August 2014

When Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012 it quickly became clear that the operating system was not performing as well as Microsoft hoped it would.

Windows 8 was not a new Windows 7 sales-wise and the operating system gained usage share slowly as a consequence.

One of the core reasons for this was Microsoft's decision to make the touch-optimized interface standard on all devices. The company added the Start Screen interface -- known as Metro back then -- which meant that users had to switch between the two interfaces regularly.

When you search for a software download on most search engines the official site of the program may be listed as the first result there. Sometimes, that is not the case and this happens often for lesser known applications.

Instead, you may see download portals listed there with the developer site nowhere in sight. That's a problem, not only because many download sites have started to use download wrappers to earn money at the expense of their visitors, but also because malicious sites may exploit this to distribute malware.

Computer hard drives and other storage devices will fail eventually. While you may be able to use them for years without any issues, failures can happen from one moment to the next.

If you are not prepared for that, by making sure your data is backed up safely, you may lose access to the data partially or fully.

While backups are one of the best ways to recover from failing hard drives, they are useful for other purposes as well. They are useful if you need to restore files that were accidentally deleted or to gain access to all the data if a computer gets stolen.

Lightspeed is an idea by Philipp Sackl and Michael Verdi of Mozilla that could make the web simpler to use without sacrificing privacy or security in the process.

I don't like simplifications. I don't like it when companies strip away features from a product or  give you little to no information, and simplification seems to be a trend in current UX design.

When it comes to supporting web browsers, most companies have made the decision to only support the most recent version of it and maybe in addition to that an extended support release version.

Microsoft on the other hand has not done so up until now. This means that all four major versions of Internet Explorer available for Windows 7 are supported by the company.

The operating system shipped with Internet Explorer 8 back in 2009 and users of it can install IE9, IE10 or IE11 on it as well either via automatic updates or manually.

Outdated browser plugins are a huge security risk on today's Internet. While some companies have started to block outdated plugins and insecure ones, others have not done so until now.

Microsoft just announced that it will implement changes to Internet Explorer browsers on Windows 7 and newer operating systems that will block some ActiveX controls that are out of date.

Mozilla plans to improve user protection against unwanted search engine manipulations in Firefox by changing the way search engine information are stored in the browser.

Firefox users have to cope with unwanted changes made to the browser more than other users. When it comes to unwanted add-on and toolbar installations, and changes made to the homepage or search provider, it is Firefox that is affected the most by it.

Mozilla plans to improve user protection against unwanted search engine manipulations in Firefox by changing the way search engine information are stored in the browser.

Firefox users have to cope with unwanted changes made to the browser more than other users. When it comes to unwanted add-on and toolbar installations, and changes made to the homepage or search provider, it is Firefox that is affected the most by it.

Software company IObit has released a public beta version of the next version of the company's software uninstaller introducing several new features and support for uninstalling Windows 8 applications.

When it comes to uninstallation of programs on a Windows device, it is often not enough to run the uninstaller the program shipped with to remove its contents from the system. More often than not, leftovers remain behind either in form of files or directories on the system or as Registry entries.

When Opera Software launched Turbo, it was one of a kind service that users of the browser -- desktop and mobile -- could make use of to tunnel traffic through Opera servers to reduce the bandwidth needed to download the data.