Some Windows 10 users have complained that when Microsoft sets up its Edge browser, it steals data from Chrome and Firefox without asking first, writes ZDNet columnist Chris Matyszczyk.

But today a reader sent him a new complaint involving Windows 7: "My wife's computer, which is running Windows 7, got a Windows update this morning, which then gave the full-screen welcome page for Edge Chromium. She was terrified as this looked exactly as if malware had taken over the machine... How could any application be running that she hadn't started? How is it that Microsoft can't manage to provide security updates for Windows 7, as it is end of life, but still manage to force a new web browser that isn't wanted on Windows 7 users...?"

"The full-screen welcome page for Chomium Edge did have a faint 'close' gadget in the top right, which was the very first thing we clicked... This still left Edge pinned on the taskbar and when I hovered over it, it showed all the recent sites she had visited on Chrome. So it must have stolen that data from Chrome which is the only browser she ever uses."
The ZDNet columnist shared his own reaction to the story. "Edge is a fine browser. It's quick, effective, and has superior privacy instincts than does Chrome. I have begun to use it and I like it. When you launch a new product, however, you have two choices: You can announce it, make people feel good about it, and then rely on word of mouth. Or you can try ramming it down people's throats.

"The former is often more effective. Microsoft has chosen the latter."

"Google has taken one step closer to banishing third-party cookies from Chrome," reports Engadget. The internet giant has started testing its trust tokens with developers, with promises that more would move to live tests "soon." As before, the company hoped to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome once it could meet the needs of both users and advertisers.

Trust tokens are meant to foster user trust across sites without relying on persistent identifying data like third-party cookies. They theoretically prevent bot-based ad fraud without tying data to individuals. This would be one framework as part of a larger Privacy Sandbox including multiple open standards.

The company still hopes to eliminate third-party cookies by 2022.

Google and Apple, which already battle over mobile operating systems, are opening a new front in their fight. How that plays out may determine the future of the web. From a report: Google was born on the web, and its business reflects its origin. The company depends on the web for search and advertising revenue. So it isn't a surprise that Google sees the web as key to the future of software. Front and center are web apps, interactive websites with the same power as conventional apps that run natively on operating systems like Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. Apple has a different vision of the future, one that plays to its strengths. The company revolutionized mobile computing with its iPhone line. Its profits depend on those products and the millions of apps that run on them. Apple, unsurprisingly, appears less excited about developments, like web apps, that could cut into its earnings.

The two camps aren't simply protecting their businesses. Google and Apple have philosophical differences, too. Google, working to pack its dominant Chrome browser with web programming abilities, sees the web as an open place of shared standards. Apple, whose Safari browser lacks some of those abilities, believes its restraint will keep the web healthy. It wants a web that isn't plagued by security risks, privacy invasion and annoyances like unwanted notifications and permission pop-ups. Google leads a collection of heavy-hitting allies, including Microsoft and Intel, trying to craft new technology called progressive web apps, which look and feel like native apps but are powered by the web. PWAs work even when you have no network connection. You can launch PWAs from an icon on your phone home screen or PC start menu, and they can prod you with push notifications and synchronize data in the background for fast startup. PWA fans include Uber, travel site Trivago and India e-commerce site Flipkart. Starbucks saw its website usage double after it rolled out a PWA.

The split over native apps and web apps is more than just a squabble between tech giants trying to convert our lives online into their profits. How it plays out will shape what kind of a digital world we live in. Choosing native apps steers us to a world where we're locked into either iOS or Android, limited to software approved by the companies' app stores and their rules. Web apps, on the other hand, reinforce the web's strength as a software foundation controlled by no single company. A web app will work anywhere, making it easier to swap out a Windows laptop for an iPad. "What you're seeing is the tension between what is good for the user, which is to have a flexible experience, and what's good for the platform, which is to keep you in the platform as much as possible," said Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Eric Rescorla.

"Google has decided to disable a feature in Windows 10 version 2004 that allowed Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers to use a lot less RAM," reports ZDNet: Windows 10 gave Win32 apps including Chrome access to a 'segment heap' API to allow apps to reduce memory usage, but as Techdows spotted, Chromium engineers have decided for now to turn off the feature by default in Chrome 85 after discovering it has a negative impact on CPU usage. Chrome 85 should reach stable status in August...

