February 2015

One of the core reasons why Microsoft's Bing search engine is not well received in most countries is that Microsoft restricts features regionally. It is not the only reason but Bing feels like a second class version in many countries but the US.

One service that is not available for example outside the US is Bing Rewards. Designed as an incentive to use the Bing search engine, members who join the free program earn credits while using Bing.

While most web browsers support extensions and themes, or are about to, you will notice that they don't necessarily share the same capabilities.

Google Chrome for instance has its fair share of extensions and while some of them are unique, it would not be all to difficult to create them for Firefox as well.

The same cannot be said however for certain Firefox extensions as Google Chrome limits the capabilities of extensions far more than Mozilla's browser.

F-Secure is probably best known for its security products that it makes available for desktop and mobile operating systems.

While that is the company's main business, it started to offer other services in recent years including the virtual prvivate network service F-Secure Freedome and the password manager F-Secure Key.

F-Secure Younited, a cloud hosting service, was launched in 2013 publicly when several companies launched cloud-based products.

File management has not evolved a lot from the user perspective in the last ten or so years. If you look at how various versions of Windows handle files, you will notice that there has not been lots of progress.

Sure, Microsoft introduced libraries as a way of accessing certain file types from one central location but since you need to make sure to only save these file types into locations the library picks up, it is far from ideal.

If you are running Windows you may know that the operating system keeps track of a lot of things in the background.

It stores information about recently opened or saved files, recent file access, and programs that were run on the system.

Most content blockers use lists to determine what should be blocked and what should be loaded when a user makes a request.

Options to add custom filters are provided by many blocker extensions. If you are using the popular uBlock extension for example, you know that you can load and unload various network lists but also add your own custom rules that the extension follows to the letter.

When you open the Task Manager on your computer system after starting up Google Chrome and opening a couple of sites, you will notice that Chrome uses one process per tab that you have open in the browser plus one for the browser core and one for eht GPU (graphics processing unit).

It is not really something to worry about unless your system is low on RAM as the browser's memory usage is highly affected by the number of processes that it spawns.

One interesting feature of Firefox on Android is the web browser's reader mode. It is basically replicating functionality that extensions and bookmarklets such as Readability for Firefox, Readability Redux for Chrome or the Readability bookmarklet have offered for years: a way to improve how content is displayed in the browser.

Microsoft's Image Composite Editor received great reviews when the company released it back in 2008.

It was released as a Microsoft Research project back then allowing users to create panoramic images by stitching together multiple photos of the same scene.

All of that was handled automatically by the program which made it very comfortable to use especially since results looked great most of the time.

Reddit is a massive website that offers groups for any topic imaginable. If you want to share your shower thoughts, are a fan of 70s design or like to look at pictures of lazy cats, then you find a group for that on the site.

Chance is high that Reddit has groups for topics that you are interested in. It is rather difficult to find those on the site. While you could use the site's search for that or try your luck by by adding topicsw of interest to the url in the form reddit.com/r/thatsgreat, it is not the most comfortable thing to do.