November 2015

Saved Telemetry Pings and datareporting/archived are two local folders in the Firefox profile that the browser started to populate with data recently. Users on development versions may find months worth of telemetry data in those folder while stable users only recent data.

What makes this puzzling is that the data is created even if Firefox is configured to not collect telemetry data.

You can check the configuration by loading about:preferences#advanced in the browser's address bar and switching to the data choices tab when the page opens.

After delivering bad news in form of two Firefox feature deprecations -- Tab Groups and Full Theme support will be removed from Firefox -- Mozilla is also working on removing Pocket's native code from Firefox to make it a system add-on instead.

Mozilla made quite a few controversial moves in past years, and if you ask Firefox users, you probably find the native integration of Pocket up there at the top next to launching the Australis interface or the end of NPAPI plugin support.

After making it clear that full theme support will be discontinued in Firefox, Mozilla announced that it will remove another feature from the browser.

Tab Groups, formerly known as Panorama, allow the creation of groups of tabs that the user can switch between to limit the number of open tabs in the browser at the same time.

The feature was initially offered as an add-on before it was integrated in Firefox 4 as a native feature.

Mozilla announced yesterday that it plans to remove heavyweight theme support from Firefox as part of the organization's great or dead initiative.

Heavyweight themes, sometimes also called full themes or complete themes, can modify all elements of the web browser opposed to so-called lightweight themes which modify basic elements such as the header bar only.

Reader Mode, initially launched for Firefox on Android in 2012, landed in the beginning of this year on Firefox for the desktop.

First only available in Firefox Nightly and locked behind a preference, it is now enabled by default in all versions of the web browser.

ShareMouse 3, a program to control multiple computer systems with a single mouse, has been updated recently to version 3. The new version introduces support for Windows 10 and Apple OSX El Capitan, improved network code and more.

If you work on two computer systems side by side, and it does not matter if its a desktop system and laptop, a tablet, or even a system running another operating system, then you have to use different input types connected to those devices.

Malwarebytes, makers of the popular Anti-Malware application for the Windows operating system, has just released a new version of Anti-Exploit.

Anti-Exploit is a security program for Windows that detects and blocks some types of exploits that can  cause great harm on unprotected systems.

One elegant option to deal with file corruption on a Windows system is to run the SFC /scannow command on the machine running the operating system.

SFC, which stands for System File Checker, scans all protected system files for corruption and attempts to repair it by copying a cached copy of each corrupted file from the system32\dllcache folder.

This works sometimes but not all of the time. For instance, if the cached copy is corrupted as well, then it won't succeed.

Android fragmentation continues to be a serious issue not only for application developers and manufacturers, but also for end users.

Android is without doubt the most popular mobile operating system out there. While other mobile systems may be more popular in certain regions, it is Android that is dominating most markets.

Security firm Lookout discovered a new form of Android adware recently that goes through great length to make sure it stays on the device it has infected.

The adware comes in form of re-packaged applications that Android users download from third-party stores or other sources that offer Android apk files.