May 2015

Remember Flickr? The last big update the site received dates back to 2013 when it upgraded free accounts to 1 TB of storage and introduced several other changes to the site.

In a blog post entitled "It's finally easy to upload, access, organize, edit, and share any photo you've ever taken" Flickr announced the next major update to the site that it just launched.

Mozilla has added a new feature to Firefox 39 which emulates some -webkit prefixes on select sites to improve compatibility of those sites in the Firefox browser.

One issue that you may run into when browsing sites on the Internet is that web developers may have used vendor specific prefixes for styling. While that is not an issue if alternatives have been implemented, it can cause display issues when that is not the case.

Common prefixes are webkit, used by Chromium-based browsers, moz, used by Mozilla-based browsers, and ms used by Internet Explorer.

Pale Moon 25.4 has just been published. The new version of the web browser is already available via the browser's automatic update feature and the official website.

The release is a major update that introduces several important fixes and changes to Pale Moon. Apart from that, it is patching several security issues making it a mandatory update for all users of the browser.

As far as major improvements are concerned, there are a few that need to be mentioned.

Google's Accessibility team has released two new Chrome extensions recently that improve the browser's accessibility in two specific ways.

Animation Policy is a Chrome extension that gives you more control over animated image formats in the browser.

Animations run in a never ending loop in Chrome by default which is not always the best usability experience especially since there is no quick option  to stop the animation once the image has loaded fully in the browser.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.