Opera Mini for Android has been upgraded to version 7.5, bringing with it a new Smart Page feature that aggregates social media updates and news from your most frequently visited websites. Smart Page works by creating feeds for your favorite web destinations and suggesting other sources based on your surfing habits. So far, Opera Mini 7.5 with the Smart Page is only available on Android.
Hackers have used a new zero-day vulnerability — a hole previously unknown to security researchers — in versions 7 and 8 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to spread malware on computers running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and below. Further investigation by the developers of penetration testing tool Metasploit has demonstrated that the hole can also be exploited on computers running Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 or Windows Vista.
If you are spending most of the time on your computer using a web browser like Firefox, you may in the future spend even more time using the browser, and nothing but the browser. The idea behind Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is to add options to the web browser to share and stream audio, video and data. How that is different from today’s options to do so? WebRTC requires no plugins, extensions or third party software to provide you with those functionalities.
Days before iOS 6 lands on iPhones without the familiar pre-installed YouTube app, Google has released a new version with some significant upgrades. Tens of thousands of additional videos can now be played through the iOS app, notably major-label music videos. That will be made possible by advertising, which was forbidden in the original Apple-designed app. The new YouTube also includes an easier way to browse any channels you've subscribed to - just swipe right from the left side of the screen to see a list of them - and new options for sharing videos with friends, including Facebook and Google+.
Browser maker Mozilla has patched a bug in the latest major version of Firefox that could have exposed the websites of those using the "Private Browsing" mode. Private Browsing, a feature implemented in most modern browsers, allows users to browse the Web without leaving any trace of the websites visited on the user's computer. But shortly after the latest Firefox release was dished out to end-users, a bug report was filed to claim that any site visited while in the privacy-conscious mode could be found through manual browser cache inspection.
HP has announced their Windows 8 desktop lineup, leading off with 23.6-inch Spectre One. It's the first all-in-one in the company's premium Spectre line and a scant 11.5 millimeters thick — HP's thinnest all-in-one to date. The desktop also lacks a touchscreen, a curious omission in light of finger-friendly Windows 8. You'll still be able to get your multitouch-gesture fix, as HP has bundled a wireless touchpad with the PC.
Third party software developers who want their programs to function properly under Microsoft’s upcoming operating system Windows 8 need to focus their attention on two new areas. The start page is the first and without doubt the most difficulty to work with as it is restricting apps significantly that run here. The second area is touch, which is one of the improved features of Windows 8, and if you take the hardware announcements of this year’s IFA as an indicator, one of the main focuses of hardware manufacturers when it comes to Windows 8 powered devices.
Hewlett-Packard released two beta versions of its open source webOS on Friday: one for developers that runs on the Ubuntu Linux desktop, and one for the "OpenEmbedded" development environment, intended to help developers port webOS to new devices. The August Edition, as the webOS team calls the latest release on the project website, consists of 45 open source webOS components and 450,000 lines of code. The two versions were released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.
From the early days, Mozilla has been focused on empowering users across platforms and devices. They released Firefox Home as an experiment in bringing a part of the Firefox experience to iOS, focusing on Firefox Sync. This project provided valuable insight and experience with the platform, but they have decided to remove Firefox Home from the Apple App Store and focus our resources on other projects.
In response to the findings of a recent vulnerability in Java 7 that was being exploited by malware developers, Oracle has released an official patch that takes care of the problem. In the past week, a new vulnerability was unveiled in Oracle's Java 7 runtime, which has been used by hackers in targeted attacks on Windows-based systems. Similar to the recent Flashback malware in OS X, this vulnerability allows criminals to create a drive-by hack where the only action needed to compromise a system is to visit a rogue Web page that hosts a malicious Java applet.