Ask Paul: July 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here is a blessedly shorter than usual Ask Paul to end this short week and get the weekend started a bit early.
File Explorer bug
staganyi asks:

Sorry if this was asked/discussed before, but ever since upgrading to w11 22h2 build 22621.169, windows explorer is always reverting to the "group by - date modified" view. Even if I change it, it comes back. I've tried a few tricks from the past but nothing sticks. I prefer not to use the group by view. Anyone else encountering this?

I have not experienced this, but I’m on build 22621.105 everywhere. Which means that there is some difference between where I’m at (the Beta channel) and where you’re at (the Release Preview channel, it appears). Oddly, there is a newer build available to PCs enrolled in the Beta channel, but I’m not seeing it for some reason. But regardless, the Release Channel build was, until two days ago, on a higher build number than was the Beta channel, but the latter is now up to 22621.290.

I guess we can chalk this up to a pre-release bug, but it’s still concerning. I’m curious if anyone else is seeing this?
Why not Firefox?
SherlockHolmes asks:

I was surprised to read about your switch to Brave instead of Firefox. I remember that you switched happily to Firefox from Edge not long ago. What are the reasons for you to switch again? For me Firefox is the only browser that acts exactly the way I like my browser to act. That said, I dont mind the little features Firefox doesnt has over Chrome browsers.

I love the idea of Firefox, of course, but it has a few issues that always drive me away. Some are very much “me” specific: it’s much harder (for me), for example, to find images that you can’t download directly from a website, which is something I have to do each week. For example, there’s a thumbnail image for each Windows Weekly episode that I can’t get to directly from the page, but when I go into the Sources view Developer Tools in any Chromium-based browser, it’s very easy to get to.

I could probably work around that. But in my continual testing of various browsers, it’s very clear that Firefox performs the worst of the lot, both the app itself and the page renderer. And I don’t like various UIs in Firefox, especially how it handles downloads (also a problem in Edge) and Find in page.

(One interesting exception: I really like and still sometimes use Firefox on the iPad.)

Brave just works exactly as I want it to. It offers the best performance, built-in tracking and ad blocking that actually works without the need for multiple extensions, a minimalist UI, and all those little things that bug me about Firefox just work as expected.

I guess I’d also add that Firefox pretty much explicitly ignores PWAs now, which I don’t understand. To be fair, this isn’t a feature I “need” a lot---the ability to install a web app and run it as a standalone app in Windows---but I feel that this is the future of ...