Tech News Weekly: Issue 29
Firefox and Chrome security updates, new Vivaldi feature, new Winamp, and more this week
News
Operating Systems
Windows Widgets is one of the new features of Windows 11. It displays weather information on the taskbar and, when opened, news, sports scores, stock market information and other content. News is powered by MSN, and many users find the quality lacking. Problem is: there is no option to turn off news entirely in Widgets.
Microsoft is working on adding suggestions to Windows 11’s Snap Assist feature. Snap Assist allows users to display windows in different layouts on the screen, from side-by-side, to four windows taking up a quarter of the space. Suggestions would display other program windows that would be placed into the available regions of the layout.
Fedora 38 was released today with GNOME 44. You may read up on the major new features of the Linux distribution here.
Mobile
Firefox 112 for Android was released this week with two major improvements. The first attempts to block “open in another app” prompts from websites, the second enables the swipe down to reload the page action.
Google plans to introduce an App Archiving feature to the next version of Android. It is designed to free up space for the installation of new apps, without removing user data from installed apps. Users need to opt-in during the installation of apps, if the device is low on space. If confirmed by the user, the feature will remove the application data but not the user data from apps that have not been used for a while.
Browser
Quick tip for most browsers. A middle-click on the back button opens the previous webpage in a new tab, a right-click displays the list of closed tabs, to select one in particular.
Mozilla released Firefox 112.0.1 this week to address a major cookies issue. The last access date of cookies was set to 4000 years in advance, which caused them to be deleted. Users lost their sign-ins, and had to sign in again. Other data stored in cookies was also lost for affected users.
Mozilla did enable Total Cookie Protection in Firefox 112 as well this week, which sandboxes cookies and makes tracking less effective.
Firefox may soon select the reject all option when sites display cookie prompts to the user. Cookie prompts without that option stay open and continue to require user activity.
And the last Firefox news for the week is that Mozilla is preparing to integrate Firefox Translations natively in Firefox. It is available in Nightly 114 already, and may launch in the coming months in the stable version of Firefox. Firefox Translations is a privacy-friendly translation service, as it processes the translations locally. Downside is, that it lacks support for many languages.
Google improved the performance of Chrome’s JavaScript handling by 10% according to one benchmark. Version 114 of Chrome includes the full improvements, but some are already in Chrome 112 as well.
Google released a Chrome 112 update that addresses a security issue in the browser that is exploited actively.
Vivaldi launched version 6.0 of its browser this week. It introduces the new workspaces feature, to separate tabs into workspace areas, which all launch in dedicated windows, and custom icons, which users may use to replace browser icons with custom ones.
Privacy and Security
Microsoft is working on a new Presence Sensing API and feature in Windows, which allows apps to use it on user requests. Microsoft explains that it may be used to save power, by turning off devices if the user leaves the device’s vicinity, and improve security as well.
Microsoft changed the naming convention for threat groups this week. Threats are now named after natural disasters to indicate origin or purpose. New names sound like the latest creations in cocktail bars. Want some examples? Strawberry Tempest, Night Tsunami, Aqua Blizzard or Circle Typhoon.
Western Digital hackers claim that they have copied 10 terabytes of data from the company. They have provided some proof to Techcrunch and want at least and 8 figure payment from Western Digital for not releasing the data to the public.
Anyone still using Foxit products for PDF documents? The company released a security bulletin today to address security issues in Foxit PDF Reader and Foxit PDF Editor.
Software Updates
Microsoft PowerToys will soon get an option to run ChatGPT interactions directly from the Run Launcher tool. The feature will require an API key though.
Gaming
Valve released a new version of Proton this week, which improves Steam on Linux devices.
Other
The new Winamp launched, finally, and it is totally different from what most die-hard Winamp users might have imagined. It is a web-based player that does not play local music. It does support radio streams and podcasts, and includes options for artists to offer their content on the platform and for users to support artists through subscriptions. You can check out the new Winamp here.
VideoLAN, maker of VLC Media Player, released a special version of VLC with NVIDIA RTX Super Video Resolution support. The feature attempts to improve the quality of low-quality videos.
