VLC Media Player
Many people will have come across VLC media player at some point in their lives, whether that be on a school computer, at work, or because Microsoft removed the native DVD playback feature in Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, that was present in Windows 7, now I understand all the efforts that the team at VideoLAN do to code and design VLC media player... however there are just so many issues with this free program that it is actually kind of enraging. One of the earliest features that I made use of when I first started using the program on my own computer was the downloading of youtube videos, and it worked pretty well from what I can remember, it was fast, free, the image quality was decent and you didn't have to go through one of those dodgy third party sites that you never know whether they are going to download viruses to your pc or not... I used that feature quite a lot before my SSD died on my laptop, and also on the 2007 machine, and I didn't have many issuse to start out with. However when I got an archos from my dad that didn't support native h264 playback without a paid plugin (screw paid plugins, I hate having to pay for things that shouldn't have to be paid for) I had to resort to the use of AVI files, which were a pain in the ass to convert, now I knew there was a video converter built into VLC, however whenever I tried to convert h264 mp4's into AVI files it would never work right, it would output a file, which would never be compatible, or it would somehow still have h264 juice all over it making it completely pointless to attempt the conversion in the first place. It gave the same result across computers from 2004 all the way up to 2019, with different installations of Windows ranging from Xp to 7 to 10... And none of them worked right, it got to the point where it wouldn't output anything and would just crash, or it would output a 0 byte file that you could do literally nothing with.
So I had mentioned about the YouTube video conversions, this was one of the main reasons that I actually downloaded this in the first place, not to illegally download movies or music or whatever, just to download other people's stuff that they'd made, so that I had a copy, so if ever the video or the users account was deleted I had a copy so that I could watch it back, I had already lost a few videos that I liked to things being taken down or made private, now at first the downloading feature worked just fine, though araound the time of late 2018 that feature began to play up, it began to stop working more often, creating the same problems as the file conversion had, the 0 byte files that just pissed you off, this was pretty damn irritating, as it was nice and fast to just insert the URL and hit save, it would be done pretty quick, and guess what, THEY WEREN'T EVEN COPYRIGHTED VIDEOS!!! They changed how it worked for some reason, instead of just entering the URL and hitting save as, now you had to enter a bunch of junk that made it so much more complicated, not to mention that if you entered something wrond it wouldn't even work... Not that it even told you which was the right way to do it... Eventually this just stopped working all together and saving just didn't work at all, however something that usually did work without fault was the streaming feature, after I was no longer able to just download stuff I wanted, I had to use htat instead and use the record function that was built in to VLC, initially this worked just fine, though it was annoying to have to watch through the whole thing again to make sure that it was actually recording... Though knowing VLC it didn't take too long before this feature just didn't work either, at which it did... And I could no longer record streams, though after a bit of research (And much annoyance) I found that I could just select the "Codec information" of the video, where it would tell me the video URL, and I could download it off of that, yes it was a few extra steps, but at least I could actually download the fricking video.
This feature worked pretty well for quite a while, though becuase it was really inconvenient I rarely did it becuase I really could not be bothered to go through the hassle to do so, but whenever I needed to do it, it pretty much always worked... Up until pretty recently it was one of the main features of VLC for e (other than DVD playback) so when I entered a URL and it didn't work I was really pissed, attempting certain videos that weren't private or whatever resulted with a black screen and VLC not doing what it was meant to do, which was a really damn irritating, seriously, though the problem began to worsen, especially as I wanted to archive more and more videos, it got to the point where any video I would put in just wouldn't work. So I consulted google, and found that you coulg just do ctrl + n to directly enter a URL and stream it directly, so I tried this, and it didn't work... Not at all surprised I went looking for answers, and found a few lines of code on github, not to difficult to do I thought, though I doubted that it would work becauase at the time the code was from 7 years ago, I copied and pasted it into notepad and saved it as whatever it needed to be, then after wrestling with Admin privileges stuff I finally managed to get it into the folder that it belonged in. Guess how surprised I was to see it work and fix the one issue I was having... So a 7 year old piece of code from a website I don't 100% trust works better than the actual program? WTF I though, I geniunely thought I had put more time and effort into copying and pasting these few lines of code than the team at VideoLAN had when implementing it in the first place...I know it is open source... but damned hell, having to fix issues that shouldn't be there just doesn't make sense, why didn't they just take this fix and implement it into the full program, getting rid of the issue entirely, I mean it is open source for Gods sake.
