What's New

Microsoft and Sony plan to release new consoles, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio by Microsoft , and the Playstation Neo by Sony.

Microsoft plans to release the Xbox One S, a slim version of the Xbox One, in August 2016, while both the Neo and the Scorpio will be available in (late) 2017.

The plan to push out new console models is not entirely new, both companies have created slimmer or more efficient models of consoles in the past, but what is new is that the new models that come out in 2017 will be more powerful than the original versions released in 2013.

It can take hours or even days to update a freshly installed version of Windows 7 using Windows Update.

Windows Update displays a "checking for updates" prompt when you run the first update check after installation that seemingly does nothing at all.

This can be extremely frustrating, especially since it is not recommended to run a copy of Windows that is not patched and have that copy connected to the Internet.

Vivaldi Fox is a Firefox add-on that brings Vivaldi's color changing user interface feature to the Firefox web browser.

One unique feature of the Vivaldi web browser is its ability to change the browser user interface (UI) by painting it in the dominant color of the active web page.

While some may find the feature distracting or even confusing, others like it and prefer it over using one color scheme for the interface.

Vivaldi ships with options to turn the feature off so that it is up to the user whether the feature is being used or not.

A recently disclosed man-in-the-middle vulnerability in the popular password manager KeePass has been fixed in KeePass 2.34.

The issue required some preparation on part of the attacker to be exploited successfully. It took advantage of KeePass' update check mechanics which did not verify the information provided by the KeePass server nor use a secure transfer protocol for transmitting them to the user system.

Any website can access a selection of Firefox resource files to find out more about the web browser that is used to connect to the site.

Firefox and add-ons use the resource:// scheme to load resources internally, but some of the information are available to sites the browser connects to as well.

It is unclear why websites would need access to resource:// resources.

DoNotSpy78 is a free program for the Windows operating system that brings options to make privacy related changes to Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The program works similar to the popular DoNotSpy10, one of the several privacy programs for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system.

Browser tabs are a useful feature supported by all modern desktop browsers. They enable you to open multiple web pages and applications at the same time in a single browser window.

Most browsers seem to be optimized for low to medium numbers of tabs, and companies are using different means when certain thresholds are crossed to deal with tab overload.

Mozilla Firefox and Firefox-based browsers add scroll icons to the tab bar for instance, while Google Chrome squeezes icons more and more until they don't even reveal the site's favicon let alone any title  anymore.

Mozilla rolled out a new feature in Firefox 50 Nightly today that improves the page search functionality of the web browser.

Firefox users can tap on F3 to run searches for words or phrases on the active page.  The first search results is highlighted by the browser once you start typing, and controls are provided to jump to the next in line or the previous one, or to highlight them all at once.

SMPlayer 16.6 is the latest version of the popular media player for Windows that introduces a new touch screen mode, options to send video signals to external screens, and support for high DPI screens.

The media player SMPlayer is one of the two programs that I use for the purpose of playing media files on Windows devices (the other is VLC Media Player).

The reason why I use two instead of just one is simple: while both deliver good performance and support for the majority of formats out there, one does better than the other when it comes to specific formats such as wmv.

VideoLAN, the company behind the powerful cross-platform VLC Media Player, revealed on Wednesday that VLC Media Player 3.0 will ship with Chromecast support.

Chromecast is a device created by Google that allows you to stream media from a device to another.

NoSquint Plus is a new add-on for the Firefox and Chrome web browser that is a fork of the very popular but no longer maintained NoSquint extension for Firefox.

Amazon Assistant is a service by Amazon that is offered as a browser extension or mobile application designed to improve the Internet shopping experience.

Its main features are product comparison, access to Amazon's wishlist from any website, the highlighting of daily deals on Amazon, and a search.

Mozilla Firefox is a great browser. Not everyone may agree with me on this but that is fine and expected. Firefox is the browser that gives users the most control over their browsing experience. It has the strongest add-on ecosystem of the three, and is backed by an organization that for the most part seems to be on the user's side of things when it comes to rights and such.

Opera Software launched a new application for Android devices called Opera browser - news & search that moves away from the classic web browser concept.

The company has experimented with news feeds and personalized news in Opera browsers both on the desktop and mobile devices for some time, and it seems that the new app marks the next step in the company's journey.

Opera browser - news & search is not a classic web browser anymore even though it comes with functionality to load web pages.

When I look back at my software buying history of the past five or so years, it is clear almost immediately that I did not really buy many products in that time.

The main reason for that is that there are lots of free programs available for Windows -- and other desktop operating systems -- that provide me with the functionality I require.

In fact, there are types of software where commercial programs are non-existent. Think of web browsers for instance and let me know if you can name a single commercial browser.