What's New

Microsoft introduced the Sleeping Tabs feature in Microsoft Edge Canary 87 back in September 2020. The company rolled out the feature to all Edge users in Edge 89, released earlier this month. Designed to improve performance by unloading sites in tabs, Sleeping Tabs helps improve battery life and reduce memory usage in Edge.

Microsoft released a new Insider build on February 24, 2021; it included fixes for the most part but made a few changes as well. One of the changes hides the 3D Objects folder by default on the operating system.

Every once in a while, I visit websites which are not in a language I'm familiar with. While translating the entire page is a good idea, sometimes I may only need just a sentence or two to be translated. Normally, I paste the lines into a translation extension that I use. But you know how it is, sometimes the translation makes no sense, and you may want to try a different one.

Mozilla plans to release released Firefox 87.0 Stable and Firefox 78.9 ESR to the public on March 23, 2021. The new versions of Firefox are available as automatic updates but also as direct downloads from Mozilla's main website and third-party sites as well.

All development versions of Firefox are released around the same time. Firefox Beta and Firefox Developer are updated to Firefox 88, Firefox Nightly is updated to version 89, and Firefox for Android will also be updated to version 87.0 eventually (the release was delayed somewhat recently).

Microsoft is working on a new feature that integrates the company's Microsoft Edge web browser better with the company's Windows 10 operating system.

Called share browsing data with other Windows features, it is designed to share data from Edge, such as Favorites or visited sites, with other Windows components. Search is a prime target, and highlighted by Microsoft at the time of writing.

Basically, what this means is that users who run searches using the built-in search feature may get Edge results as well.

AM-DeadLink has been resurrected, and version 5.0 of the program is now available for download. In case you missed it, about five years ago the developer, Aignes Software GMBH, discontinued the application citing complexity issues related to bookmark management in modern browsers.

Mozilla announced plans to trim the referrer that the Firefox web browse sends when requests are made for all cross-origin requests today to improve privacy.

Requests made by the web browser, e.g. to load a webpage, image, CSS stylesheet, or advertisement, includes the referrer. The referrer is usually the URL that users see in the browser's address bar.

Math Solver is a new feature of Microsoft's Edge web browser that is being tested in development versions currently. The feature, just like many others, is slowly being rolled out to the entire development population.

At least in Edge Canary, it should be possible to enable the feature if it is not enabled by default. Check Menu > More Tools to find out about that; if you see Math Solver listed, it is enabled already. If you don't, do the following to enable it:

MZLA Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, released the financial report 2020 for Thunderbird last week.

The entire Thunderbird project moved from being a part of Mozilla Foundation, which it was a part of since 2017, to the newly founded MZLA Technologies Corporation.

People with a small hard drive or constantly filled-to-the-brim drive will understand why it is important to get rid of trash files. I usually have one big game (modern ones are 100GB+) and a couple of smaller ones installed at the same time, and the rest of the space goes to my other storage needs: work, music, videos, pictures. So, I'm the kind of guy who fires up the Disk Cleanup tool in Windows every week or so.

Universal MediaCreationTool is an open source batch file for Microsoft Windows devices to download a Windows 10 ISO image to the system the batch file is executed on. Unlike Microsoft's Media Creation Tool, which will download the latest ISO only, it is giving the user the choice to download older Windows 10 versions.

March 2021 has not been a particularly good month for some users of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system. The company released the cumulative updates for March that fixed security issues on all supported versions of Windows. Shortly thereafter, reports emerged that printing would cause bluescreens on some devices.

We talked about the privacy initiative Global Privacy Control (GPC) before here on Ghacks. GPC looks similar to Do Not Track on first glance. Both submit information to websites on connect that "tells" site owners about a user's privacy preferences.

MS Paint will always have a special place in many people's memories. Not due to its features, but because some of us may have used it to doodle mindlessly, it was an unusual way to relax.