February 2016

Tabli is a free browser extension for Google Chrome and compatible web browsers that improves the tab management in several significant ways.

One of the main limitations of Google Chrome is the browser's non-scrolling tab bar. The more tabs you open in a browser window, the less information about each open tab is displayed by the Chrome browser.

Eventually, all you get are very small tabs that don't show text or site favicons at all making it nearly impossible to identify open websites in the browser.

Google added two new security indicators to its email service Gmail which reveal TLS encryption support and whether the sender could be authenticated.

Many popular email services, including Gmail, support TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption to protect data while it is in transit.

TLS is only useful if both the sending and receiving email service supports it, and one of the new features highlights on Gmail when TSL encryption is not supported by another service.

Quick Access Popup, an updated version of Folders Popup, provides you with the means to open folders on Windows quickly with just a mouse-click.

The main idea behind the program is to provide Windows users with the means to access popular folders and custom folders easily from anywhere.

You may have encountered situations before where you need to click several times in Windows Explorer or in an open/save dialog to navigate to the folder you are looking for.

A consortium of Chinese Internet companies, among them Kunlun and Qihoo 360, plan to acquire Norwegian company Opera Software in a buyout valued at $1.2 billion US Dollars.

Rumors about a potential acquisition of Opera Software, or a sale of company assets, have circulated around the Internet as early as 2012.

While there has surely been interest by many companies to acquire Opera Software, no offer has been made publicly until yesterday.

Sourceforge, once the go-to site for open source project management, has experienced a rough time in recent years thanks to the rise of competing services like GitHub, but also because of the DevShare program and placement of advertisement on the site.

Projects hosted on SourceForge could apply for the DevShare program to bundle adware with project installers for the Windows operating system.

If you are a regular here on Ghacks Technology News you know that I cover Windows Updates each month here on this site.

The overview is designed to help Windows users make educated decisions about the patches that Microsoft releases in a given month.

This works out fine most of the time, as I can use Microsoft Knowledgebase articles to find out more about updates that the company released in a particular month.

The Microsoft Security Bulletins overview for February 2016 provides you with detailed information about security and non-security patches that Microsoft released for its Windows operating system and other company products since the January 2016 release.

The overview begins with an executive summary listing the most important facts. What follows afterwards is the patch distribution across different client and server versions of the Windows operating system, and other Microsoft products.

It is difficult to find out how well -- or not -- Microsoft's new operating system Windows 10 is doing, and whether it is likely that Microsoft will hit the 1 billion or more devices running the operating system in two to three years after launch.

The company has been tight lipped about the progress, and revealed numbers only sporadically in the past.

Piratebay Stream It is a new option on the popular torrent indexing website that enables users of the service to stream media torrents directly instead of downloading them using a torrent client.

Streaming is on the rise and services such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime offer access to traditional TV and movie formats as well as originals and exclusives produced for these individual services.

The author of Tampermonkey, a popular script loader for Chromium-based web browsers, has released a beta port of the add-on for the Firefox web browser.

The browser extension is only compatible with Firefox 46 and newer at the time of writing (the current stable version of Firefox is version 44.0.1). If things go as planned, Firefox 46 will be released to the stable channel on April 19, 2016.