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When the first personal home pages came up back when the Internet started to get traction outside the academic and military world, animated gifs were one of the few means to add animations to a page.

While abused largely by the majority of webmasters to display blinking under construction or contact signs, or dancing babies, it was also used by some for other purposes.

Since no plugin was necessary to display the animation, and HTML5 was not there as well, it was favored by some to display moving contents on a website.

When you visit a website in a modern web browser for the first time, contents get loaded from a web server to the local computer.

While some resources may be loaded from cache already, for instance if you visited another page on the same host or if the same third-party host was used on websites that you visited previously.

Most of the time though, contents get loaded from a web server.

Runbot is a free unobtrusive application for Android devices that you can use to track activities such as walking, jogging, cycling or in-line skating.

I spend most of the time in front of the computer on my desktop thanks to the awesome job that I have. I have started to walk everywhere I need to go -- in reasonable distance -- as a counterweight to all that sitting and working on the computer.

Virtual desktops, also called workspaces in some contexts, expand the visual interface of the system usually in the form of copies of the desktop environment but sometimes also by allowing users to scroll on the desktop.

The first platform graced with a virtual desktop managers was Commodore's Amiga 1000 back in 1985. Today, it is natively implement in most Unix-based operating systems and available in form of third-party programs for other operating systems such as Windows.

When Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012 it quickly became clear that the operating system was not performing as well as Microsoft hoped it would.

Windows 8 was not a new Windows 7 sales-wise and the operating system gained usage share slowly as a consequence.

One of the core reasons for this was Microsoft's decision to make the touch-optimized interface standard on all devices. The company added the Start Screen interface -- known as Metro back then -- which meant that users had to switch between the two interfaces regularly.

When you search for a software download on most search engines the official site of the program may be listed as the first result there. Sometimes, that is not the case and this happens often for lesser known applications.

Instead, you may see download portals listed there with the developer site nowhere in sight. That's a problem, not only because many download sites have started to use download wrappers to earn money at the expense of their visitors, but also because malicious sites may exploit this to distribute malware.

Computer hard drives and other storage devices will fail eventually. While you may be able to use them for years without any issues, failures can happen from one moment to the next.

If you are not prepared for that, by making sure your data is backed up safely, you may lose access to the data partially or fully.

While backups are one of the best ways to recover from failing hard drives, they are useful for other purposes as well. They are useful if you need to restore files that were accidentally deleted or to gain access to all the data if a computer gets stolen.

Lightspeed is an idea by Philipp Sackl and Michael Verdi of Mozilla that could make the web simpler to use without sacrificing privacy or security in the process.

I don't like simplifications. I don't like it when companies strip away features from a product or  give you little to no information, and simplification seems to be a trend in current UX design.

When it comes to supporting web browsers, most companies have made the decision to only support the most recent version of it and maybe in addition to that an extended support release version.

Microsoft on the other hand has not done so up until now. This means that all four major versions of Internet Explorer available for Windows 7 are supported by the company.

The operating system shipped with Internet Explorer 8 back in 2009 and users of it can install IE9, IE10 or IE11 on it as well either via automatic updates or manually.

Outdated browser plugins are a huge security risk on today's Internet. While some companies have started to block outdated plugins and insecure ones, others have not done so until now.

Microsoft just announced that it will implement changes to Internet Explorer browsers on Windows 7 and newer operating systems that will block some ActiveX controls that are out of date.