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TekBits Technology News

Top Firefox Add-ons, and their WebExtensions Status

The following article looks at a list of top Firefox add-ons, and checks whether those add-ons are available as WebExtensions already, or are planned to be released as WebExtensions.

Top Firefox add-ons in this context means the following: first page of add-ons on Mozilla AMO based on user count, user rating, and featured.

Firefox 55: Geolocation requires secure origin

Mozilla plans to make a change to Geolocation in Firefox 55 that would block requests automatically if they come from non-secure origins.

Geolocation, broken down to its core, refers to technologies that allow sites and applications to determine a user's position in the world.

This can be useful when mapping services are used among other things (show me where I'm, auto-filling of the current location). Many sites, not only mapping services but also shopping sites, or multi-lingual sites, use Geolocation for functionality.

Skype for Chrome with Gmail, Outlook, Twitter integration

Microsoft published an update for the company's Skype extension for Google Chrome that introduces Gmail, Outlook and Twitter integration.

The browser extension has a so-so rating on the Google Chrome web store. This can be attributed mostly to the fact that it is probably not what users expect it to be when they installed the extension.

NetCrunch Network Tools for Windows

NetCrunch Network Tools is a free collection of networking related applications for devices running Microsoft's Windows operating system.

The application is available for free, but you need to sign in to an account before you can use it. You may use some third-party services for that, or create an account directly within the software. While you are asked to enter an email address and other information, nothing appears to be verified at this point in time.

Adguard website: Download Windows and Office ISO images

Adguard is a third-party web service that allows you to download Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office ISO images from Microsoft services directly.

Microsoft makes it quite difficult for the average user to download ISO images of Windows or Office.

While you can grab some ISOs from Microsoft directly, it gets quite complicated if you need ISO images of older Microsoft products.

Grab 8GB worth of songs from the SXSW 2017 Festival

The SXSW music festival is a long standing event at which hundreds of artists perform each year to festival goers.

Music is also made available on the SXSW website, and it is also made available as one huge torrent package each year.

A torrent is created each year featuring songs that artists performed during the festival. The archive dates back to 2005, and the most recent torrent just got uploaded to the site.

Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari memory performance in 2017

Mozilla Firefox with its multi-process architecture enabled is still the web browser with the best memory performance according to Mozilla.

Our own memory benchmarks saw Firefox lead the pack in 2012 and 2014 when we compared the browser's memory usage against Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer on Windows.

Mozilla did run tests of its own last year, and ran them again this year with multi-process versions of the browser.

Remember: Windows Vista support ends next month

Microsoft plans to end the extended support for its operating system Windows Vista next month so that no further security updates will be released for the OS.

The client Windows lifecycle sheet on Microsoft's website lists April 11, 2017 as the end of support. Microsoft will release security patches for Windows Vista on that day, and stop support for the operating system afterwards.