January 2017

Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer.

If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. The list includes information about each plugin, including a name and description, location on the local system, version, and options to disable it or set it to "always run".

Microsoft is working on improving the updating options of some editions of its Windows 10 operating system currently that provide users with better options to defer updates.

The option to defer updates in current versions of Windows 10 is limited in several regards. First, it is only available if the Windows 10 edition is Pro, Enterprise or Education.

Trails is a new lossless web navigation experiment by Mozilla with the aim to fix the tabbed browsing issue of losing information during navigation.

The traditional tabbed browsing model has not changed all that much in the past 15 or so years. The majority of modern browsers supports tabs, and browsers keep track of the browsing history of each tab individually.

Microsoft launched the first functional version of Game Mode, a game performance improving feature, yesterday with the Windows 10 build 15019 update.

After having some troubles getting the update to install on the test machine running a recent Insider Preview version of Windows 10, I finally managed to do so this morning.

The core idea behind Game Mode is taken from Microsoft's Xbox One console: prioritize the game over other processes on the device.

The respected Firefox add-on developer Quicksaver announced yesterday that he won't update any of his extensions anymore because of Mozilla's decision to move to WebExtensions exclusively.

Quicksaver, responsible for add-ons such as Tab Groups, OmniSidebar, FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis and Puzzle Bars, had four of his five add-ons for Firefox featured by Mozilla in the past.

The story of 64-bit Firefox on Windows is a long and complex one, and it is just about to end with Mozilla moving from offering 32-bit Firefox as the default download option to offering 64-bit Firefox on Windows by default.

Mozilla Firefox is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version on Windows, with 32-bit still the default right now when it comes to downloads.

While the 32-bit version works well, and it is the only option for systems without a 64-bit processor, it is the 64-bit version that users should consider using if their device is equipped with a 64-bit cpu.

Malwarebytes 3.0.6 is the latest version of the popular security program for Windows that is available as a free and premium version.

The company, also called Malwarebytes, released version 3.0 of the program not too long ago. The update changed things around quite a bit, and not all for the better.

Whisply is a free online service that enables you to transfer files in a secure way to others using the cloud storage providers Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive.

You have plenty of options when it comes to the transferring of files to others. Use email, FTP, a cloud storage provider, snail mail, personal meet and transfer, or a free file hosting service.

The Windows operating system is configured to display all available wireless networks when WiFi is enabled on the device running the operating system.

This is helpful of course, as it enables you to pick the wireless network from the list of available ones to connect to it.

It becomes less useful once you have made the decision. If you only connect to one wireless network for instance, you may want to hide the other wireless networks to speed up the process and avoid picking the wrong network from the list.

The most recent Nightly version of the Firefox browser, Firefox Nightly 54, ships with two content processes instead of just one.

Firefox's multi-process architecture still rolls out to Firefox stable versions. That process will still take a couple of release cycles to reach all users of the stable version of the Firefox web browser.

Firefox uses a content process for all tabs open in the browser, and a separate process for the browser core.  Separating the core browser from the rest improves stability, and also responsiveness and other metrics of the browser.