> But that might be violating the Computer History Museum's license:
Yep, TFA includes this sentence:
> To download the code you must agree to the terms of the license, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
This post prompted me to fix a problem I’ve had for literal years. Forgive the tangent, but I’m so happy that I needed to share. I imagine I’m not the only one who’s run into this particular issue, so hopefully it’s helpful for others too.
If you’d prefer, feel free to skip over the story to the links at the bottom.
I use a single large(ish) monitor and multiple virtual desktops, or “spaces” as macOS calls them. I have Chrome windows on all of my desktops. When I quit Chrome with ⌘Q and then relaunch it, it collects all of my Chrome windows onto one desktop instead of restoring them to the desktops that they were on previously.
For something like 14 years(!), this has driven me up a wall.
Notably, it doesn’t happen when Chrome relaunches to update itself or when I reboot my machine. In those cases, the app happily restores all my windows to their respective desktops. It’s almost as if it’s taunting me: “oh sure, I can do what you want, I just choose not to sometimes.”
Every once in a while, I go down a rabbit hole, trying to find a solution. I always come up empty-handed. Usually I just find a small handful of other people complaining the same issue. It was never a particularly easy thing to google, and it didn’t help that that it wasn’t clear who was even at fault. Was it a Chrome thing? A macOS thing? Maybe some combination of both? Or even worse, maybe it was a “wontfix, works as intended” situation?
Over the years, I’ve learned to cope. I rarely quit Chrome anyway, aside from updates and reboots, so the itch wasn’t that strong. Or maybe the itch just became part of me. Who knows.
But today, reading this post about things that suck in macOS, I thought of my own thing that sucks in macOS. Like remembering an old friend. An old friend who drove you crazy but who, nonetheless, you cared about.
And today, for old times’ sake if nothing else, I once again googled some combination of the words “Chrome”, “restore”, “windows”, “multiple”, and “spaces”. And folks, this time, I found it.
There’s a setting called NSWindowRestoresWorkspaceAtLaunch. (How had I never found this before? It’s so simple!) You can change the setting for any app, not just Chrome.
In case the Stack Exchange network finally succumbs to whims of private equity or otherwise gets lost to sands of time (it’s a fear I have), here’s a gist with the same instructions:
I can also put to rest my internal “feature vs bug” debate. Here’s Apple’s response to a bug report from the Chrome team (presumably from before they added the NSWindowRestoresWorkspaceAtLaunch setting):
This issue behaves as intended based on the following:
Application restart does not preserve space assignment.
We are now closing this bug report.
Digging around a bit more, the original webreference.com (along with this article) existed until around April 2020. It's since been replaced by a generic landing page with a prompt to "subscribe to be the first to know when we relaunch". Shame that the article's URL doesn't work anymore after being maintained for 22 years. I imagine the domain was sold or something?
Double clicking selects a word, and triple-clicking selects the whole line. If I double- or triple-click-and-hold, I can drag the mouse to expand the selection word-wise or line-wise, not just character-wise. This works with the paragraphs of text in the body of this blog post, too.
I had no idea that you could end with a drag to expand your selection by word or by line like that. That's really cool. (The author's using Linux, but it works on macOS too.)
This thread just makes me think of the thankless job of native frontend developers working on Linux/macOS/Windows OSes that made these nuances and behaviors work exactly to a specific standard. Ok, maybe not thankless in the case of Mac and Windows since they probably got paid. :) But yeah, I imagine all the edge cases aren't easy to handle.
Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)
For anyone who's curious, here's a video of the Easter egg in action, along with a some more interesting backstory on Jacques Servin, the programmer in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI&t=495s
your answer doesn’t make any sense in this context. this is a standard whatsapp feature that can not be turned off. you can disable networking and open whatsapp and that flag will not be sent, but also your conversations won’t get updated. jailbreaking doesn’t change any of this.
If you have root you could decrypt the traffic on the fly, and block any data that is not necessary for basic functionality. Maybe even run squid locally, and configure it there. I doubt that's what they meant, and it would take a bit of reverse engineering, but would be kind of fun.
Totally agreed that it's invasive. Same for the "typing" indicator, which also can't be disabled. If I'm writing something longer than a sentence or two, I usually just compose it somewhere else and then copy/paste it into WhatsApp, just to avoid feeling observed.
The fact that those two things can't be disabled actually makes me want to use WhatsApp less. I doubt I'm alone in that. Makes me wonder if Facebook's "engagement" stats account for those types of disincentives.
I also type elsewhere and copy paste to Whatsapp anytime I am writing something longer than a couple lines. I have also disabled the last seen feature. The currently online status seem way worse than last seen and can't be disabled.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/right-repair-law-washi...