This morning when I fired up Vivaldi (I still use it for social media), it popped up an update message. Luckily, I actually read the change notes in the message, so I can tell you that Vivaldi 1.4.589.29 consists of an engine (Chromium) update, plus a few bugfixes.
I say ‘luckily’, because as I’m writing this, there’s no announcement of the new version on the Vivaldi blog, and no release notes of any kind. Sheesh.
I’m a big fan of Let’s Encrypt, an organization committed to encrypting all web traffic by proving free security certificates.
I’m also a big fan of transparency, so when LE published a summary of their financial information recently, my regard for their efforts clicked up another notch.
Highlights from LE’s financial information post:
For the record, this web site (boot13.com) and all my other secure sites now use Let’s Encrypt certificates.
I’m getting better at parsing Mozilla blog posts. I only had to read a few paragraphs of the latest post (“Latest Firefox Expands Multi-Process Support and Delivers New Features for Desktop and Android”) to be fairly certain that it’s talking about a new, just-released version of Firefox. The new version number (49) isn’t mentioned, and neither is there any definite indication of when the new version was released. But there is a link to the version 49 release notes, way down at the bottom of the post.
Why is that bad? Because the Mozilla blog also routinely includes posts that are not related to new versions of Firefox, and those posts are almost indistinguishable from posts about new Firefox versions. Of course, if your goal is to confuse and obfuscate, well, nice work, Mozilla.
According to the release notes, Firefox 49 enables multi-process tabs for even more users. After installing, you can determine whether your Firefox is using multi-process tabs by entering ‘about:support‘ in Firefox’s address bar and looking for the ‘Multiprocess Windows’ entry. In my case, that entry shows as 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons). I’m using add-ons that Mozilla hasn’t tested, I guess.
Also in Firefox 49, Reader Mode has been improved, and offline page viewing has been enabled for Android users.
Version 40 of alternative web browser Opera includes several major enhancements. Most notable among the changes are:
Sadly, the folks behind Opera seem to be taking a (rather dysfunctional) page from Mozilla – at least in the way changes are reported. Release announcements for Opera are still in the same place on the Opera Desktop blog. But whereas changes in previous versions were reported in changelog posts on the desktop blog (such as this one for version 39), on a page on the Opera documentation site (which stops at version 37), and on the Opera history page (which also stops at version 37), there doesn’t seem to be anything like a change log for Opera 40. Hopefully this is a temporary issue, and something better is on the way. But I’m not holding my breath. This trend toward a general reduction in (and dumbing-down of) information provided to users is not helpful, in my opinion.
boot13