January 2017

One of the major improvements that comes along with Firefox's new multi-process architecture is sandboxing to improve the browser's security.

The multi-process rollout is chugging along nicely, but it will still take at least months before it is enabled by default for all, or at least the majority, of Firefox Stable users.

Electrolysis, Firefox's multi-process architecture, is the prerequisite for Firefox's sandboxing feature as it makes use of child processes to establish security boundaries.

Context Menu Tuner is a free program for Microsoft Windows that enables you to add various functions to the right-click context menu on Windows.

Many companies that produce software seem to have a Wild West mentality when it comes to adding items to the context menu on Windows. Add first, and maybe provide options to remove the context menu entries again in the program settings.

This is especially problematic for functions that you will never use, as they make orientation worse and may delay operations that you want to execute.

Intel Driver Update Utility is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices to search for, download, and install Intel driver updates.

It is usually a good idea to keep drivers up to date, especially if newer drivers improve the old or add new features that you may be interested in.

While there is certainly something to "never change a running system" as well, driver updates may improve a component's performance, stability or other parameters such as temperature.

Microsoft announced on Thursday that the original release version of Windows 10 will reach the end of servicing on January 26, 2017.

Windows 10 version 1507 was released in July 2015 by Microsoft. It was the Windows 10 RTM version that Windows customers could purchase, or upgrade for free to.

Microsoft released two feature updates for Windows 10 since then. First the so-called November Update, released in November 2015, and then the Anniversary Update, released in August 2016.

Valve published a new update for its Steam gaming platform recently that allows users of the service to move installed Steam games to another folder.

The company did add options to change the install folder of Steam games in 2012, but never introduced an option to do the same for games or apps already installed on the computer.

The new option enables you to move installed Steam games to another folder or hard drive. This can be quite useful, for instance when you want to move older games to another hard drive to make room on your primary hard drive for new games.

When Adobe released an update for the company's Adobe Acrobat Reader DC software in January, it installed alongside with it a browser extension for Google Chrome.

This "feature" was not mentioned in the changelog, and users had no option to block the installation. Chrome's security mechanism when it comes to the installation of browser extensions did kick in however, and blocked the extension from being enabled automatically.

Mozilla plans to roll out a new feature in Firefox 53 that makes finding the right item in large select fields more comfortable by adding a search to the field.

Select fields provide you with a set list of items that you select one from. This works well if there are not too many items, but once scrolling is involved, it can become a nuisance.

While you can usually type the first two or three characters of the item you want to select rapidly, if you know its name, this only works if they are the beginning characters.

Rufus is an easy to use portable software program for Microsoft Windows devices to create bootable USB drives using ISO images.

It appears that I have never reviewed Rufus before here on Ghacks, even though I mentioned it a couple of times in the past when it came to the creation of bootable USB media.

Bootable USB media is quite common these days, as more and more PCs and laptops seem to ship without optical drive.

A report on Cnet suggests that 3D TV won't be the next big thing after all, as the last two major TV makers of 3D TVs announced that they would stop producing 3D TVs in 2017.

The revival of 3D in home entertainment began with the release of Avatar back in 2010, but the technology never really took off.

Microsoft pushed out a new Windows 10 Insider Build today, bringing the latest version of the development version to version 15014.

The company published a blog post on the Windows Experience Blog that highlights major changes, and issues that users may experience.

As always, the features listed here will likely be part of the Windows 10 Creators Update. This is the next major feature upgrade of Windows 10 that Microsoft plans to release to all users in April 2017.

Note though that things may change during development.