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April 2018

Of software downloads and unique identifiers

When you visit a website, there is a chance that you are tracked by the operators of the site or by third-parties. Whether that is the case or not depends on the site in question and which site party connections it makes.

Software vendors and download sites may track users that visit the website. They may track the pages that users open or where they came from.

What most Internet users may not know is that they may also embed unique identifiers in software downloads.

Get Firefox Share back with Share Backported

Mozilla removed the Share icon and functionality from the Firefox browser when it launched Firefox 57, generally known as Firefox Quantum.

Share integrated sharing functionality directly in Firefox. Instead of having to rely on share functionality on sites, by extensions, or by using manual means to share, Firefox users could activate the share button to use the built-in functionality.

Wikipedia adds page preview functionality

Browsing on the world's largest community powered online encyclopedia Wikipedia just got a whole lot easier thanks to the integration of page preview functionality on the site.

The new feature displays a preview of any internal Wikipedia link that you hover the mouse cursor over. Just hover the mouse over any link on the site to display the preview.

Windows Defender System Guard in Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

Microsoft added a new security feature called Windows Defender System Guard to Windows 10  versions when it released the Fall Creators Update version of the operating system back in October 2017.

Windows Defender System Guard was designed to " create the condition that the integrity of the system can’t be compromised" to protect against boot-level attacks such as rootkits or bootkits.

First look at Google Chrome's UI design refresh

Users of Google Chrome Canary, the cutting edge version of Google's web browser, have a chance to get a sneak peek of a user interface design refresh that Google may plan to launch in all versions of Chrome eventually.

The feature is hidden behind a flag currently but that is a common practice by Google; the company uses flags to hide future features from the general population. While there is no guarantee that features will land in Chrome one day, it is often the case that Google uses experimental flags to prepare the wider release.

Prevent Hard Drives and External Storage from powering down

Some internal and external hard drives use power saving functionality to power down (go to sleep) after some time of inactivity. That's beneficial for power consumption but it adds a spin-up delay when the drive is accessed.

Solid State Drives are not affected by this as they use different technology but if you use platter-based drives you may have noticed that they won't react immediately to user commands after inactivity.