July 2017

Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution is one of the, if not THE, most popular distributions of any GNU/Linux systems available; and now the company is looking for input from the masses on what software should be included in Ubuntu 18.04.

The next long-term support release of the popular GNU/Linux operating system from Canonical is scheduled for April 2018, and will feature a number of changes; most notable is the switch from the Unity desktop environment and the return to GNOME.

Google moved the option to display certificates in Google Chrome from the site properties menu to the Developer Tools.

All you had to do previously to display the certificate of a site in Chrome was to click on the site icon in the browser and select details to display the certificate in the browser.

USB 3.0 was a big step up from USB 2.0 in terms of performance, which in turn was a big improvement over USB 1.0.

It then got a bit confusing when USB 3.1 was introduced, as it was decided to rename USB 3.0 devices to USB 3.1 Gen 1, and pave the way for USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices on top of that.

USB 3.1 Gen 2, or SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps, is the fastest version of USB right now. It offers speeds up to 10 Gbit/s which effectively doubles the speed of USB 3.1 Gen 2 devices which are good for a maximum transfer speed of 5 Gbit/s.

Windows Repair 4.0 is the newest version of the popular repair software for Microsoft Windows that is available as a free and professional version.

The program, which the developers recommend to run in safe mode with networking, is designed to fix numerous issues that Windows users may experience on their Windows machines.

Windows Repair fixes issues with Windows programs and settings, and advanced issues such as file permission problems.

When Google launched Google Instant Search back in 2010, the company called it a fundamental shift in search that would save searchers time when running searches on Google.

Instant Search displayed search results page to the user during the process of typing the actual search phrase the user was interested in.

In best case, it would display the desired results earlier. In worst case, it would throw a number of unrelated search results page at you while you tried to focus on typing your search query.

Mozilla plans to launch the three new Test Pilot experiments Voice Fill, Notes and Send for the Firefox web browser soon.

Voice Fill adds voice commands for running searches on search engines to Firefox, Notes adds notepad functionality, and Send an option to transfer files securely by using encryption.

Mozilla launched the first wave of Test Pilot experiments back in May 2016, and new experiments regularly afterwards.

Development of the next feature update of Windows 10, the Fall Creators Update, is slowly coming to an end as Microsoft shifted development from adding features in builds to fixing issues and giving the new version a bit of polishing before release.

If you use the Google application on Android, you may have noticed that videos may autoplay when they are shown in search results.

Jennifer Slegg was the first to notice this on Google Search on desktop devices. She noticed that Google would autoplay videos on select searches.

When she searched for "The Lego Ninjago Movie" or "Justice League Release Date" for instance, Google would display a movie trailer in the Knowledge Graph area of the search results, and play the movie trailer automatically.

Things were quite easy to understand from a support perspective in the pre-Windows 10 age. If you installed Windows on a PC or bought a PC with Windows pre-installed, you could be certain that you could run it until Microsoft ended support for the operating system.

Upgrades to newer versions of Windows were possible as well, and if an upgrade was supported, you could be certain that you could run the new operating system version on the device for the remainder of its support phase.

Google released the stable version of the Chrome 60 web browser yesterday for the supported desktop operating systems Windows, Mac and Linux.

The new version is mostly a security and under-the-hood release that introduces little functionality to the frontend side of the browser.