January 2015

If you have been to YouTube recently and played a couple of videos on the site you may have noticed that new videos were loaded automatically at the end of the one you were just watching.

While that is similar to how the playlist feature on YouTube works, it is completely different from it as it happens when you are playing individual videos on the site.

The video hosting site YouTube supports Adobe Flash and HTML5 Video and delivers videos based on the web browser and system used to access the site.

Chrome users were defaulted to the HTML5 video player for some time now for instance while Firefox or Internet Explorer users to Adobe Flash instead for the most part.

YouTube announced yesterday that it made the decision to make HTML5 video the default on the website for all versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8 and Firefox Beta or newer.

Do you know how many USB ports your computer has and how many USB devices are connected to these ports?

While that is usually not of importance to users who just work with the PC, it may become important sometimes when things don't work as expected.

If you connect a fast USB 3.0 drive to a USB 2.0 port for instance, you may wonder why data transfers take so long.

And if a device is not working at all, you may need to check the available ports as well.

You have two core options to connect to the Internet with your smartphone or mobile device: WiFi or using mobile connections.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. While you may run into privacy issues while using wireless connections that you don't have full control over, mobile connections are often limited bandwidth-wise which means that you may increase your mobile bill using them or limit the connectivity options once you hit a certain threshold.

It may sometimes be necessary to clear site-specific cookies. Maybe because you are a web developer and need to test a service, want to remove cookies after you are done visiting a website, or want to clear cookies to find out if they have been the cause for issues you have experienced in the past.

Most Chrome users are probably using the Cookies settings page to remove cookies for individual sites in the browser.

Whenever you connect to sites on the Internet information about the connection and the underlying system are available to the site automatically.

Information includes the web browser and version used to connect, the language, operating system and also the remote IP address.

While there are means to prevent the IP address from being revealed, by using proxy servers or virtual private networks for example, one IP address is revealed in the end.

The technical preview of Vivaldi, a Chromium/Blink based web browser by Opera co-founder and former CEO John von Tetzchner is now available.

The Opera browser is best known for innovations that Opera Software introduced to the browser, and while not all of them stuck, many were copied by other browsers in the end.

The browser never managed to get significant market share on the desktop and things changed completely when the company announced that it would move to Blink used by Google Chrome.

WinToUSB is a free program for Windows that allows you to copy Windows installation files to a USB drive to run the installation from that drive.

This can be useful in numerous occasions, for instance when the device you want to install Windows on has no optical drive.

All you have to do is select an ISO image or Windows installation disc, select a connected USB drive and let the program handle the rest.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 35.0.1, a stability update for the web browser that fixes eight issues in total including three that may have caused crashes on user systems.

The new version comes exactly two weeks after the release of Firefox 35 which caused add-on related issues for some users.

Remember Facebook Lite? Facebook experimented with a low-resource version of the website back in 2009 and discontinued the site a year later in 2010 citing that Facebook Lite was not optimized for mobile devices and that apps should be used instead.

The company did release and remove several apps in the meantime for mobile users and while those worked fine on most devices, they were not optimized for low-resource devices.