Came across this gHacks article via Grand Stream Dreams. Starting with Pale Moon 26 the rendering engine is going to move from Gecko to Goanna. From what I gather, the change is more for legal reasons (Gecko is registered trademark licensed to the Mozilla Foundation by Netscape/AOL) and also to fix compatibility issues with websites detecting the wrong version of Gecko because of the numbering differences with Pale Moon and Firefox. There is really not going to much changes under the hood so to say. It is going to be a fork off of Gecko much like Chromium (Open Source Project based…
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Over the course of the last year I have noticed Firefox is becoming more and more bloated. Martin Brinkmann (ghacks), talks about what Firefox was like when it was first introduced: Back then, the core development philosophy was to create and maintain a user-friendly browser with a high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem that adds new features to the browser. This worked really well, kept the core browser rather slim without sacrificing features as users were able to install extensions or scripts, or use other customization options such as styles to modify the browser for their needs and…
Claus at grand stream dreams, linked in his recent Anti Virus Software Updates blog posts an interesting article about issues Windows users were having with high CPU load. The culprit as it turns out was an optional (though installed by default) of avast! antivirus (both free and premium versions) called avast NG. The article (which has been Google Translated from another language) includes step-by-step instructions on how to uninstall the unwanted components (warning: restart required to complete the removal) as well as screenshots (in a another language). On my three systems (generic Windows 7 Desktop, HP Windows 7 Laptop and Gateway Windows 8.1),…
Another thing I did not know about Windows 8: Product/Activation/Registration Key is stored in BIOS. Unlike Windows 7 and older, chances are there is not a product key sticker on your computer. I did a very through examination of my Windows 8 Gateway Desktop and noticed there is not a ‘Windows Key’ sticker anywhere to be found. What if something happens to your hard drive and you are not able to recover the contents (mechanical failure)? If you have a recovery CD/DVD/BD/USB you might be okay once you get a new hard drive installed. If you don’t, it is going to…
Browsers extensions are great as they enhance the usability and your experience with your browser. However, there are some extensions out there that will actually do the opposite. This seems to be a bigger problem for Chrome but there are a couple known ‘spying’ extensions in Firefox. These ‘evil’ extensions may track you or as in the case with Scott Hanselman inject ads into sites you are viewing. My perspective on JavaScript-based browser extensions has been far too naïve until this point. We were all burned by bad toolbars or evil ActiveX add-ons in the past, so when I run IE I run it with…
Now, for whatever reason I have not seen any reference to this new feature (or annoyance as Mozilla makes it rather difficult to allow the download if you understand the risks) in the Firefox 32.x release notes. From the Mozilla Security Blog: Until recently, we only had access to lists of reported malicious web sites, now the Safe Browsing service monitors malicious downloaded files too. The latest version of Firefox (as of July 22) will protect you from more malware by comparing files you download against these lists of malicious files, and blocking them from infecting your system. The next version of Firefox…