June 2015

I have been following the development of the Firefox web browser for a long time. In fact, I switched to Firefox very early on in development and began to write about the browser back in 2005 when I launched this blog.

Back then, the core development philosophy was to create and maintain a user-friendly browser with a high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem that adds new features to the browser.

If I had to rate annoying things that I encounter on the Internet on a scale, auto-playing videos would certainly make it to the top of the list, especially if they are not configured to start muted by default.

But even if videos start muted, they are a huge annoyance as they may distract users, suck up bandwidth or waste cpu cycles.

Whenever I'm not at home, I'm taking my ThinkPad laptop with me hat I installed Linux Mint on. While I could run a flavor of Windows on the device as well, I made the deliberate decision to install Linux on the device to discover what it has to offer.

Shiela USB Shield is a free security program for Windows operating systems that protects PCs from USB threats.

USB Devices are often used to spread malicious software. This can be software that replicates itself on USB devices or specifically prepared code to attack select systems only.

The free Windows software Shiela USB Shield offers real-time protection against threats coming from removable devices using USB connections.

Google Inc. runs a field test in Indonesia currently in which the company redirects mobile search users who are using slow Internet connections to a transcoded version of the original page that has been automatically optimized for fast access.

Live is not easy if you are a webmaster. Not only do you have to keep up with the ever changing world of SEO and marketing, you also have to ensure that your sites display and function properly in all (modern) browsers.

Valve updated the company's store yesterday with Steam Machine information and pre-order options. The information displayed depend on the region you are in. If you are connecting from Germany for instance, you don't get any information besides the base price of each device on offer while gamers from the US get pre-order links and stats for each machine that they can order.

The following guide lists stats for all Steam machines that are currently offered on Steam. That's the Alienware Steam machine starting at $449 and the Syber Steam Machine which starts at $499.

Websites go overboard sometimes with Flash contents which you may notice as it may stop web browsers dead in their tracks, consume lots of battery if you are on a mobile device, or use lots of cpu cycles.

Whatever it is, it is usually easy to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant content. For instance, if you are on a video site the video that is playing is relevant and important, but the Flash ad that is displayed somewhere on the site may not be.

If you need to run command prompt commands regularly in Windows, it may be useful to save the command somehow so that you can run it whenever the need arises without having to type it all out again.

While you can use batch files for that, it is also possible to use shortcuts instead. The core difference between the two options is that you can only run a single command using shortcuts while you can run a series of commands and get better customization options when using batch files.

Yahoo Inc. announced the shut down of several company products including Yahoo Maps and Pipes yesterday.

Yahoo Pipes, which we first covered back in 2008 here on ComTek4u, is one of the prominent products that Yahoo selected to discontinue.

The service allowed you to collect and use data from around the web to create new products or information based services.

Android's consumer-unfriendly permissions system makes it difficult for users to find out what applications do in the background.

While it is possible to root phones and install applications that provide detailed information about the background tasks an app runs on a device running Android, it is safe to say that most Android users cannot install those apps because their devices are not rooted.

It is difficult to find out if an application connects to Internet servers and even more so when it comes to the data that is transferred in the process.