July 2014

If you copy data from a private browsing window to the clipboard and close the private browsing window afterwards, you will notice that the data is not there anymore.

Firefox empties the clipboard whenever you exit private browsing mode. You can test this easily by opening a new private window in Firefox using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-p, copying text displayed on the introductory page, closing the window again, and trying to paste the copied text to a regular browser window or text document.

The result is that it won't work since there is no data to paste anymore.

I'm spending quite some time on Reddit. During the Football World Cup, I monitored match threads and discussions closely for example, and one thing that became apparent quickly was that Reddit's current feature set was less than ideal for real-time updates.

Game threads would blow up to thousands comments with no option to distinguish between good ones that informed you about something happening, a gif of a foul or goal for instance, and comments that would express opinions or were used to discuss certain aspects of a game.

There are times where you want to monitor if a program connects to the Internet.

Sometimes when you move files or folders from another system to a Windows PC, you may notice that you cannot work with those files or folders in the usual way.

While the files and folders may be transferred without incident to the system, for instance by downloading and extracting an archive on it, it may not be possible to delete, rename, move or copy these files.

There are times where you want to monitor if a program connects to the Internet. Maybe you have just downloaded it and want to check if it connects to servers on the Internet.

This can be used to check if a program is phoning home for instance, or if it is making connections on its own without being initiated by you.

Starting with Firefox 32, Mozilla will check file downloads against Google's application reputation database which is powering Chrome's Safe Browsing feature since 2012.

If you have read the release notes of Firefox 31, you may have noticed the entry "block malware from downloaded files" under What's New.

The integration of the feature in Firefox 31 is the first step in the implementation which will be completed when Firefox 32 is released to the public in six weeks.

Some Internet sites make use of a safe mode to filter out objectionable contents. This is true for search engines such as Google Search, Startpage or Bing, or video sites like YouTube.

When enabled, contents with adult themes may be filtered out automatically by sites. The safe mode is usually set to a moderate level so that select contents get filtered out while others don't.

When it comes to popular computer online shops in the United States, Newegg is without doubt very popular. While it attracts users of all experience levels, the layout and design of the store make it ideal for tech-savvy users who know what they want and understand the lingo that is used on the site.

Browser fingerprinting refers to methods to profile a browser based on information transferred automatically when connections are made to websites or services, or generated with the help of scripts and technologies.

It is unclear how widely browser fingerprinting is being used on the Internet but it is clear that it is used by some companies to track users online.

Often, it is used in conjunction with traditional tracking methods such as cookies or LSO.

Mozilla will release updates for Firefox on all channels and platforms later today that increase the version of the browser by one.

This means that stable users of the browser will get updated to version 31 automatically, while beta, aurora and nightly users are moved to Firefox 32, 33 and 34 respectively.

The update has not been released at the time of writing, but several third-party download sites and Mozilla's official FTP server are already listing it.