What's New

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In the past two years, Microsoft did release a major feature update in the first half of the year and a minor update in the second half. It appears that the company plans to reverse the process: the next feature update for Windows 10, which is the first update of 2021, appears to be a smaller update, the second feature update, released in the second half, will be a larger update.

If there is one thing that laptop users worry about constantly, it's the device's battery life. Many users keep their computer plugged in at all times for work/gaming purposes. But sometimes you may have no choice but to use the system on battery power, like when you're travelling.

Mozilla is working on a Firefox design refresh under the codename Proton. The project is in its early stages but the general plan appears to be to refresh pretty much any user interface element in the browser.

Mozilla did create several mockups of browser elements, sometimes multiple, to showcase some of the ideas its UI team has for the refresh. It is clear that the project is still in its infancy and that final decisions have not been made yet.

Security researchers of the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a new method to track Internet users that is persistent across sessions, even if users clear cookies and the browsing cache.

The research paper Tales of F A V I C O N S and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers highlights that favicons may be used in conjunction with fingerprinting techniques to track users.

Automating things that you do frequently can aid you in becoming more productive. There are a few good programs that you can choose for this purpose such as RoboIntern or System Scheduler.

Microsoft released a new stable version of its Chromium-based Edge web browser on January 21, 2021. Microsoft Edge 88 is a security and feature update that introduces several new features and changes to the browser.

The company released the first stable version of the new Microsoft Edge in January 2020.

Google released a new stable version of the company's Chrome web browser to the public this week. Chrome 88 fixed security issues and removed Adobe Flash among other things.

Google improved the browser's password management capabilities in the release. Chrome users who save passwords in the browser may access two new password management related options in the release.

The next stable version of the Firefox web browser supports the import of passwords from the password managers KeePass and Bitwarden, and password managers that use the same format.

Privacy-first search engine DuckDuckGo's year was productive in 2020. The search engine managed to increase daily search queries significantly in 2020 and 2021 is already looking to become another record year as the search engine broke the 100 million search queries mark on a single day for the first time on January 11, 2021.

Google Images Restored is an extension for Chromium-based and Firefox-based web browsers that restores the classic Google Images web interface and its functionality.

While we wait for Microsoft to deliver a modern Windows Explorer, an alternative app is already available on the official store and on GitHub. The program is called Files, and is an open source application.

Google introduced support for partitioning the cache of the company's Chrome web browser when it launched Chrome 86 earlier this year. The feature changes how web browsers cache content. Previously, web browsers like Chrome used a single cache to store content. One benefit of this approach is that all sites may make use of a cached resource, say a web font or image to speed up the loading of a page or application.

Use of a single cache opened up the door for attacks as sites could check for the existence of cached entries for use in tracking and other attacks.

Google released updates for the company's YouTube application for Android and Apple's iOS operating system recently. One of the changes of the update moved the autoplay toggle; it is now displayed in the media player.

YouTube users who use the web version, e.g. on a desktop operating system such as Windows, will get the same change. Google is rolling it out currently to all users who access YouTube on the web.

Most users should see a prompt the next time they play a video on the site stating "looking for autoplay? Choose whether videos automatically play next".

Mozilla plans to release a minor update for the organization's Firefox web browser later today. Firefox 84.0.1 is a bug fix release that addresses crashes, performance and loading issues.

The new version of Firefox is pushed via the browser's automatic updating system to all devices that have it enabled. Users may check the installed version in the browser by selecting Menu > Help > About Firefox. Doing so will run a check for updates to download available ones to the local system.