January 2016

Oracle will soon lay the Java browser plug-in to rest

“Now that Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari stopped or will soon stop supporting NPAPI web plug-ins*, Oracle thought it best to accept the Java plug-in’s fate and let it go. The company has announced that it will be deprecated in the next version of Java to come out on September 22nd before being removed entirely by another future release …” Source: EngadgetMore  Oracle will soon lay the Java browser plug-in to rest

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Microsoft to end Support Early for some Windows 7/8.1 Computers

Microsoft MSFT 417,32 +0,90 +0,22% has announced on the Windows Blog they will stop supporting Windows 7/8.1 on computers running the latest chips from Intel INTC 42,71 +0,07 +0,16%, AMD or Qualcomm QCOM 167,20 -1,25 -0,74%. Specifically these are listed as ‘Kaby Lake’ (Intel), ‘Bristol Ridge’ (AMD) and Qualcomm’s ‘8996’ (the base for the Snapdragon 820). Between them these chips will dominate sales of all new desktops, laptops, hybrids and tablets in 2016. This means for user of devices using these chipsets as well as the current generation Intel Skylake processors the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 deadlines of January 2020 and…

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Microsoft To Get More Aggressive with ‘Get Windows 10’

Starting later this month business Windows 7/8.1 users will be included in the Get Windows 10 campaign. They too will start getting the nagware to upgrade to Windows 1o. According to a blog post from Matt Barlow, Microsoft’s MSFT 417,32 +0,90 +0,22% general manager of business group marketing, “Small businesses and organizations will soon be able to receive notifications about the upgrade and then directly upgrade to Windows 10,”. Microsoft defines small businesses and organizations as those with a device which: Running and licensed for Windows 7 Pro or Windows 8.1 Pro Configured to receive updates directly from the Windows Update service (i.e….

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Microsoft Has Ended Windows 8 Support

On January 13th, 2016, Microsoft Unfortunately, we could not get stock quote msft this time. officially ended support for Windows 8 and you better upgrade to Windows 10 while you still can for free. Okay, you may be asking since Windows 7 came out before Windows 8 and it is supported until January 2020 why would Microsoft end support for Windows 8 now? Well, Microsoft is referring to the original Windows 8.0 (though never branded as such). Okay, so I have Windows 8.1 I am good then? Maybe, maybe not…Microsoft’s FAQ: “Windows 8.1 falls under the same lifecycle policy as Windows 8,…

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Thunderbird 38.5.1 Released

Mozilla released an update to the Thunderbird 38.5.x branch on January 7th, 2016. Thunderbird 38.5.1 is for Windows users and implemented using a SHA-256 signing certificate for Windows builds, to meet new signing requirements. This was the final step of the replacing the now deprecated (as of 01/01/2016) SHA-1 signing certificates. Windows XP SP2 users: You can not update from Thunderbird 38.4.0 (or older) to 38.5.0 automatically. You will need to manually download and install Thunderbird 38.5.0 from here and then update to the current version of Thunderbird. Windows Vista/Server 2008 SP2 users: If you are running into issues trying to install Thunderbird…

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Add-ons for a Better YouTube Experience

“From blocked videos to annoying ads, there are many things about YouTube we don’t like. These restrictions and distractions only dampen the amazing experience that the video-sharing website is meant to provide. If you are a Firefox user, however, you won’t have to worry about such things. Firefox offers a variety of add-ons that let you fix pretty much any annoyance that YouTube has. Furthermore, they also let you download videos right to your desktop so that you can watch them whenever you want, even without a connection.“So, without much ado, here are some of the best Firefox add-ons that…

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Using extensions in Firefox

Looks like I got caught assuming again. I’ve been using FF for a long time and the primary reason has been the extensions/add-ons therefore everyone uses it for that reason. Gizmo’s posted a how-to for the add-ons today and caused me to rethink that assumption. “… Counting the number of Firefox installations from which the foundation receives this anonymously submitted data, Mozilla staff estimates that around two in five users don’t have add-ons installed on their Firefox browser. …” Source: Softpedia Mozilla: 40 Percent of Firefox Users Don’t Have Add-Ons Installed “Firefox has tons of useful add-ons that can make your…

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The Ghacks user.js Firefox privacy and security list

“… The newest version of it, featuring hundreds of advanced preferences for Firefox, has been released today. The latest version of the preferences list contains 298 different preferences for Firefox, and it is growing with every release. …” Source: gHacks Tech News The Ghacks user.js Firefox privacy and security list has been updated

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Importing from Eudora or Outlook?

If you have been trying to import your emails from MS Eudora or Outlook with the current Thunderbird 38.x branch you likely have run into problems. According to Bug 1176748, this functionality was disabled as it broke the Thunderbird 38 branch. There is however, a simple fix and that is to temporarily install Thunderbird 31.8.0 (or Thunderbird 17.8.0), import then update to the current Thunderbird 38.x branch. One catch though, this only works for Outlook. Apparently the import functionality for Eudora has not worked in a long time and since it has been almost 10-years since Microsoft ended support for Eudora, Mozilla…

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Choose Windows 7 at “your own risk and your own peril”

This very odd statement is from Microsoft MSFT 417,32 +0,90 +0,22% Marketing chief Chris Capossela. “We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines,” Capossela stated. “And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to…

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