In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

Yeah, thank god some people still learn their tools. When I was younger I thought one of the defining characteristics of "techies" is that we open settings/preferences (followed by the advanced version) as soon as we get our hands on a piece of software. Unfortunately it seems the overall techie population is just getting lazier and lazier (not lazy in a good way), and now the norm is, or is sliding towards open the box -> whine about things not working out-of-box when the feature is right there -> find suboptimal workarounds on StackOverflow or random blogs posted by lazy people.

The fact that I like configuration is the reason that I ditched Chrome at home and moved from it to Firefox to Waterfox to Palemoon, where I can use Pentadactyl to customize far beyond the limits of any browser I'd used before.

At work I have to use Chrome (and worse, Chrome OS), and I used the settings to disable syncing between the devices I switch between (because I don't want Google to have any extra excuses to handle my data). Some of them I only use for an hour, so I optimize my customizations to be made quickly. I switch the default search engine to get thousands of keywords in seconds, then load AdNauseum for ads, then depending on how long and what I'll use the browser for, I'll get Surfingkeys or a similar extension for general vim-bindings (I've switched between more of these than I have fingers on one hand because they're all inferior to Pentadactyl in somewhat different ways) and wasavi for more extensive vi-like bindings in text fields.

Worth pointing out then that DDG has a number of shortcuts built-in. If you don't care about passing a query through them, it already works.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The most-used is probably !g, which sends your query to google. For wikipedia, it's !w.