November 2014

Animated gifs have made a comeback in recent time. Not on personal homepages but as short viral video clips that get posted in the hundreds each day on sites such as Reddit, 4Chan or Imgur.

While some are trying to kill animated gifs for good, by replacing them with HTML5 videos, it is likely that the format is not going anywhere in the near future.

All modern browsers play animated gifs just fine and so do the majority of media players. This leaves little room for a desktop program dedicated to playing these animations.

If you want to keep up with news, especially those in the technology and startup world, then it is usually necessary to read news on multiple websites to stay informed.

While you can read all news in a browser regardless of whether you are using a mobile device or desktop computer, dedicated apps are another option.

There are great apps available for popular sites such as Hacker News, Reddit or Product Hunt but barely any offers support for multiple sources.

One-click solutions such as Microsoft Fix-It tools offer simple fixes for issues that you may experience while using a PC. The core benefit of these tools is that you don't need any computing experience to use them.

Anvisoft released PC Plus recently, a collection of one-click tools to fix common PC issues.

You should not have any issues installing the program. It does not include adware or any other potentially unwanted offers.

Whenever I speak to someone who used NoScript for a day or two I'm told that the add-on is complicated and a nuisance.

NoScript, for those of you who do not know it, is an add-on for the Firefox web browser whose main feature is the blocking of scripts running on web pages you visit in the browser.

This includes advertisement, tracking, social media, many media embeds, other third-party scripts such as Discus and also first-party scripts required for functionality on the website itself.

Minimalism seems to be the trend of the hour, or more precisely, of the past two or three years in the browser world. It started with the release of Google Chrome and its minimalistic design and is still ongoing.

Mozilla for example modified the interface of the Firefox browser this year removing interface elements such as the browser's add-on bar in the process.

Russian search giant Yandex launched a web browser based on Chromium in October 2012 using a slightly modified interface.

Mozilla is working on Firefox's multi-process architecture that it calls e10s and interested users can enable it in some versions of Firefox already.

If you have tried it already you may have noticed that some sites or add-ons that you are using are not working properly when e10s is enabled in the browser.

If you are interested in the progress that is being made in regards to add-ons, then you may want to head over to the Are we e10s yet website which lists popular add-ons for Firefox and their compatibility state.

Advertising companies have various methods at their disposal to display advertisement to web users. The best, from a business perspective, is to know as much as possible about a user to display ads catered to potential interests.

If a user visits a lot of car sites, then car ads may be the way to go. This level of understanding can only be achieved by tracking users on the Internet.

Advertisers need to know which sites are visited by the user and which apps are being used to create a profile of that user that is then being a deciding factor in displaying ads to that user.

If you want to watch a movie or TV show at home, either on your computer, another device or your television, then you have quite a few options to do just that.

One method that has risen in popularity in recent time is to stream media. Provided that the Internet connection is fast enough to handle the stream, it is one of the most convenient methods to access TV shows or movies almost immediately.

There are downsides though that users may encounter. One downside is that there is not a single service that is offering access to all TV shows or movies that are available.

Depending on your web browser of choice, you may have encountered webp images before or not at all. The main reason for this is that the format is not supported by all browsers.

While Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome support it, it is still not supported by other popular browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.

This means that sites that are offering webp images are often making use of scripts that check the browser to deliver either webp or a fallback format if webp is not supported.

Proxy server offer a fast and easy way of accessing websites without revealing your IP address. All it takes is to load the proxy website, type or paste the url of the website you want to visit anonymously in the form on that site and hit enter.

There are a couple of things to note. First, there are different scripts available that provide proxy functionality. Some support scripts on target websites, others don't and chance is that you may encounter sites that work only partially or not at all when you open them using proxies.