What's New

Microsoft plans to introduce a feature called Sleeping Tabs into the company's Microsoft Edge 87 web browser.The feature is designed to reduce the browser's resource usage by unloading background tabs automatically.

The feature is available as an experimental flag in the browser currently; you need Microsoft Edge 87 at least, which is currently available as a Canary channel version.

Mozilla has been working on a new mobile browser for Google's Android operating system for some time now. The idea was to create a browser from scratch that uses modern frameworks and technologies to compete with the likes of Chrome on Android.

Microsoft released a new Insider build to the Fast Ring last week that introduced the redesigned Start Menu to testers. Another change highlighted in the official Windows Experience blog post describes how Microsoft plans to make the Settings application "even better".

Microsoft released a new preview build of Windows 10 to the Insider channel on July 1, 2020. The new build features the previously announced redesign of the Windows 10 Start menu.

The new Start menu is theme-aware according to Microsoft. Windows 10 testers may notice several changes after the device has been upgraded to the latest build.

Chromium engineers are working on a new feature currently that is designed to speed up the process of reopening closed tabs in Chromium-based web browsers such as Google Chrome.

All web browsers include functionality to open, close, and restore tabs in the browser. Restoring is not instant in Chrome as content needs to be loaded when a user selects to restore a closed tab.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai published an announcement on the company's official Safety and Security blog yesterday about privacy changes for some Google products.

Google started the rollout of DNS over HTTPS yesterday in Chrome Stable with the release of Chrome 83 Stable to the public.

The company calls it Secure DNS. DNS lookups are unencrypted by default; this means that DNS may be used to track the sites that an Internet user opens. Additionally, since it is unencrypted, bad actors may exploit it to manipulate or tamper with the connection, e.g. for phishing purposes.

Stress testing your computer can be a good way to check its performance under heavy load. RapydMark is benchmark tool for Windows that can help you test your PC's hardware.

The message "downloading proxy script" may be displayed by Google Chrome. If you see it frequently, you may want to know why the message is displayed by the browser and what you can do about it.

You may see the message when Internet connectivity changes, e.g. when you connect to a different Wi-Fi network or if other connectivity parameters change. Chrome may appear to take longer than usually to display sites and the downloading of the proxy script may take a few seconds to complete.

The next feature update for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system will likely be called the May 2020 Update.

The developers of the email client Thunderbird have released Thunderbird 68.7.0 to the public. The update for the stable 68.x branch of the email client is a maintenance update for the most part that resolves more than a dozen issues in the email client and improves MailExtensions support in the client. Additionally, it fixes security issues.

All modern browsers use a horizontal bar to display open websites in tabs; that has been the status ever since browsers started to allow users to open multiple sites in a single browser window.

Vertical tabs were introduced as extensions, a prominent example the classic version of Tab Mix Plus for the Firefox web browser which was one of the most popular extensions of its kind.

Keeping track of Coranavirus news can be quite the time-consuming process and a burden as well considering that you need to find reliable information.

Microsoft just launched its Coronavirus tracker on Bing. COVID-19 Tracker provides statistics and information about the spread of the virus in the world.

Gog unveiled the company's annual Spring Sale yesterday. The gaming platform holds several sales throughout the year and Spring Sale is just one of them. Customers and new users find more than 2500 discounted games on the platform which focuses heavily on classic games.

While you will find newer games on Gog as well, most games that are currently available fall into the classic category.

Sumatra PDF is my favorite PDF reader on Windows; it is lightning fast, resource friendly, and generally a well designed application. The developer of the application has released Sumatra 3.2 to the public yesterday. It is the first release of the PDF viewer since 2016 as development slowed down considerably in the past couple of years.