What's New

The Windows operating system is configured to display all available wireless networks when WiFi is enabled on the device running the operating system.

This is helpful of course, as it enables you to pick the wireless network from the list of available ones to connect to it.

It becomes less useful once you have made the decision. If you only connect to one wireless network for instance, you may want to hide the other wireless networks to speed up the process and avoid picking the wrong network from the list.

The most recent Nightly version of the Firefox browser, Firefox Nightly 54, ships with two content processes instead of just one.

Firefox's multi-process architecture still rolls out to Firefox stable versions. That process will still take a couple of release cycles to reach all users of the stable version of the Firefox web browser.

Firefox uses a content process for all tabs open in the browser, and a separate process for the browser core.  Separating the core browser from the rest improves stability, and also responsiveness and other metrics of the browser.

Wine 2.0 is the most recent version of the popular compatibility layer for operating systems such as Mac OS X, BSD, and for Linux.

What it allows you to do is run -- some -- Windows programs on those devices. This is excellent for users who switched from using Windows on their machines to Linux or Mac OSX, but want to use certain programs only available for Microsoft Windows.

I ran the excellent KeePass password manager for Windows for instance on Linux back in the days using Wine.

Microsoft has released KB3211320 for Windows 10 Version 1607 today through Windows Update and the Microsoft Update Catalog service today.

The Knowledgebase page of the update is not live yet, which makes it difficult to find out what it is all about.

If you are using a third-party web browser on your Android device and Google Sync, you may have noticed that syncing stopped working all of a sudden.

Quite a few browsers are based on Chromium, the open source part of Chrome. This is efficient for developers, as they don't have to concentrate on core features such as getting page rendering right or ensuring support for new web technologies, but can concentrate on other areas to distinguish the browser from Chrome, Chromium, and third-party browsers based on Chromium.

Google plans to roll out a change in Chrome Stable soon that will have the browser throttle timers in background tabs to improve battery life and browsing performance.

The motivation behind the chance is that some pages consume a lot of CPU when they are in the background. Google mentions JavaScript advertisements and analytics scripts explicitly but it is not limited to that.

The core idea is to limit the processing power that background tabs get in Chrome once the feature lands.

Vivaldi 1.7, the upcoming next version of the popular web browser, will ship with better audio muting controls that users can utilize.

Most web browsers support audio muting by now. Most display audio indicators in the tab bar of the browser. Some let you control audio directly through those icons, usually to toggle the audio state between mute and unmute.

Nvidia has just released new GeForce Drivers for supported Windows operating systems that introduces game ready support for Resident Evil 7 among other things.

Nvidia GeForce Drivers 378.49 is a WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) game ready driver for Windows that is available as a manual driver download, and through Nvidia's GeForce Experience software.

The new driver version for Nvidia video cards brings Game Ready support for the following three games: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Conan Exiles, and For Honor.

Don't touch my tabs! (rel=noopener) is a Firefox add-on that adds rel="noopener" to external links on sites open in Firefox automatically. Noopener_by_default is a userscript that does the same for links.

Did you know that sites that you load by clicking on links may manipulate the page the link was posted on?

Mozilla Firefox 51.0 Stable was released on January 24, 2017 to the public by Mozilla via automatic updates and on Mozilla's website.

Note: If you are reading this article on January 24, 2017, you may not be able to upgrade Firefox  to version 51 yet as Mozilla may not have enabled the new version through automatic updates. Releases are always available on Mozilla's FTP before they are made available via Firefox's built-in update mechanism.

Memory Hogs is a free program for Microsoft Windows designed to monitor the performance of PC components, and alert you when thresholds are reached.

While you may notice that something is wrong performance-wise when things slow down to a crawl, crash, stutter, or show other symptoms of weakness, it is sometimes not as obvious at first that something is wrong.

There are plenty of performance monitors out there, for instance the built-in Resource Monitor that Windows ships with, or Glint, an interesting program that displays lots of information when it is started.

The Google Chrome extension uBlock Origin Extra adds anti-content blocking capabilities to the popular uBlock Origin extension for Chrome.

uBlock Origin is probably the best content blocker for the Google Chrome web browser at this point in time.

The extension is updated regularly, and very powerful when it comes to content blocking thanks to options to add your own rules, and to download rules using various lists.

One of the major improvements that comes along with Firefox's new multi-process architecture is sandboxing to improve the browser's security.

The multi-process rollout is chugging along nicely, but it will still take at least months before it is enabled by default for all, or at least the majority, of Firefox Stable users.

Electrolysis, Firefox's multi-process architecture, is the prerequisite for Firefox's sandboxing feature as it makes use of child processes to establish security boundaries.

Context Menu Tuner is a free program for Microsoft Windows that enables you to add various functions to the right-click context menu on Windows.

Many companies that produce software seem to have a Wild West mentality when it comes to adding items to the context menu on Windows. Add first, and maybe provide options to remove the context menu entries again in the program settings.

This is especially problematic for functions that you will never use, as they make orientation worse and may delay operations that you want to execute.

Intel Driver Update Utility is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices to search for, download, and install Intel driver updates.

It is usually a good idea to keep drivers up to date, especially if newer drivers improve the old or add new features that you may be interested in.

While there is certainly something to "never change a running system" as well, driver updates may improve a component's performance, stability or other parameters such as temperature.