February 2015

While efforts are underway to make the web plugin-free, plugins at it stands are still highly popular.

Not only are they installed on nearly every system and integrated in web browsers, they are also required on many sites for some or even all functionality.

I have to admit that I was impressed with what the first version of the Vivaldi web browser brought to the table.

It felt in many regards like a browser that had been there for a long time and not like a new browser that was just released for the first time.

Sure, some features are not there yet and others need some work, but overall I have to say that it looks promising.

Multi Commander is a third-party file manager for the Windows operating system that improves file management and handling significantly in many ways.

Windows Explorer, the default Windows file manager, is limited in many regards. Even basic operations such as copying files from one folder to another or the unpacking of multiple files are not completed easily when it is used exclusively.

Third-party programs like Multi Commander have been designed to replace Windows Explorer to improve file handling on Windows systems.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system is coming out later this year if development does not take a hit between now and then.

The company announced previously that an upgrade to Windows 10 will be free on devices that run a legitimate version of Windows 7 or newer.

The offer is limited to the first year but once upgraded, Windows 10 remains free on those systems.

If you are a regular here you know that you can modify quite a few Google Chrome settings on the chrome://flags/ page.

The majority of settings that you find there are not yet ready for prime time. Some technologies may still be in active development, other features are tested by Google and made available to a wider audience through flags.

Since you find more than a hundred flags on the page at any time, it can be quite time consuming to go through all them regularly to find out what is new.

SuperEasy Live Defrag Free (yes that is the name of the program) is a free file defragmentation program for Windows that ships with advanced features.

Fragmentation occurs when parts of a file get saved in different locations on a hard drive. Since it is necessary to load all parts if the file gets loaded, it may slow down read or write processes on the system.

While that is less of an issue on modern systems, it may still be an issue depending on use and the storage devices that are used on the system.

Offline - An Offline Browser is a free application for Google Android devices that you can use to download web pages to your device to read them at any time even when you don't have an Internet connection at all or one that is unreliable.

This can be quite useful at times. Reading the latest articles of your favorite online newspaper in the subway, having tourist information at hand right away while you are on vacation, or troubleshooting articles from your favorite tech blog that you can use for work.

Cookie use notifications on websites is a very annoying thing on the Internet for a number of reasons. These notifications are displayed on many websites to citizens from the European Union and state, basically, that the site they are visiting is using cookies.

Designed to inform citizens about cookie use on sites they visit, these messages become annoying quickly.

You may experience that they are displayed over and over again to you when you visit the same site. Why? Because the system uses cookies to determine if the notification should be shown to you or not.