What's New

The Settings application is one of the central locations in Windows 10 to manage and customize the operating system.

It is still largely a work in progress, as Microsoft announced back in 2015 that it wanted to migrate all Control Panel applets to the Settings application eventually.

Windows 10 users still juggle between the Control Panel and Settings app more than two years after the official release.

Mozilla's decision to switch the Firefox web browser's extension system to WebExtensions had far-reaching consequences not only for Firefox but also for browsers that share code with Firefox.

I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the current state of extension support of popular web browsers.

For this, I took a look at the browser's Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Waterfox, and what options users of these browsers have to download and install browser extensions.

KUC is a free program for Microsoft Windows that system administrators may use to check for installing, missing or removable updates on Windows PCs, and to download and install missing updates.

KUC works with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on the client side, and Windows Server 2008 R2 and various other server products on the server side.

CVE-2017-5715 (variant 2), also known as Spectre, as most people know by now is a serious problem affecting a large number of computers across the world.

If you run Google Chrome on a Windows PC and monitor processes that run on the machine, you may notice the Software Reporter Tool process eventually.

Software Reporter Tool, the executable file is software_reporter_tool.exe, is a tool that Google distributes with the Google Chrome web browser.

Wondrous Lands is an online roleplaying game in which you control a party of three characters to, you guessed it, save the world from an evil overlord.

The game begins on the party creation screen. You pick three characters from a random selection that may differ regarding race, stats, and abilities. Note that you cannot change the party after selection and that you can reroll to get a different list of available characters.

Integrity Downloader is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices that is a basic download manager on first glance. The built-in security features are what may make the program interesting to some users.

Download managers offer plenty of extra functionality when it comes to file downloads. They promise faster download speeds by downloading multiple parts of files simultaneously, and offer better file management options.

Microsoft released another batch of updates for various versions of the company's Windows 10 operating system.

This is the third batch of patches that address the AMD boot loop bug directly caused by earlier updates, or add more protections to the operating system.

The first batch of patches resolved the unbootable state issue for specific AMD devices on machines running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

While Mozilla focuses much of its development resources on releasing Firefox 58 next week, work on the next Firefox version Firefox 59 continues as well.

Firefox users who run Nightly, the cutting edge version of Firefox that is updated very frequently, are already on version 59.

While some features are not enabled yet, Tab Warming needs to be mentioned in this regard; others are readily available already.

Firefox 59 will be released on March 13, 2018, if there are not any last minute changes to the release schedule.

A new breed of malicious browser extensions uses techniques to make the removal of these extensions more difficult to users and administrators.

Malwarebytes revealed in a blog post how these extensions block user access to the add-on management page of the browser and therefore removal from within the browser.

Wine HQ announced the release of Wine 3.0 today. The new version of Wine comes with support for Direct3D 10 and 11, improved DirectWrite and Direct2D support, and more features.

Wine enables users on Linux, Mac OS X and other non-Windows systems to run Windows programs without requiring a copy of Microsoft Windows.

It is, for instance, useful to get Windows software to run on Linux machines that would not be available otherwise. Think of computer games, Adobe Photoshop or other programs that are not available for Linux.

The next feature update for Windows 10, Windows 10 version 1803, will feature new privacy settings and improvements that give users and administrators more control over data on the device.

Windows 10 users and admins may change privacy-related settings in several ways on machines running Windows 10. They may change some privacy options under Settings > Privacy, make modifications using policies, or change Registry keys related to privacy.

The recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities can only be patched fully with BIOS updates. Depending on your system, you may have installed the operating system, web browser and other software updates already to reduce the attack vector of potential attacks targeting the vulnerabilities.

JSPaint is a free web-based remake of Microsoft Paint, a basic but popular image editor for the Windows operating system.

Microsoft announced some time ago that it would deprecate Microsoft Paint in favor of the new Paint 3D UWP application that it introduced in the Windows 10 Creators Update.

Mozilla has been on the forefront of WebAssembly development, a relatively new technology that offers better performance on the Web than JavaScript in many cases.