Can you explain the first usecase in more detail to me? I don't understand what's different in it compared to normal downloading.

aria is a comandline download utility. Link: https://aria2.github.io/ Basically it's like idm which downloads files faster than your browsers.

I would love to see what those UIs looked like, but I'm completely unfamiliar with it. What should I search on Google to get proper results?

Thanks! I didn't think about searching on fdroid.

Why does Google do this? Now I wonder what good apps I can't find due to them not being updated.

My guess is probably both to free space from their servers and to ensure that unknowing users aren't downloading an app that doesn't have somewhat recent security patches.

Why is IE still in use and what's stopping people from switching over to something new?

What do you mean by smart bookmarks?

Address bar commands that substitute a given argument in a URL when a given search key is used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark

For searching in Hacker news, I saved the URL 'https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s' with the search key 'hn'. So when I want to search something around here, I just type

    hn something

which then replaces the %s variable with 'something'

   https://hn.algolia.com/?query=something

There is Javascript code that allows for two or more arguments, but saving that as a bookmarklet isn't as neat.

Is the custom Google search engine same as the main one in terms of its algorithm?

Partially but no, it’s comparatively pretty bad after playing with it a lot.

It seems to be based on a much older and more literal algorithm where it buries a relevant post on page 3 just because the keyword was not perfectly in the title.

Probably intentional or they just don’t prioritize since a small % of people use it.

Better to use “site:” search for your fav blogs instead.

You could also just do:

> pancakes site:reddit.com/r/memes

Consider using the "Minimal Twitter" browser extension. That solved for me the issue you're dealing with.

Or try element picker from ublock origin.

Where can I see an index of all posts?

> Give me a way to disable the download finished popup notifier.

When was this shipped? I have no idea why this is a thing now, but it's incredibly annoying.