What's New

Quick Access Popup, an updated version of Folders Popup, provides you with the means to open folders on Windows quickly with just a mouse-click.

The main idea behind the program is to provide Windows users with the means to access popular folders and custom folders easily from anywhere.

You may have encountered situations before where you need to click several times in Windows Explorer or in an open/save dialog to navigate to the folder you are looking for.

A consortium of Chinese Internet companies, among them Kunlun and Qihoo 360, plan to acquire Norwegian company Opera Software in a buyout valued at $1.2 billion US Dollars.

Rumors about a potential acquisition of Opera Software, or a sale of company assets, have circulated around the Internet as early as 2012.

While there has surely been interest by many companies to acquire Opera Software, no offer has been made publicly until yesterday.

Sourceforge, once the go-to site for open source project management, has experienced a rough time in recent years thanks to the rise of competing services like GitHub, but also because of the DevShare program and placement of advertisement on the site.

Projects hosted on SourceForge could apply for the DevShare program to bundle adware with project installers for the Windows operating system.

If you are a regular here on Ghacks Technology News you know that I cover Windows Updates each month here on this site.

The overview is designed to help Windows users make educated decisions about the patches that Microsoft releases in a given month.

This works out fine most of the time, as I can use Microsoft Knowledgebase articles to find out more about updates that the company released in a particular month.

The Microsoft Security Bulletins overview for February 2016 provides you with detailed information about security and non-security patches that Microsoft released for its Windows operating system and other company products since the January 2016 release.

The overview begins with an executive summary listing the most important facts. What follows afterwards is the patch distribution across different client and server versions of the Windows operating system, and other Microsoft products.

It is difficult to find out how well -- or not -- Microsoft's new operating system Windows 10 is doing, and whether it is likely that Microsoft will hit the 1 billion or more devices running the operating system in two to three years after launch.

The company has been tight lipped about the progress, and revealed numbers only sporadically in the past.

Piratebay Stream It is a new option on the popular torrent indexing website that enables users of the service to stream media torrents directly instead of downloading them using a torrent client.

Streaming is on the rise and services such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime offer access to traditional TV and movie formats as well as originals and exclusives produced for these individual services.

The author of Tampermonkey, a popular script loader for Chromium-based web browsers, has released a beta port of the add-on for the Firefox web browser.

The browser extension is only compatible with Firefox 46 and newer at the time of writing (the current stable version of Firefox is version 44.0.1). If things go as planned, Firefox 46 will be released to the stable channel on April 19, 2016.

Valve has integrated a custom version of the Chromium web browser in its Steam client that displays web content to Steam users.

If the past couple of weeks have shown anything, it is that custom Chromium or Chrome versions are a security risk more often than not.

Google analyzed third-party implementations of its Chromium browser recently, and came to the conclusion that they made user systems less secure despite claiming the opposite.

The main reason for this was that companies disabled security features of the Chromium browser, or circumvented them.

Complete the Google Security Checkup today to add 2 Gigabyte of additional permanent storage to your Google Account.

Google runs a special promotion on Safe Internet Day -- just like it did last year -- that awards Google account owners with an increase of 2 Gigabyte of permanent storage if they complete the company's Security Checkup.

The checkup takes less than a minute to complete and will net you another 2 Gigabyte of storage to your account.

You may remember that Google ran the same promotion last year as well.

Chromer is a free application for Android devices that has been designed to speed up the loading of web links from any application by using Android's Chrome Custom Tabs feature.

Whenever you open a link in a third-party application on your Android device, say a link posted by a friend to WhatsApp, you are either asked what you want to do with it, or it is opened directly in the default system browser.

When you install Windows 10 on a new PC or upgrade an existing version of Windows to the new operating system, you get the option to customize select preferences or use the defaults instead.

If you select to customize, you get the option to disable three pages full of features related to privacy.

While that is a good start at limiting Windows 10's hunger for data, it is nowhere near sufficient to keep the operating system from talking with Microsoft servers regularly.

MyRouter Log is a free program for the Windows operating system that enables you to back up modem or router log information for safekeeping or analysis on a PC running Windows.

The program has been designed by its author to listen to log file broadcasts from ADSL modems or routers supporting them.

While these devices allow you to access log information directly in a dashboard or administrative interface, it is often easier to analyze information on the PC directly.

Additionally, routers may lose log information if the device crashes or if data becomes corrupt.

Pure URL is a free browser extension for all recent versions of Firefox and Google Chrome -- and likely also Firefox-based and Chrome-based browsers like Pale Moon or Opera -- that removes optional parameters from URLs automatically.

My System Monitor is a free program for the Microsoft Windows operating system that displays realtime information about PC hardware use in a toolbar at the top of the screen.

It can sometimes be useful to keep an eye on things, for instance to to keep an eye on the load of the processor, RAM, hard drives and the computer network.

While you can use a variety of programs for that, for instance the Windows Task Manager, most need to be opened whenever you want to access the information.