November 2015

Microsoft announced recently that it added additional means of protection against the installation of so-called potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) to Windows Defender but only for Microsoft Enterprise customers.

It is unclear why Microsoft made the feature an Enterprise exclusive as unwanted software installations are likely more of a problem in home and small business environments than in Enterprise environments.

Work on Firefox's Tracking Protection feature continues as Mozilla plans to give users more control over the feature by adding tracking groups to the system that users can allow or disallow individually.

Tracking Protection is a new privacy feature of Firefox that Mozilla launched in Firefox 42 stable. The mode blocks connections to trackers in the browser's private browsing mode to limit exposure while using the mode.

Private browsing itself takes only care of local data, and the addition of Tracking Protection expands this by blocking remote trackers as well.

The developers of the popular torrent client qBittorrent have released version 3.3 of the software for Windows, Linux and Mac systems.

I switched from uTorrent to qBittorrent years ago as I did not like the direction the once-popular torrent client uTorrent was taking. Just this year for instance, uTorrent shipped a Bitcoin Miner with the application which wasted resources on unsuspecting user systems.

The client shipped with cross-promotions and advertisement as well since 2012.

Pref Helper is a free add-on for the Firefox web browser that reveals preference names behind Firefox options.

The Firefox Options provide users of the web browser with customization settings. While those options pale in comparison to the treasure chest that users find on about:config or the corresponding prefs.js file, a selection of many popular settings are provided directly in the options.

When Microsoft released the retail version of Windows 10, window titlebars supported only the white color. This meant that every titlebar, with some notable third-party exceptions that used their own color scheme, was white.

Microsoft was criticized heavily for the lack of coloring options, promised to do better, and added options to Windows 10 later on to pick a different color for the active window.

Options to pick an accent color from the background, or a fixed color, were added to the Personalization > Color options of the Settings application.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system, just like previous versions of Windows, comes with a truckload of services preinstalled.

Some of these services are required for all Windows 10 systems regardless of type or what they are used for while others may only be required on some systems and not all.

Microsoft takes this into account to a degree by configuring services to start automatically with the system or only manually (meaning when a program requiring them is run on the device).

While Mozilla is still in the process of setting up add-on signing for its Firefox web browser, Google uses the system already for apps and extensions for its Chrome web browser.

Mozilla's add-on signing efforts have been criticized as ineffective recently, and the same can be said for the automated scans that Google runs to filter out malicious extensions or apps before they are listed in the official Chrome Web Store.

Firefox Electrolysis, a new multi-process architecture of the browser also known as e10s, won't see a release in stable Firefox this year.

Mozilla announced back in early 2013 that it was considering reviving the multi-process architecture project for Firefox, and began work in earnest in late 2013.

It made the project a priority in mid-2014, and things looked for a while as if a release was just around the corner.

Electrolysis was enabled in Firefox Nightly shortly thereafter, and found its way into the Developer Edition of Firefox later as well.

DeadLock is a free program for the Windows operating system that helps you unlock files or folders that you cannot delete, move or rename because Windows claims they are still in use.

It seems that most Windows users encounter situations while using a computer running the operating system eventually that prevents them from moving, renaming or deleting files or folders because of "them being in use".

Depending on how you use your computer, you may come in contact with the Microsoft Management Console on a regular basis, once in a while, or not at all.

Home users may come into contact with it when they run tools like the Services Manager (services.msc) or the Performance Monitor (perfmon.msc), but most snap-ins available are used almost exclusively by system administrators.