You Should Be Using Opera Instead Of Chrome, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most important facts from the past few days. This week: Chrome is a garbage browser, cars have gotten a lot safer and MP3s are a dying breed.
Do Yourself A Favor And Ditch Chrome
It's difficult to tear yourself away from Google. Even if you don't use an Android phone, there's a good chance you use Google search, Gmail, Google Docs and the like. And also Chrome. And if you use Chrome, there's a good chance that you hate it, because Chrome is a massive resource hog that slows your computer down to a standstill just because you dared to have two YouTube videos open at once.
But it doesn't have to be like this. As Motherboard's Jason Koebler writes, there is a better way, and that way is Opera, a browser that blends the openness of Chrome (you can still have extensions!) with the not-eating-all-your-RAM part of other browsers. Half the Digg office switched to Opera this week and yeah, we're all happier.
A Tortoise Is A Weird Pet
One of the sad realities of getting a pet is that it will die at some point during your life. For all the joy they bring you during their lives, cats and dogs and the like just don't live as long as we do.
On the other end of the spectrum is a pet sulcata tortoise, which will almost certainly outlive you (though it probably won't come to your funeral). Hanya Yanagihara's story about the sulcata her parents adopted on impulse many years ago is a poignant reflection on death, family and shelled pets.
Cars Have Gotten A Lot Safer In The Last Couple Decades
Okay, that shouldn't be a surprise. As with things like gas mileage and in-car tech (farewell, built-in mobile phones), car safety has improved by leaps and bounds since the '90s. To illustrate that change, the New Zealand Automobile Association decided "hey, let's just crash an old car and a new car together." So they did, and here's a snapshot of what a 2015 Toyota Corolla does to a 1998 Corolla:
[Digg]
The MP3 Is Dying
Chances are you have a pretty solid library of MP3s on one of your devices. Chances are you also haven't been adding many new MP3s to those devices, as the rise of streaming services have replaced not only the need to download tracks, but the very format your music comes in as streaming services have eschewed MP3s.
At the end of the day, you won't notice any difference when you're listening, but if you're the kind of person who gets a little bit sentimental about their carefully curated MP3 library, the news that the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, which held the patent for the MP3, declined to renew the patent recently, effectively killing off the future. Combined with the recent fall of What.CD, it feels like the end of an era for music collectors.
[Quartz]
Previously on What We Learned This Week
The Trees Are Dying And We'll Die Next, And Other Facts