So where do I stand, well the program would be pretty much perfect if they could fix the issuse, or someone could take the source code and rework it in to a program with more, stabel features, that would be pretty danm helpful, and would be a nice thing to do (I wish I could, but I have absolutely no knowledge in the matter so I don't really think that it's going to happen). The sad thing is, I like the program, and I want to keep using it, but not when it just outputs garbage and doesn't to what I downloaded it for.
Chrome
Ah chrome, any modern computer is incomplete without it, compared to other browsers. Alternatives such as IE, Edge, Firefox and opera have their own issues that limit their usefulness, IE and edge for example... well they are IE and edge so no explaiination needed, really... Firefox is really CPU dependant in my experience, it really favours older or weaker processors where Chrome and others do not, Opera is pretty decent, it is not as CPU demanding as firefox, however it has issues with certain google and non-google sites, and to be honest I prefer the dashboard in Chrome.
Although Chrome is the superior browser compared to the rest, it does have its flaws, some of them aren't that bad, others just shouldn't be there, the first that come to mind, and the issue that is synonymous with chrome's operation, and somehting that has become a bit of a meme at this point is the working and idle memory (RAM) usage, like seriously holy moly does chrome like RAM, though most computers today haveat least 8GB and slightly better ones have 16GB, you need an extra 2x additional to your currently installed RAM to run Chrome (e.g. if you have 16GB you'd probably need an extra 32GB just to let Chrome properly) so I can totally understand why people would have 32-64GB in their systems, its not for the games, its for running Chrome in the background. Another issue seems to be with the settings menu, now I actually really have the Chrome settings menu, its really counter intuitive to where you would think everything should be, there is no clear or defined layout, and you usually end up having to search settings to find what you need, honestly I just want the setting to be there in front of me with easy access, withut the need to actually search for what you need... God... The next issue is things such as Adobe flash and audio and other things that are pretty much essential for using the internet, Flash is one of the most irritating things, there are circumstances when you really have to use Flash, and then chrome just blocks it for no reason, you go and fumble through the menus and then it still doesn't work, being honest I don't know whether I will be happy or sad to see Flash removed from Chrome, though not having to mess with those settings will be a nice change, especially when there is no option to just "Allow for all websites" which would have been really damn useful so I didnt have to go back into the horrible settings menu whenever I went to a different website. Then there's the issue with audio, and also with website notifications, so on one of my computers audio from Chrome just doesn't work at all, everything else works just fine, but not Chrome, I don't know why that it, I've reinstalled Chrome on that PC 3+ times, reinstalled the sound driver, changed sound devices etc... but still not Chrome audio... and I know I didn't mute websites. The thing with website notifications is that they are ALWAYS ANNOYING AS HELL those things at the top of the page asking you to click "yes" and jeopradise your PCs whole security and wire half your savings to a Nigerian "Prince" are so bloody annoying, sometimes they will stop you from continuting to the site if you don't install their malware onto your PC... I just say screw it and leave the site never to return.
There is something I know that we all find annoying, that being signing in to another device with your google account, though I dont ignore those "Security" emails, if I notice something that isn't right I'll take action, but every other time I will delete it immediately... Becuase I really couldn't care. Though that is something that you can just ignore, and I know that the majority of people do, however one of the things that really does annoy the crap out of me is whenever you try to sign in to a device and it required 5 million factor auth, I know my password and email and that's all I want to provide when I'm logging in, whenever it asks for my phone number and wants to send a confirmation text I just nope out and try again later becuase I really hate doing that... Damnit google I just want to log in... come on please...
So other than most of the flaws that only really just annoy the user, chrome is pretty solid, it's secure, fast, modern etc. It is still the best browser, despite all of these problems.
OpenGL
So the only reason I know about OpenGL is from playing Minecraft with friends on PC over the last 4 years, now I know that the program was originally written in Java back in 2009, so yeah it's a pretty old game, and it originally used OpenGL then as well... but that was the alpha/beta/gamma/whatever and that was fine... for a prerelease prototype, now Jave... well it's "okay", definitely not perfect, or that efficient, but it makes it really easy to mod and create your own stuff with, however the renderer is just plain aweful... everyone knows about the lighting glitches and the poor performance and the chunk loading issues.... well that's OpenGL for ya! In all seriousness, they really should have written it in something like DirectX, I don't know if that would even be possible, or whether it would make an improvement... but literally anything is better than OpenGL, and it's not just the cube game from 2009 that has OpenGL issues, there are plenty of other games that run on OpenGL and have horrendous rendering issues... Everybody knows that no matter what you're doing, OpenGL is broken... It is literally a thing people say now "OpenGL is broken", and too right they are... OpenGL is pretty damn broken showing similar issues to pretty mich anything that runs on the API.