October 2017

Google Chrome 62 for Android comes with a set of new features that Google announced on the official Chrome releases blog a couple of days ago.

The most important feature of the set, if you ask me, is the ability to view and copy passwords that users saved using the mobile web browser.

Google announced a change yesterday that affects which version of the company's Maps and Search services users get.

The change affects mobile and desktop searches and Maps access, and returns local results to users regardless of top level domain they have accessed.

Mozilla plans to display permission prompts if websites or services attempt to use HTML5 Canvas Image Data in the Firefox web browser.

Canvas fingerprinting is a byproduct of the HTML5 Canvas technology that all browser makers added to their browsers.

Microsoft's Edge development team launched a new open source website scanner called Sonar yesterday which tests websites for security and performance issues.

Sonar is available as a web tool and command line tool; the web version of Sonar is easier to use though, as it requires just an URL to get started with the scan.

One of the limitations of the new WebExtensions add-on system of the Firefox web browser was up until now that these extensions would not work on some websites operated by Mozilla.

Only WebExtensions are hit by the limitation, and it means that functionality that these extensions provide is not available on sites and services such as addons.mozilla.org or www.mozilla.org.

Extensions cannot manipulate these pages in any way, for instance to provide additional functionality on them, modify content, or even block elements on them.

Mozilla plans to run four new Test Pilot experiments for the Firefox web browser in the coming two quarters.

Test Pilot is a relatively new system that Mozilla uses to test ideas and features, and to gather telemetry data about those features to determine whether to add these features natively to the Firefox web browser.

In a blog post written Oct 25, the Linux Mint team has announced that Linux Mint will be ending the KDE flavor after 18.3 is released.

“In continuation with what’s been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so.”

Mozilla Firefox 57 will launch next month to the browser's stable channel. The version is a milestone release for Mozilla as it introduces new functionality -- see the Firefox quantum article for information on that -- and cuts off the browser's legacy add-on system.

Independent antivirus testing organization AV Test published its September 2017 rankings for Android antivirus solutions.

The organization has done so since 2013 by testing the protection and usability of Android security solutions.

While it is debatable whether antivirus solutions are needed on Android, it is clear that the platform is used to distribute malware.

Google released a new version of the company's official development environment for Android, Android Studio 3.0, to the public yesterday.

Android Studio 3.0 comes with three new features and updates to many existing ones. New app profiling tools, support for the Kotlin programming language, and new tools to speed up the development on the latest Android O APIs.