What's New

Smart Tab Mute is a browser add-on for the Firefox web browser that limits audio playback in the browser to a single tab at a time.

If you open five tabs with videos, games and other content that plays audio in your browser of choice, you may notice that audio starts to play out of all five tabs regardless of active tab.

While that may not be such an issue, the fact that audio playback is enabled for all five tabs as well is one.

HARDiNFO is a free and commercial program for Microsoft Windows devices that offers details hardware information, benchmarks, monitoring, and diagnostic tools.

The free version of the application is limited to home use; if you want to use the program for business, you need to purchase a Pro license.

The Pro version offers additional features, such as the option to export reports, monitor notebook battery, a live network monitor, and 64-bit SSD benchmarks. Most features provided by the program are available in both the free and the Pro edition however.

Virtual Private Networks (VPN) have evolved from a technology used mostly by businesses to one that is used by more and more home users as well.

Reasons are manifold, but improved privacy and security are certainly two key features that make a growing number of home users use VPN services and apps.

Without going into too much detail; a VPN protects a device's IP address as traffic flows through it instead of directly to the user's system.

Windows 10 Cloud is a new edition of Windows 10 that showed up for the first time in one of the recent Insider Builds released for the operating system.

Microsoft did not provide any information back when Windows 10 Cloud appeared, and has not until today. The rumor mill was in full swing though immediately. Suggestions ranged from a cloud-based operating system, a new subscription-based version of Windows similar to Office365, to something completely different.

Temps is a cross-platform weather program for Windows, Linux and Mac that is beautiful, but eats more RAM in Megabyte than there are rainy days in England.

So, if RAM is not an issue on your device, you may read on if you are interested in a new weather application.

You may notice that Temps is a demanding application right when you start the 50 Megabyte download from the developer site. The 64-bit version for Windows has a size of more than 130 Megabytes unpacked which is gargantuan for a weather app.

The Linux Mint team has just released the long term support release Linux Mint 18.1 as a KDE and Xfce edition to the public.

The new version of Linux Mint brings software updates and refinements mostly. First, some information on Linux Mint 18.1 being a long term support release.

The Mint team will support Linux Mint 18.1 with security updates until 2021. Future versions of Linux Mint will use the same base package as Linux Mint 18.1 until 2018. This ensures that it is easy to update to new versions.

Google is on a roll. After removing user control over some plugins installed in the browser, the company moved information about security certificates of sites to a place where most users may never find it.

More and more sites on the Internet move to https. Doing so has advantages, but there is also a considerable amount of pressure by browser makers and search engines to get sites to migrate.

Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer.

If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. The list includes information about each plugin, including a name and description, location on the local system, version, and options to disable it or set it to "always run".

Microsoft is working on improving the updating options of some editions of its Windows 10 operating system currently that provide users with better options to defer updates.

The option to defer updates in current versions of Windows 10 is limited in several regards. First, it is only available if the Windows 10 edition is Pro, Enterprise or Education.

Trails is a new lossless web navigation experiment by Mozilla with the aim to fix the tabbed browsing issue of losing information during navigation.

The traditional tabbed browsing model has not changed all that much in the past 15 or so years. The majority of modern browsers supports tabs, and browsers keep track of the browsing history of each tab individually.

Microsoft launched the first functional version of Game Mode, a game performance improving feature, yesterday with the Windows 10 build 15019 update.

After having some troubles getting the update to install on the test machine running a recent Insider Preview version of Windows 10, I finally managed to do so this morning.

The core idea behind Game Mode is taken from Microsoft's Xbox One console: prioritize the game over other processes on the device.

The respected Firefox add-on developer Quicksaver announced yesterday that he won't update any of his extensions anymore because of Mozilla's decision to move to WebExtensions exclusively.

Quicksaver, responsible for add-ons such as Tab Groups, OmniSidebar, FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis and Puzzle Bars, had four of his five add-ons for Firefox featured by Mozilla in the past.

The story of 64-bit Firefox on Windows is a long and complex one, and it is just about to end with Mozilla moving from offering 32-bit Firefox as the default download option to offering 64-bit Firefox on Windows by default.

Mozilla Firefox is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version on Windows, with 32-bit still the default right now when it comes to downloads.

While the 32-bit version works well, and it is the only option for systems without a 64-bit processor, it is the 64-bit version that users should consider using if their device is equipped with a 64-bit cpu.

Malwarebytes 3.0.6 is the latest version of the popular security program for Windows that is available as a free and premium version.

The company, also called Malwarebytes, released version 3.0 of the program not too long ago. The update changed things around quite a bit, and not all for the better.

Whisply is a free online service that enables you to transfer files in a secure way to others using the cloud storage providers Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive.

You have plenty of options when it comes to the transferring of files to others. Use email, FTP, a cloud storage provider, snail mail, personal meet and transfer, or a free file hosting service.