What's New

Google announced a number of changes to Google Chrome's extensions system designed to make the use of extensions more secure.

The company has been in a constant battle against misuse of extensions that are either outright malicious or problematic from a privacy perspective.

Reachability Cursor: one-handed mode mouse pointer is a new application for Google Android to control big Android devices with a single hand.

Smartphones seem to get bigger with every passing year; while that is great on the one hand as that usually goes hand in hand with a bigger and better screen, it is not so great on the other hand for a number of reasons.

A newly discovered bug in the desktop version of the Firefox web browser may crash the browser and under certain circumstances the entire operating system.

Discovered and revealed by security researcher Sabri Haddouche, the bug causes the Firefox web browser to crash when a specifically prepared website is loaded in the web browser.

What happens then depends on the operating system. Firefox displays the browser's Crash Reporter prompt on Linux and Mac OS X which may be used to inform Mozilla about the crash and to restart Firefox.

Mozilla plans to launch a new anti-tracking method in Firefox 65 that blocks tracking resources from accessing storage on all desktop platforms. The new policy is designed specifically to limit cross-site tracking while minimizing site access and rendering issues.

The actual implementation depends largely on tests in pre-release versions of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla runs a Shield study in Firefox Beta 63 at the moment.

Mozilla released Firefox 62.0.2 on September 21, 2018 to the Release channel. The new version of the web browser is a minor update that addresses bugs and security issues in Firefox Stable.

The organization released Firefox 62.0 on September 4, 2018, a major version release that included security fixes, bug fixes and new features.

A group of administrators and users who tried to install the August or September 2018 patches on Windows 7 devices reported that the update installation would fail with error 0x8000FFFF.

Mozilla Firefox is one of the few web browsers out there that gives users and system administrators options to turn off Telemetry.

Telemetry, which Mozilla introduced in Firefox 7 back in 2011, provides data to Mozilla which the organization uses to refine its products.

While that is often beneficial to users, for instance when issues are detected and fixed, it has also been used in the past to justify the removal of features from Firefox. The removal of features based on Telemetry led to my suggestion in 2013 to keep Telemetry enabled to make "your voice" count.

The Firefox web browser will soon block autoplaying media on webpages visited in the web browser more reliable.

Mozilla added options to control HMTL5 video autoplay in 2015 in Firefox and while the functionality worked fine on many sites, it did not work on others.

Microsoft released new cumulative updates for supported versions of the company's Windows 10 operating system on September 20, 2018.

The updates KB4458469, KB4457136, KB4457141 and KB4457127 address a huge number of issues in the Windows 10 versions 1803, 1709, 1703 and 1607.

FastStone released a new version of the company's picture viewer FastStone Image Viewer today that brings the version of the application to 6.6.

FastStone Image Viewer 6.6 improves the performance of certain operations in the application significantly. Users who noticed slowdowns when they browsed large collections of images on their devices or when they opened folders with lots of photos may notice significant loading time improvements.

Microsoft plans to change how .NET Framework updates are delivered and deployed on devices running Windows 10 in the near future.

Recent versions of the Android operating system display notifications on the lock screen of the device by default.

Some users may like this as it gives them access to notifications on first glance without having to unlock the device first to check out new notifications.

The functionality has one serious drawback in my opinion, however. Since notifications are shown on the lock screen, anyone with access to the Android device may see them as well.

2018 has been a troublesome year for users of the computer program CCleaner. The popular Windows program to delete temporary files and data to free up disk space went through a series of program updates that many users of the software opposed.

Microsoft's Bing Search engine is doing quite well as we have found out in 2017 and it should not come as a surprise that Microsoft updates the search engines functionality regularly to compete with the almighty Google Search engine.

Sony, the company behind the PlayStation gaming console, unveiled a remake of the company's first console, the PlayStation Classic yesterday.