February 2017

Firefox 52 will be the first release version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser that will ship without support for NPAPI plugins.

The only exception to the rule is that Firefox 52 will support Adobe Flash. All other plugins, Silverlight, Java, and all the others, won't be supported anymore in the Firefox version.

While plugin use is on the decline, scenarios exist where plugins are still required to use sites or services on the Internet.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) published a vulnerability note yesterday about a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft Windows 8, 10 and Server editions.

It reads:

Microsoft Windows contains a memory corruption bug in the handling of SMB traffic, which may allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service or potentially execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

NooBoss is a Google Chrome extension management add-on that supports automatic state changes, a history, and better management options among other things.

This includes monitoring extensions for state changes, activating extensions only for select sites, checking the update history of extensions, and basic management options to activate, remove or configure Chrome extensions.

When you buy a video card for gamers, it is often the case that you get a game or multiple games along with it.

These games are provided as codes that you need to enter on Nvidia's website to download and install the games on the PC on popular platforms such as Steam, uPlay or Origin. So, basically, you enter the code on Nvidia's website to get the "real" keys that you can then use to register the game on one of the gaming platforms.

Games included in video card game bundles are usually the latest blockbusters.

UCheck is a free and professional program for Microsoft Windows devices that checks installed software for updates semi-automatically.

Windows, apart from apps that come from Windows Store, does not ship with options to download software or update installed programs from a central repository.

Programs may ship with their own, unique, way of checking for updates, and downloading and installing updates, but not all offer that option.

Nintendo has just released Fire Emblem Heroes, the company's first "real" game for Android, and second game for iOS.

Microsoft pushed out Windows 10 Insider Build 15025 to the Fast Ring channel yesterday evening featuring mostly bug fixes.

Some devices, all running 32-bit versions of Windows 10, are excluded from receiving the update though the company notes in a blog post announcing the new release.

Google, just like Microsoft and probably any other company on the planet that produces software, wants you to use the most recent version of their products and not older versions.

The company tries to keep Google Chrome users current through various means, but most importantly updating services that will check for and download Chrome updates automatically whenever discovered.

LibreOffice 5.3 is the newest version of the popular open source Office suite, and one of the "most feature-rich releases in the history of the application".

The Office suite, available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, is now also available as a private cloud version, called LibreOffice Online.

LibreOffice, at is core, is an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It features Writer, a text editing program similar to Word, Calc, the Excel equivalent, Impress which is similar to PowerPoint, and Draw, which enables you to create graphic documents.

Mozilla targets Firefox 56, out in the second half of 2017, as the first version to feature the organization's new Activity Stream new tab page.