What's New

Windows assigns drive letters to internal and external hard drives, optical drives, Flash memory cards and other devices automatically when it recognizes them.

The main reason for that is that it allows users of the system to interact with the devices directly; it would certainly be inconvenient if users had to assign drive letters to new devices manually, or even each time devices get connected.

Firefox 59.0 was offered to the stable channel of the browser on March 13, 2018. It is the second major update after the release of Firefox 57.0 Quantum which introduced major changes across the board.

The release overview highlights all major and minor changes sorted into categories such as security or developer for easier accessibility.

In-page popups can be quite the annoyance on the Internet. These popups appear on the active page and not in form of a new windows displayed over or under the current browser window.

If you are long enough on the Internet, you probably encountered sites that threw these popups in your face already; the in-page popups are used to get you to subscribe to the site's newsletter, or inform you about a very special offer that expires soon.

Windows 10 was not Microsoft's first operating system that collected Telemetry data but Microsoft changed what is collected and the control users have over the functionality significantly in Windows 10.

The move to Windows as a Service played a major role in the decision as Microsoft's decision to switch from a "one major new version of Windows every three years" to "two not so big but still significant updates per year" release scheme.

CurrPorts 2.5, a new version of the program that lists open TCP/IP network ports and connections, lists sent and received bytes, and sent and received packets in its interface.

CurrPorts by Nirsoft was one of the first programs that I reviewed here on Ghacks Technology News. The first CurrPorts review dated back to November 2005, the second to 2010.

Mozilla plans to improve the built-in screenshot tool of the Firefox web browser in Firefox 59 Stable by adding image editing functionality to the server uploaded images are hosted on.

Update: The feature is available for all versions of Firefox as it was enabled server-side.

Screenshot functionality is not entirely new. Mozilla added screen capturing options to Firefox back in 2012 when it added the functionality to the browser's Developer Toolbar.

Session Boss is a free browser extension for the Firefox web browser to save and restore Firefox tabs for safekeeping, backups or working with different tab sets.

The well-designed extension saves sessions automatically in intervals and supports manual session savings to give users full control over the saving of tabs in the browser.

Firefox comes with session saving and restoration functionality built-in which works for the majority of users reliably (provided that they configured Firefox to remember the previous session).

When Secunia launched Personal Software Inspector (PSI) almost a decade ago, it was welcome with open arms by users who wanted to run security scans on Windows systems to detect security issues and outdated applications.

The company switched from an online tool to a software program and launched version 3.0 of the application back in 2012. Version 3.0 of the program featured a new streamlined interface and lacked some of the features that previous versions of the program supported.

You broke something. Congratulations! You’re one of the millions of people across the globe, who have broken their system, perhaps without having any clue whatsoever about how you even did it...

Okay, so, you’ve tried some searches online, you’ve asked your other computer savvy friends, and you’ve also dug out your favourite hammer – just incase you need to break something. Being real though, there’s many times where you may need to seek out help online using forums, IRC, or mailing lists.

Unpuzzle 2 is a free puzzle game in which you try to remove connections between all puzzle pieces in each level to proceed to the next.

The only option that you have is to drag puzzle pieces vertically or horizontally. As you can imagine, this is not as easy as it sounds. You may drag them only if no other puzzle piece is in the way, only if it is connected to a single other piece, and if other connections don't get in the way either.

Mozilla is working on integrating Group Policy Support for Firefox running on Windows devices in the upcoming Firefox 60 release.

Firefox 60 is the next Extended Support Release of the web browser which replaces Firefox ESR 52.x, the last official version of Firefox to support the old extensions system. Mozilla made Firefox 60 the next ESR target and not Firefox 59.

So, with the news of Linux Mint no longer providing KDE in future releases, some people have started to wonder where they might turn should the need / desire to change distributions in the future arises; granted you don’t have to leave LM-KDE at all if you don’t want, there will just be no more ISO’s being made, etc.

The source code of the privacy extension Ghostery for the web browsers Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Edge, has been published on GitHub by the development company.

Ghostery is a very popular browser extension. On Firefox, it is one of seven extensions with more than 1 million users; and on Chrome, it has more than 2.8 million active users.

The extension has not been without controversy in the past. While the extension did what it was supposed to do -- protect user privacy while running -- it was the underlying revenue scheme of the company that met criticism.

WizTree 3.19 is the latest version of the large folder and files browser for Microsoft's Windows operating system.  It is my favorite application of its kind as it is super fast and well designed.

Reports are coming in that Windows 10 systems running an earlier feature version of the operating system are upgraded to Windows 10 version 1709 forcefully in some circumstances.

The issue seems to be related to KB4023814, "Some versions of Windows 10 display a notification to install the latest version", which Microsoft updated on March 5, 2018 the last time.