I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing. In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
>> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.
I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using.
Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
On my mac I just use the built in calculator in spotlight. So cmd+space opens the spotlight search widget and then I can just type in whatever I need calculated. Not sure if something like this is built into Windows? More often than not I use Google as my calculator when on Windows.
I use Raycast for the same, but does that do multiple calculations? Ie. 184 + 64 then multiplied by 4, etc.
You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and your calculation goes away.
> Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS notification center. It's accessed in any app through a trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the menu bar.
For now. This is what, the third iteration of widgets on Mac?
The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely.
You also need to know the feature exists (they had notifications before widgets, people might not know it was updated to support them), that there exists a calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use it. That's the same discoverabiloty problem, with the added wrinkle that functionality changed in Monterey.