Netflix plans to push its Basic with ads plan this year, stating that it performed better than the company’s lowest tier plan without ads. To do so, Netflix will increase the quality of the stream to 1080p and allow a second stream to take place at the same time as the first.
Reddit users who use third-party apps may soon find out that the majority of them will cease existing, if Reddit’s plans to drop free access to its API become reality.
Amazon has added a Dialogue Boost mode to Amazon Prime Video. It is designed to improve the volume of dialogue, which may sometimes be very quiet when compared to the rather loud sound effects and background music of TV shows and movies.
Article(s)
Are Windows gaming handheld devices the next big thing?
When you think about gaming on a handheld device that is running Windows, Steam Deck may be the first device that comes to your mind. It is developed by Valve, maker of Steam, and optimized for running Steam games.
It is available in three different versions and costs between $400 to $700, based on the selected version. The main difference is storage, with the two higher priced versions using NVMe SSDs and the entry level version eMMC.
The Windows handheld gaming market is not as niche as one might assume. Companies, mostly from China, such as Anbernic, GPD, One XPlayer or AYA have created numerous devices for gaming on Windows.
Take the AYANEO NEXT Advance as an example. It features an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor, an AMD Radeon Vega 8 graphics adapter, 16GB of LPDDR4x RAM, a 2TB M.2 hard drive, a 7-inch IPS LCD display, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, a 4100 mAh battery and a Windows operating system.
These devices come at a cost though. It is more powerful than the Steam Deck, but costs more than $1300 in retail.
Not all of the devices are as expensive. The Anbernic Win600 is available in several configurations. The most expensive one costs less than $450 at the time of writing. It is powered by an AMD Athlon Silver 3050e chip and an AMD Radeon RX Vega 3 graphics adapter. The top of the line mode has 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1 TB M.2 SATA drive.
It is a less capable device, but still capable of running older games, games that require less power, or emulators.
ASUS is about to enter the Windows handheld gaming niche with its Rog Ally gaming handheld. Not all details are clear about it, only that it will be more powerful than Valve’s Steam Deck and that it won’t be limited in regards to what can be run on the device.
Valve’s device ships with a special version of Steam and is therefore limited to running Steam games, at least by default. ASUS’ device can run any game Store or standalone game that is available for Windows, provided that it supports Windows 11.
There has also been talk about a Handheld Mode for Gaming for Windows 11, but this was based on a hackathon project held by Microsoft in September 2022. It is unclear at this point if the project has been picked up or not.
Manufacturers like ASUS do not have access to an optimized version of Windows for handheld gaming. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to Valve.
How to speed up qBittorrent checking torrent files
If you are using qBittorrent to download torrent files, all legal of course, you may have encountered situations in the past, in which the program ran checks on all torrent files.
This may happen if some or all of the torrents are stored on an external drive, that is not accessible all the time. If qBittorrent can’t access it when it is launched, it may run automatic rechecks later on to verify the integrity of the data.
Problem is: this can take a long time. Disk read speed is one factor that plays a major role, but there is a setting and a trick to speed up the process.
Your first option is to increase the memory of the checking operation. Go to Tools > Options > Advanced, and scroll down to the libtorrent section.
Change the value of the preference “Outstanding memory when checking torrents” from 32 MiB to 128 MiB. This alone may speed up the checking process.
There is another option that you have. It is a manual one, but it may make a huge difference. Instead of running the checking operation on all torrents simultaneously, use the pause option to limit it to a small amount of torrents.
Highlight all torrents and activate the pause button. Then, visit the Downloading section, select ten or so torrents, right-click on the selection, and pick resume. This pushes them to the checking process, while all other torrents are waiting for their turn.
Repeat the process in batches until all torrents are checked and operations can continue unhindered. It may still take some time to recheck everything, but the entire process should be smoother using these tweaks.
Links
AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable
Brussels to tighten 'standby' rules for electrical appliances
FSF: Chrome’s JPEG XL killing shows how the web works under browser hegemony
New report says the next Microsoft Surface PCs will all have NPUs inside