What's New

The company behind WhatsApp released WhatsApp Web recently, a web-based service that allows you to use WhatsApp in Google Chrome without phone.

It introduces most of the functionality of the mobile application on the web including options to read current and past messages, and to message contacts.

While you can make privacy related configuration changes in the Firefox options, many advanced options become only available when you load about:config or install add-ons that provide you with frontend access to those settings.

You can check out our list of best privacy add-ons for Firefox which gives you an overview of good extensions for that purpose.

Tinfoil is a brand new extension for Firefox that makes quite a few privacy related preferences available in its options.

While Autoruns may not be the most popular startup manager available for Windows, it is without the shadow of a doubt the one a complete package.

It enables you to go through all startup items of the system to assess and change them. Where most startup managers limit items to programs and sometimes services, Autoruns includes dynamic link libraries, drivers, network providers and a whole host of other items in its interface.

Animated Gifs seem to be everywhere these days. You find them posted on forums, on social networking sites, in chat messages, and even sites like YouTube have started to experiment with the generation of animated gifs.

Gifs have seen a revival in recent time which may seem puzzling to Internet users who had to endure them on homepages of the early Internet days.

One recent trend in regards to animated gifs is to turn them into videos instead and play them using HTML5 video.

Unless you run software that logs all local and remote connection attempts, you don't really see what is going on when you connect to a website or run a program on the local system that connects to the Internet.

A powerful program to analyze web traffic is Fiddler. While it is great, it is rather complicated to use thanks to its impressive set of features.

It can sometimes be useful or even mandatory to run programs on system start. This is for instance the case for most security programs that you run on the system.

Other programs on the other hand, Office quick starters, maintenance programs or software that you only use occasionally may do more harm than good. Well, harm is not the right word but they do slow down the start of the system at the very least.

Safe Startup, formerly known as Startup Guard, is a free program for Windows that you can use to manage and block autostart items on Windows.

Microsoft released its Outlook Preview application for Android devices to the Google Play Store. It is not the first Outlook app by Microsoft for Android, there is OWA for Android for instance which is also available as a pre-release) but it is the first that brings core desktop Outlook functionality to Android.

For starters, it supports a wide range of email services and technologies out of the box including Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, the company's own Outlook web mail service, iCloud and standard IMAP accounts.

Google Search is without doubt the most popular search engine globally. It is the major search engine, often with 75% or more market share, in most countries.

There are only a few countries, China or Russia for example, where Google Search is not the dominant search engine.

If you like to use Google Search but are concerned about privacy you have a couple of options to deal with that.

If you have been to YouTube recently and played a couple of videos on the site you may have noticed that new videos were loaded automatically at the end of the one you were just watching.

While that is similar to how the playlist feature on YouTube works, it is completely different from it as it happens when you are playing individual videos on the site.

The video hosting site YouTube supports Adobe Flash and HTML5 Video and delivers videos based on the web browser and system used to access the site.

Chrome users were defaulted to the HTML5 video player for some time now for instance while Firefox or Internet Explorer users to Adobe Flash instead for the most part.

YouTube announced yesterday that it made the decision to make HTML5 video the default on the website for all versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8 and Firefox Beta or newer.

Do you know how many USB ports your computer has and how many USB devices are connected to these ports?

While that is usually not of importance to users who just work with the PC, it may become important sometimes when things don't work as expected.

If you connect a fast USB 3.0 drive to a USB 2.0 port for instance, you may wonder why data transfers take so long.

And if a device is not working at all, you may need to check the available ports as well.

You have two core options to connect to the Internet with your smartphone or mobile device: WiFi or using mobile connections.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. While you may run into privacy issues while using wireless connections that you don't have full control over, mobile connections are often limited bandwidth-wise which means that you may increase your mobile bill using them or limit the connectivity options once you hit a certain threshold.

It may sometimes be necessary to clear site-specific cookies. Maybe because you are a web developer and need to test a service, want to remove cookies after you are done visiting a website, or want to clear cookies to find out if they have been the cause for issues you have experienced in the past.

Most Chrome users are probably using the Cookies settings page to remove cookies for individual sites in the browser.

Whenever you connect to sites on the Internet information about the connection and the underlying system are available to the site automatically.

Information includes the web browser and version used to connect, the language, operating system and also the remote IP address.

While there are means to prevent the IP address from being revealed, by using proxy servers or virtual private networks for example, one IP address is revealed in the end.

The technical preview of Vivaldi, a Chromium/Blink based web browser by Opera co-founder and former CEO John von Tetzchner is now available.

The Opera browser is best known for innovations that Opera Software introduced to the browser, and while not all of them stuck, many were copied by other browsers in the end.

The browser never managed to get significant market share on the desktop and things changed completely when the company announced that it would move to Blink used by Google Chrome.