Skip to main content

What's New

 

 

TekBits Technology News

Viewhance improves Firefox’s image and video viewer

The Firefox web browser comes with built-in image and video viewers that are used by it if supported file types are not associated with other programs or browser extensions.

The image viewer is bare bones as it lets you view and zoom images, and so is the media player used by the browser.

Viewhance is a new Firefox add-on that improves the functionality of these two viewers in Firefox.

You gain immediate access to a large list of extra features and interface modifications right after installation.

Microsoft Edge benefits significantly from Mozilla’s asm.js

One fundamental difference between Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, the company's upcoming web browser, is that Microsoft began to integrate third-party technologies into Edge.

One of those technologies is Mozilla's asm.js which provides performance improvements for web applications that are closer to native code than standard JavaScript.

The current version of Microsoft Edge ships with preliminary asm.js integration that users that run recent Windows 10 builds can enable in the browser.

First Firefox uMatrix build created

The first Firefox build of uMatrix has been created by Gorhill on Github. The release is dubbed a "very early preview" and users are asked not to file feature requests currently.

The Firefox version of uMatrix is currently only available on Github from where you can download and install it in the browser.

Please note that only the English version will display properly while you may get missing strings in the options in other versions.

Google’s fight against Ad Injectors continues

So-called ad injectors are programs that insert ads into pages visited in web browsers. This is harmful in many ways not only to users who are often bombarded with ads, popups and other unwanted annoyances but also webmasters and businesses who finance their sites through advertisement and advertising networks.

Google notes in a new blog post on the official Chrome blog that ad injectors are the number one complaint of Chrome users in 2015.

Display WMI Query results with Nirsoft’s SimpleWMIView

One of the features that Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provides is the ability to run WMI queries that provide you with information about the system you are running the program on.

For example, a basic request can display all running 32-bit processes on the system, information about user profiles and their state or storage volume information.

While they are mostly used for administrative or development purposes, they can be useful on end-user systems as well.

Will Microsoft ship Windows 10 with a dark theme?

One of the first things that comes to my mind when I think of Windows 10 is how light and bright the default theme of it is.

While Microsoft modified some of that, for instance by making the taskbar and start menu background color darker, programs like File Explorer are almost entirely made up of white and grey.

To make matters worse, options to control window colors and other color-related settings have moved or seem to be not available at all anymore in recent builds.

How Microsoft wants to make email more effective

Email is still strong when it comes to communicating with others on the Internet, especially in business but also elsewhere.

It has been around for a long time and has not changed all that much in that time especially when it comes to inbox management and how data is handled.

For instance, a typical workflow looks like the following: you get an email with a work file attached to it that you should read, edit and transfer back.

Microsoft reveals what Edge won’t support: ActiveX, VBScript, more

We all know by now that Windows 10 will ship with a new default browser that Microsoft calls Edge.

While it won't be the only browser that ships with the system, as Internet Explorer is still available for legacy applications, it will be at the center stage of Windows 10.

If you compare what Microsoft Edge delivers right now to Internet Explorer, you will notice that Edge is as bare bones as it gets in many regards.

First look at Gog Galaxy Beta client

The gaming online store Gog.com announced in mid-2014 that it would release a DRM-free Steam, uPlay and Origin alternative called Galaxy in the near future.

What made this particularly interesting, apart from the fact that the company would keep true to its no-DRM policy, was that Galaxy would be offered as an optional and not a mandatory component.