Another new release of Vivaldi appeared earlier this week, with no announcement or anything resembling release notes on the Vivaldi web site. The announcement blog is full of details on developer snapshots, which are of no interest to regular folks.
As with the previous release, I only became aware of the new version when I ran Vivaldi and an update dialog appeared. According to that dialog, the only change in Vivaldi 1.4.589.38 is a new version of the Chromium engine.
A few bug fixes and an update for the Chromium engine comprise the changes in Opera 40.0.2308.81. The Chrome 40 change log lists thirteen total changes, including fixes for some annoying address bar and bookmark issues. There are no security fixes in this release.
Three security vulnerabilities are addressed in the latest release of Google’s web browser Chrome. The release notes for Chrome 53.0.2785.143 don’t mention any other changes. The full change log lists over forty changes, but only about twenty of those are actual changes to functionality. All of the changes are minor, although some are fixes for crashing issues.
Now that Microsoft’s offer of free Windows 10 upgrades for Windows 7 and 8.x users is over, it makes sense that we should stop seeing those annoying reminders everywhere. Sure enough, an update for Windows 7 and 8.x became available last Patch Tuesday (September 13) that removes the ‘Get Windows 10’ feature. The update is identified as KB3184143, and has the (surprisingly meaningful) title “Remove software related to the Windows 10 free upgrade offer”.
If you’ve been using the third-party software GWX Control Panel to keep those annoying Windows 10 upgrade messages away, and you’ve installed KB3184143 on your Windows 7/8.x system, you might be tempted to remove GWX Control Panel. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to assume that Microsoft won’t re-enable the ‘Get Windows 10’ feature again in the future. I plan to leave it running on my Windows 7 and 8.x computers.
Of course, knowing Microsoft, if they decide to start pushing Windows 10 on us again, they’ll probably develop something completely new, in which case GWX Control Panel probably won’t help.
In related news, at least one consumer group is calling for Microsoft to offer compensation to users and organizations that were harmed by unwanted Windows 10 upgrades.
A crashing issue affecting Firefox 49 on Windows computers has been fixed in Firefox 49.0.1. No other changes are mentioned in the release notes.
The previous release of Opera caused crashes on some platforms. Version 40.0.2308.62 addresses that problem.
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 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.
With Microsoft taking Windows in a direction that’s distinctly unappealing, it’s a pleasure to write about an operating system that’s actually being improved and enhanced in useful ways: Apple ProDOS.
You read that right: ProDOS. It’s a decades old system that runs on hardware nobody uses any more (Apple IIs), but with the dedicated efforts of a single developer, a new, greatly improved version of ProDOS was recently released as version 2.4.
Why am I so excited about this? Because operating systems are important. They form the core of all the computer systems we use daily. I want to use an O/S that’s reliable, fast, and mostly invisible. A good O/S provides this critical underpinning without compromising our privacy or trying to sell us anything.
As reported by Jason Scott on his ASCII blog, ProDOS 2.4 was a labour of love for its developer. He says:
“The current mainstream OS environment is, frankly, horrifying, and to see a pure note, a trumpet of clear-minded attention to efficiency, functionality and improvement, stands in testament to the fact that it is still possible to achieve this, albeit a smaller, slower-moving target. Either way, it’s an inspiration.”
I agree completely. There’s no reason for a new version of an operating system to ever get worse. This really applies to all software, but it’s especially important for operating systems. Microsoft would do well to look at this project and learn from it.
If you happen to have an old Apple II lying around (as I do), you can run ProDOS 2.4 on it. Otherwise, you’ll need to use an Apple II emulator like AppleWin.
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