What's New

Mozilla plans to introduce Off-Main-Thread painting in the next stable version of the Firefox browser to improve the browser's performance significantly.

Basically, what Mozilla did was move rasterization to its own thread. When Firefox renders a web page, certain activities happen in the background.

Three of the four, making a display list, assigning layers and rasterization, happen in the main thread, while compositing happens in a separate thread.

CyberSight, a new computer security company based in California, released the first version of the anti-ransomware software RansomStopper yesterday.

RansomStopper is available as a free version for non-commercial use, and a paid version for commercial and Enterprise use.

The program is compatible with Windows 7 and newer versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and CyberSight promises that it will stop ransomware before encryption of data occurs.

If you run a device that is powered by Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, you may have noticed already, or not, that the system's update functionality may be broken completely.

A check for updates returns the error message "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer".  The error 80248015 is displayed, but anything you try to resolve the issue on your end fails.

The developer of the popular Classic Shell application for Microsoft's Windows operating system released the last version of the program yesterday.

Classic Shell is a free program for Windows that restores classic versions of the Windows Start Menu, Explorer, Internet Explorer and Shell on user request.

It is used by many to restore the classic Windows 7 start menu on Windows 8.1 or 10 machines, and also to bring back the classic look to other core parts of the operating system.

Script Safe, a popular extension for the Google Chrome web browser, has been ported to the Firefox web browser by its author.

Tip: check out our review of Script Safe for Chrome if you use the browser, or another Chromium-based browser.

DNSTrails is a new Internet service that provides you with the tools to find any domain someone owns among other things.

The service has more to offer than that, as you may use it to display IP neighborhoods, display DNS and Whois records of any domain, and historical DNS data.

Microsoft removed updating controls when it released the Windows 10 operating systems so that it has become less trivial to set the updating process to manual or disable updates altogether. This is true especially when it comes to Windows 10 Home.

One of the better solutions to regain controls over updates was to disable the Windows Update service, and enable it only when you wanted the system to find and install updates.

Microsoft changed that workaround in the Fall Creators Update version of Windows 10 however closing that loophole effectively.

Busy Microsoft released a total of four updates for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update; one cumulative update that addresses several issues, two dynamic updates and a servicing stack update.

KB4051963 is the major update for Windows 10 version 1709. It brings the build of the operating system to 16299.98, and was released on November 30, 2017.

Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser, released the State of Mozilla annual financial report for the year 2016, and things could not look better from a financial point of view.

The Firefox add-on NoScript was one of the best rated add-ons on Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons website. It had a solid five out of five star rating by about 1600 different users, and more than 1.7 million active users in total.

If you check  the rating and users of the extension today, you will notice that its rating dropped to four out of five stars, and that the extension lost a good 100K users on top of that beginning at the time Mozilla released Firefox 57 Quantum.

Nvidia released a new WHQL graphics driver 388.43 for Windows earlier today which brings back NV Tray and Game Ready support for Doom VFR.

The new driver is already available on the official Nvidia download drivers web page for download.

As usual, it is recommended that you remove the old Nvidia display driver fully before you install the new driver on the Windows PC.

Microsoft Office uses the language of the system to display interface elements usually. That's usually what users of the program want, but some users may want it to use a different language instead.

I for instance prefer to run the English version of Microsoft Office. The reason is simple: whenever I write an article about Office, I need to use the English terms for menus and options as I write these articles in English.

Kapwing's Resize Video tool is an online video resizer that you may use to create optimized videos for the popular services Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter Media Downloader is an  extension for the Firefox and Google Chrome web browser to download images and videos published on Twitter automatically.

Twitter is a popular social messaging service; it supports text but also media. While you can download individual media easily on Twitter, images for instance with a right-click on the displayed image and the selection of the save image option from the context menu, that process is not overly comfortable if you want to download multiple images from search or individual Twitter users.

VidCutter is a cross-platform software program for Windows, Mac and Linux devices that offers tools to cut video and audio files.

The program is not a full blown video editor, but focuses on cutting media files exclusively. While that makes it less attractive to users who require other video editing tools as well, it is ideal for users who want to cut a video or audio file quickly and without having to read through hundred pages of documentation before they can even get started.