Online chess sites, the new ailment of developing chess players

Something peculiar came up in my coaching adventures of recent months. I actually managed to enter the chess world just about before the arrival of Chessbase, but ever since I took the workflow in the screenshot above (from free database ChessX) for granted: Fire up the database, select some games, turn engine on and off as required. And yes, just like many poor users of Chessbase today, we did depend a lot on cracked versions back then, one typical behavior would be to buy Chessbase 5, use 6 7 8 and 9 cracked, then buy Chessbase 10 again.

Nothing could have prepared me for how the internet generation is treating computers though: it is all Web2.0, ignoring even the best freeware, saving games online regardless if they can download them again in convenient fashion, using cloud chess engines. That's all fine and dandy, except for the many ways in which the free cloud offerings suck, especially those engines, even if you are offered the javascript version of Stockfish. So, a quick word of caution: you want to work on your chess? So do yourself a favor, download and install ChessX, Scid or Arena, install Stockfish at least, and get KingBase to kickstart a decent game collection. And never, ever come to me with chess24 engine evaluations