing" – or they did never exist in first place.

@hjk101 The key word is "should". Unfortunately, that is frequently not the case.

@electrineer Absolutely. No root ≠ ownership.