November 2017

So, I’ve mentioned a few times for my love of Arch Linux and Manjaro, but there is another player in the mix that deserves due diligence, and has actually won over my personal use vote as well; Antergos.

The main difference between Antergos and Manjaro is updates and repositories. Manjaro holds updates for further testing, Antergos does not, and Antergos uses the Arch repos directly.

Classic Add-Ons Archive is a new add-on for the Firefox web browser that can be best described as a local catalog of classic Firefox add-ons.

The current version of the catalog lists 16706 Firefox add-ons that developers created over the past 14 yours based on Firefox's XUL/XPCOM technology.

The add-on can be installed in development versions of Firefox, and probably also in other browsers based on Firefox code.It is quite large, with more than 30 Megabytes, but that is justified considering that it is a local archive of Mozilla AMO.

Privacy Pass is a new browser extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome to reduce the number of captchas that legitimate users get when they access CloudFlare protected properties on the Web.

CloudFlare protects a large part of the Internet, and that is why the company's captcha solutions designed to determine whether a visitor is a human or a bot are found on many different sites.

The current system throws a captcha at users regularly when they visit different sites. It is not a "prove once that you are human and you are done" kind of system.

ControlMyMonitor is a new application for Windows by Nirsoft that you may use to view and modify settings of the computer monitor.

The application is a portable program that can be run from any location. It is supplied as an archive that you can extract to any location, including USB Flash Drives or even discs.

A new Intel graphics driver adds support for streaming 4K HDR media on Windows PCs and laptops provided the right hardware available.

Microsoft's Fall Creators Update -- the company launched the operating system update in October 2017 -- introduced support for 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR) streams.

When you click on a drive letter of a drive with a RAW partition that has an assigned drive letter, you get the prompt "you need to format the disk in drive [letter] before you can use it. Do you want to format it?".

While that is a good thing if the drive is new and you want to start using it, it is not such a good thing if you have encrypted the drive.

Unmounted encrypted drives, using software such as TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt or other encryption programs, look to Windows just like new drives that need to be formatted so that they can be put to use by the user of the device.

Firefox 57 is probably the most important release of the browser for Mozilla ever since the browser was released in its initial version.

The browser comes with the first bits of Quantum, a new technology that improve rendering and other areas, the deprecation of the legacy add-on system and the overboard throwing of legacy components, theme improvements, and more.

We talked about how this affects users of the Firefox web browser, but not so much about other programs and products that share code with Firefox.

The developers of the Pale Moon web browser have released version 27.6.0 to the public. The new version of Pale Moon is a major development update according to the release notes.

You can run a manual check for updates in the browser with a click on Pale Moon > Help > About Pale Moon > Check for Updates. You can then download and install the update using the internal update mechanism.

Google plans to enable a new security feature in Chrome 64 Stable that protects users from several forms of unwanted redirects on the Internet.

Unwanted redirects come in many forms, but they all have in common that users are redirected to web pages they did not request.

Microsoft published a new Insider Preview build today to the Fast Ring channel that brings the build number of Windows 10 to 17035.

Work on the next feature update of Windows 10 began some time ago, and new features and changes are slowly being introduced by Microsoft.

Windows 10 Build 17035 features a couple of interesting changes that highlight some of the things that will likely land in the next feature update version of Windows 10, out March 2018.