What's New

If you are a regular here on this blog you know that it is better to have automatic updates turned off on Windows as it gives you more control over the updating process and some time to monitor responses to released updates.

While most updates install just fine and work fine as well after installation, broken or faulty update releases appear to have increased in recent time.

Microsoft's upcoming feature update for Windows 10 will be named the October 2018 Update and Windows 10 version 1809.

The company ended the previous scheme for names that used the seasons to the informative but rather boring "launch month and year" scheme when it released the April 2018 Update in April 2018.

The new name scheme for updates is less confusing than last year's Spring and Fall updates which one half of the globe could not really related to at all, but it is not without issues.

Insight.io for Github is a browser extension for the Google Chrome web browser that adds a directory tree structure to Github repositories to browse all files of the repository comfortably.

Browsing repositories on GitHub is not the most pleasant experience that you can have; you can only select one directory to open to display the file it contains. The loading takes a bit of time and going back to open another directory takes time as well.

Microsoft released new cumulative updates for Windows 10 version 1803, 1709, 1703, 1607 and Windows Server 2016 on August 30, 2018.

In Changing Our Approach To Anti-Tracking, Mozilla revealed plans to improve the privacy protection of Firefox users and the performance of the browser through the improved implementation of content blocking in the web browser.

Firefox will protect users by blocking tracking by default and improve performance at the same time according to Mozilla.

Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail, which both fly under the Oath banner, a Verizon owned company, scan emails that arrive in user inboxes to improve advertisement targeting.

An article published by The Wall Street Journal (sorry, no link as it is paywalled), suggests that Oath's email scanning may go beyond what users of the service may deem acceptable.

Firefox Public Data Report is a new weekly report by Mozilla that offers current and historic statistics on user metrics, usage behavior, and configurations on mobile and desktop operating systems.

Has Firefox lost users in the last twelve months? What are the most widely used languages, the percentage of Firefox installations with Tracking Protection enabled or add-ons installed, or the top operating system?

CCleaner 5.46 is now available; the new version promises better privacy options, clearer explanation of privacy-related features, and a data fact sheet that highlights what is collected and why.

The past couple of months were rough for CCleaner, a popular program to clean temporary files and remove other unwanted bits of data from Windows systems.

Opera Software plans to use a different installer user interface starting with Opera 57 and going forward. The company announced the change on the official desktop team blog where it highlights changes to all Opera channels for desktop operating systems.

MaterialFox is a user-designed theme for Firefox that turns the Firefox web browser into a material-design inspired browser.

Tagstoo is a free cross-platform desktop program for Windows, Linux and Mac devices to manage files and folders using tags.

The idea to tag files and folders on desktop systems is not entirely new. We reviewed Tag 2 Find back in 2009 which focused on finding files quickly using tags that you could assign to files or folders manually or automatically. Then in 2016, we reviewed Tag2Spaces, an open source cross-platform program to tag files.

Google Chrome, just like any other modern browser, is a tab-driven web browser that gives its users options to open sites in different tabs in the interface.

Users can keep multiple sites open in Chrome that way and switch between them easily. Tabs support drag and drop operations to move them to a new position in the browser window or drag them out of the current window to create a new one automatically.

Sometimes, you may want to move multiple browser tabs of a Chrome window to a new location in the window or create a new browser window using the selection.

YouTube revealed in a new video for content creators recently that it plans to push unskippable video ads on the video hosting site.

The video "Want to earn more money from ad revenue?" was published on the official Creator Insider channel on YouTube.

All publishers on YouTube that may monetize videos on the site will get options to run unskippable ads on their channels.

Google is testing a change in the company's Chrome web browser currently that hides the URL in the address bar when users run searches in the browser.

The experimental feature is only available on Android currently, but the description suggests that it will also become available for desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome OS.

A search for the flag on a Windows PC returned zero hits at the time of writing though.

Adobe Flash will be retired in 2020 and browser makers such as Google, Mozilla or Microsoft started to phase out Flash support already in the browsers they create.