What's New

Local CDN is a browser extension for the Google Chrome browser that will load certain libraries from the local system instead of content distribution networks.

The extension is a fork of the Decentraleyes add-on that is only available for Firefox, and brings the add-ons functionality to Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

The following guide walks you through the steps of checking the installed Flash version in Google Chrome, and forcing it to update if an outdated version is used by the browser.

All versions of the Google Chrome web browser ship with Adobe Flash installed natively in the browser. While Chrome does not support classic NPAPI plugins anymore, Chrome is still supporting PPAPI plugins of which Flash is one.

MusicBrainz have released Picard 1.4, a fast, comprehensive, cross-platform music tagger for Windows, Mac and Linux devices.

I reviewed Picard 1.0 back in 2012 and came to the conclusion that it was an excellent program to tag music back then thanks to the feature set it shipped with back then.

Music, like any media and many other file types, can be tagged. This adds metadata information to the files that reveal the artist or song title, the year, and other information. Most music players read the metadata and display it when the music file is played.

Researchers have developed a cross-browser fingerprinting technique that uses operating system and hardware level features.

Fingerprinting has been limited for the most part to individual web browsers in the past. If a user switched browsers regularly, fingerprinting could not be used to link the user to these browsers.

Amazon Chime is a new communication service by Amazon that supports video conferencing, calls, chat, and the sharing of content.

The product is available for devices running Windows and Mac OS X, and for the mobile operating systems Android and iOS, and as an online version that you can use device-independent.

Data is automatically synced regardless of device that you are using to access Amazon Chime.

The following guide provides you with information on how to speed up the Opera web browser to improve performance and your overall experience.

The "new" Opera web browser is a Chromium-based browser that shares much of its code with Google Chrome. While I have not seen many complaints about the performance or resource use of the browser, there is always room for improvement.

Codec Tweak Tool is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices designed to troubleshoot and correct media playback issues on Windows.

The Windows operating system ships with support for a limited number of media types. Windows Media Player and other multimedia players on the system can play these supported media files, but not any other file.

Gmail Sender Icons is a simple browser extension for Google Chrome that visualizes the sender's domain and favicon of the domain on Gmail's website.

Gmail does not list any sender information besides the name when it lists emails received by connected accounts. Since names are picked by senders, they cannot be used reliably to identify the sender of an email.

Cobbler is a local password manager for the Windows operating system that stores passwords and other data in encrypted databases.

The following guide lists tweaks and suggestions on how to speed up the Vivaldi web browser to reduce lag and improve the browser's performance.

Vivaldi is based on Chromium, and performance should not really be much of an issue because of this. However, the browser may feel sluggish or laggy at times, with actions like opening a new tab or switching to another tab being noticeably delayed.

The Group Policy pack Privacy and Telemetry, short gp-pack PaT, is a collection of 70 policies designed to disable sending data to Microsoft on Windows 10 devices.

Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise administrators may use the Group Policy to modify privacy settings, and block some telemetry collecting and submitting to Microsoft.

Firefox Focus: the privacy browser, is a free mobile browser for iOS devices by Mozilla designed to protect user privacy while browsing the web.

PeaUtils is a collection of file management tools that enables you to run more than a dozen file related tools on your system.

The open source program is created by the makers of the popular archiver Peazip, and available for Windows and Linux.

Windows users can download a portable version of PeaUtils for 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the operating system, or download the installer instead.

Maxon Cinebench is a free benchmark software for Windows and Mac devices by Maxon, a company best known for the 3D graphics package Cinema 4D.

Benchmarks can be useful in determining the performance of hardware components or a computer system.

Useful to find out how fast a component or the computer really is, in picking the right component for a job, or for comparing the performance of a component over time.

Benchmarks that don't offer comparison are mostly useful if you have different components at your disposal that you can compare against each other.

Microsoft pushed patches to devices running Windows 7 and 8.1 in recent time that collect information and transfer data to Microsoft regularly.

One of the main issues that Windows users may have with telemetry is that Microsoft does not reveal what it is collecting, and what is included when telemetry data is transferred to the company.