June 2018

The Linux Mint team has released Linux Mint 19 final, codename Tara, in the desktop environment flavors Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce.

InstantView is a new browser extension for the Google Chrome web browser and compatible browsers that plays YouTube videos without changing pages on YouTube.

When you click on a video on YouTube you are taken to the page the video was published on to play it.

While that is wanted sometimes, you sometimes may not want to leave the page you are own. Maybe you ran a search on YouTube and want to browse the search results after playing the video, or you don't want to lose the recommendations that YouTube displays on the homepage, or browse your YouTube subscriptions.

The makers of the Brave web browser announced a new feature today that introduces an option to open private browsing tabs with Tor for that added bit of privacy.

You cannot really say that Brave is just like any other browser out there. While it is based on Chromium code and supports pretty much all the web standards that Google Chrome supports because of it, it is different in several key areas.

Extension Police is a relatively new Chrome extension that vets all installed browser extensions and gives you actionable advice for each.

Chrome extensions are limited in what they can do and Chrome's extension system limits the scope to the browser. Extensions can request additional permissions -- beyond the default scope -- which is required for some functionality.

Incognito Mode is Google Chrome's private browsing mode. When you load websites in Incognito Mode, session data that is stored locally is not stored. In other words, Chrome does not save data to the browsing history, cache, or cookie storage among others.

Incognite Mode offers several advantages besides that: extensions are not enabled by default in the mode which blocks potential data leaks and sites handle Incognito Mode independently from the rest of the browser.

Opera Software released a new version of the Opera web browser yesterday that brings the version to 54 on the browser's stable channel.

The two features of Opera 54 that Opera highlights on the official desktop team blog are news on the Speed Dial page and improvements to the visibility of update and recovery options.

WinRAR 5.60 is a new version of the popular cross-platform compression tool that has been released to the public earlier today. WinRAR 5.60 is the first big release since WinRAR version 5.50 was released back in 2017. It is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for Windows and other supported operating systems.

The latest best version of WhatsApp messenger for Android has a new feature that gives users more control over the visibility of media on their devices.

The new version adds an option to the chat application to hide media from specific chats in the gallery of the device.

Microsoft plans to ship major new features in the next version of Windows 10; one of the new features gives users control over media autoplay on the Internet.

If you have access to a recent Windows Insider build, you may have noticed already that Microsoft Edge comes with a lot of improvements.

One of the new options is a new control to configure autoplay rules for media. The default setting is to allow autoplay but you can modify it to block autoplay.

If you run the free version of the popular temporary file cleaner and system tool CCleaner for Windows, you may have noticed that it has started to display advertising popups on the system.

I noticed the behavior after installing CCleaner 5.44 on a Windows 10 Pro system; it is possible, however, that older versions of CCleaner display the advertisement as well.

The advertisement appears as a popup message in the lower right corner of the screen. It highlights a Summer Sale and a discount for CCleaner Professional.