What's New

A beta version of the upcoming Winamp 5.8 media player found its way to the darker side of the Web where it is now being distributed heavily.

Winamp, which was once a very popular media player for Microsoft Windows devices and is still used by die-hard fans up to this day, has had a rough patch in recent years.

Google revealed last week that the rather popular Gmail Offline extension for the Chrome web browser will be discontinued.

The extension enables offline access for Gmail emails in the Chrome web browser. Current stats show that it is used by over 6 million users at the time of writing and that it has been updated in 2013 for the last time.

The developer of the Waterfox web browser, Alex Kontos, released version 56.2.3 of Waterfox to the public yesterday. The new version of Waterfox is a security release that follows Mozilla's Extended Support releases loosely.

Mozilla enabled the new WebRender component of the Firefox web browser by default on Firefox Nightly installations that meet the system requirements.

WebRender is a new technology that makes better use of a device's video card to improve overall performance.

The project reached a new milestone recently when Mozilla activated WebRender by default on Nightly versions of the Firefox web browser if a supported Nvidia video card is installed and if the operating system is Windows 10. Mozilla ran a Shield Study before that to test WebRender on Firefox Nightly.

VeraCrypt is an encryption software that is a fork of the discontinued TrueCrypt encryption software. It can best be described as a continuation of TrueCrypt that supports all features that TrueCrypt supported plus a set of improved or new features.

Since it is based on the popular application it supports options to create encrypted containers, encrypt entire hard drives and to encrypt the system partition of the computer system. The popular option to create hidden encrypted volumes is supported as well.

Microsoft announced plans to deprecate the classic Disk Cleanup tool in Windows 10 on the official Windows and Windows Server storage blog.

Idrix, the company behind the encryption software VeraCrypt released VeraCrypt 1.23 for all supported operating systems.

VeraCrypt does not support automatic updates; users and administrators need to download the new version from the official website or through third-party services if available.

AV1 is a new media codec that is being integrated into various web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome at the moment. The codec is developed by a consortium of companies and positioned as a royalty-free alternative to the non open codecs H.264 and H.265.

Av1 promises smaller file sizes without impacting the quality of the video stream.

The cross-platform program fmedia (fast media player) is an audio file player, recorder and converter. All modern computer operating systems come with at least one program or app to playback media files. The programs may not always be the most suitable programs as they are usually more bare-bones than third-party options.

Windows users may use Windows Media Player, Groove or the built-in sound recorder on Windows 10, or third-party applications such as AIMP, or VLC Media Player.

Google Gmail product manager Matthew Izatt revealed today on the official The Keyword blog of the company that Google Inbox is being retired in 2019.

Google launched Inbox in 2014 as an alternative to the company's popular Gmail web service.  Back then, many assumed that Google would move all Gmail users to Google Inbox.

What happens when you close a tab in the Firefox web browser? If only one tab is open, Firefox will close. If multiple tabs are open, Firefox will open the last activate tab in the browser provided there was one.

If there was none, Firefox will load the tab to the left of the closed tab or the tab to the right depending on the closed tabs position in the tab bar of the browser.

When you try to install the Firefox pr Chrome web browser on a recent Windows 10 version 1809 Insider build, you may notice that the installation gets interrupted by the operating system.

The intermediary screen that interrupts the installation states that Edge is installed on the device and that it is safer and faster than the browser that the user was about to install on the device.

Some manufacturers, for example Dell, throttle the CPU of a laptop automatically if the AC adapter used is not manufactured by Dell or can't be recognized.

You may notice huge performance drops when that happens. One solution is to purchase an AC adapter that is manufactured by Dell as it will resolve the issue immediately, another that you use software to overcome the throttling.

Download all Images is a powerful browser extension for the Google Chrome web browser to download multiple images at once from any webpage.

You can download any single image you come across in Chrome or other browsers, usually with a right-click on the image and the selection of "save image as" or similar options.

If webpages prevent the saving of images by using scripts, you could still use a screenshot tool or extension to capture it.

Today is the second Tuesday of the month and that means that Microsoft has just released security updates for all supported company products.

The August 2018 Patch Day was rather uneventful, especially if you compare it to the July 2018 Patch Day which introduced quite a few serious issues.