February 2015

All Firefox versions ship with reporting and telemetry functionality. If enabled, these feature submit reports to Mozilla which help the organization get a better understanding of the Firefox browser.

There are three core features built-in Firefox currently that collect data and submit reports when enabled: health report, telemetry and crash reporter.

Windows users who wanted to run a 64-bit version of Firefox in the past were limited to the Nightly Channel up until now as it was the only channel that offered 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Firefox on Windows.

All other channels, Stable, Beta and Developer Edition, were not offered as a 64-bit version for the Windows operating system.

The situation is different for Mac and Linux versions of Firefox as 64-bit versions for both systems have been made available for some time now by Mozilla.

VLC Media Player is one of the two media players that I install on every Windows PC that I work on (the other is SMPlayer).

It is a great media player that supports most formats out of the box so that you can say goodbye to codec hunting.

A new version of the media player, VLC 2.2.0 has just been released. It is a multi-release so to speak as new versions for nearly every other supported platform have been released as well.

Is history repeating itself? Mega just announced that the payment processing platform PayPal has ended its business relationship with the cloud storage provider.

PayPal, which had a business relationship with Megaupload as well in the past up until its closure by US authorities, banned several large file hosting services in the wake of the takedown and changed its acceptance requirements for these type of sites as well.

Adding a new wallpaper to Windows 7 or newer systems is a straightforward operation. You right-click on the desktop, select personalize from the context menu, then desktop background and pick one of the available pictures presented to you.

There is also an option to browse a custom folder and another to change pictures in select intervals automatically.

Whenever you install an application on your Android device using Google's Play store, an icon pointing to it is placed on your phone's home screen.

While that is sometimes desired, it often is not especially if you have customized the layout of the home screen to your liking.

What makes matters worse is that there is apparently no option to stop this from happening. Apps don't display any installation dialog on the phone if you initiate the installation on Google Play and the Android settings don't seem to hold any preference either that could prevent apps from doing that.

Remember Baidu Faster, the free PC maintenance program that Baidu released some time ago? It seems that the program may receive a name change in the near future as Baidu just published the first beta of Baidu Cleaner.

While it is not clear if Cleaner will indeed replace Faster, it is obvious that both programs share features.

If you hang out on Reddit regularly you may have stumbled upon some of the site's NSFW (Not Safe For Work) groups.

These groups offer content that is not suitable for minors but the only protection offered on Reddit is a warning the first time you try to access one of those groups or a post in it.

While the majority of these groups are about image or video contents, some display links or textual information only.

Google announced recently that it made the decision to improve protection against unwanted software downloads in the Chrome browser and Google search.

The company did not reveal which sites would be affected by this and it was unclear if major download sites such as Sourceforge, Download.com or Softonic would get a pass or not.

Update: The messages don't show up in Chrome Stable yet.

When Windows 8 shipped without a start menu and forced anyone to use the full-screen Start Screen view instead to switch between it and the desktop regularly, third-party start menu replacements started to appear left and right.

Probably the (commercially) most successful one was Start 8. It was first offered as a free beta but later turned into a paid product.

The start menu replacement and many competing products allowed Windows 8 users to display a start menu that resembled the Windows 7 menu.