The CPU issue was discovered by an Intel engineer who found that when Chrome used segment heap, it led to significant performance regression in benchmarks on a PC with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor...

Microsoft has defended the trade-off between memory and CPU but conceded it can be implemented better to reduce the impact on CPU performance. "It is common practice to trade one resource for another. More often it's increased memory usage for reduced CPU usage. In this case it's increased CPU usage for dramatically reduced memory usage, or more accurately commit," wrote a Microsoft employee... "In the short term this is a good trade-off of one resource for another as memory/commit usage is a significant pain point for browser users," argued the Microsoft employee....

However, Chromium developers want to see more evidence about the possible impact of Chrome using segment heap... "The CPU cost (10% slowdown on Speedometer 2.0, 13% increase in CPU/power consumption) is too great for us to keep."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and Web Animations API, and removes older Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions. First deprecated with Chrome 81 in April, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have now been completely removed with Chrome 84. This is notable for anyone who manages a website, even if they don't use Chrome at home or at work. TLS is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network -- websites use it to secure all communications between their servers and browsers. TLS also succeeds Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and thus handles the encryption of every HTTPS connection.

In May 2016, Chrome 51 introduced the SameSite attribute to allow sites to declare whether cookies should be restricted to a same-site (first-party) context. The hope was this would mitigate cross-site request forgeries (CSRF). Chrome 80 began enforcing a new secure-by-default cookie classification system, treating cookies that have no declared SameSite value as SameSite=Lax cookies. Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure are available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections. Due to the coronavirus crisis, however, Google paused the SameSite cookie changes, with plans to resume enforcement sometime over the summer. SameSite cookie enforcement has now resumed with a gradual rollout ramping up over the next several weeks for Chrome 80 and newer.

Chrome 84 introduces the Web OTP API (formerly called the SMS Receiver API). This API helps users enter a one-time password (OTP) on a webpage when a specially crafted SMS message is delivered to their Android phone. When verifying the ownership of a phone number, developers typically send an OTP over SMS that must be manually entered by the user (or copied and pasted). The user has to switch to their native SMS app and back to their web app to input the code. The Web OTP API lets developers help users enter the code with one tap. Chrome 84 also adopts the Web Animations API, which gives developers more control over web animations. These can be used to help users navigate a digital space, remember your app or site, and provide implicit hints around how to use your product. Parts of the API have been around for some time, but this implementation brings greater spec compliance and supports compositing operations, which control how effects are combined and offer many new hooks that enable replaceable events. The API also supports Promises, which allow for animation sequencing and provide greater control over how animations interact with other app features.

The Wall Street Journal's senior personal tech columnist just published an article urging readers to "quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers." It begins with the reporter pretending to break up with Chrome, adding "I'd say I'll remember the good times — your speed, your superb handling of Gmail — but your RAM hoovering, battery draining and privacy disregarding make it easy to not look back.

"This is the year, people. It's the year I challenge you to pack up your bookmarks and wave bye-bye to Google's browser..."

And the article is even accompanied by a video titled "Four ways to stop Chrome from slowing down your computer," where tip #1 is just: "Stop using Chrome..." "Sure, Chrome has far more browser market share [than Firefox, Safari, and Edge]. But all of them have actually gotten quite good over the last number of years. Heck, the new Microsoft Edge browser even uses Chromium, the same underlying technology as Chrome, and the performance is much improved, across Windows PCs, and Macs. Yes, Microsoft's browser is available for Mac, and it's good.

"In my weeks of testing, Edge used 5% less resources than Chrome on Windows. Safari used up to 10% less in some of my tests on my Mac. That meant up to 2 extra hours of battery life in their respective operating systems. Firefox, unfortunately, took up just as much power as Chrome. Google says it's working on some resource-saving improvements that will come in the next few months.

If you can switch to just one of those, go for it, even if just for their better privacy tools."
The video opens with a cartoon depiction of "Chrome-y," who lives inside your computer and eats your RAM and other resouces. "But don't worry. You can put him on a diet and take back your computer with some of these tips." The other tips including uninstalling extensions, and using Chrome's Task Manager to "spot and kill the RAM gobblers."

But throughout the video, "Chrome-y" continues chomping on your RAM...

The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image format is considered one of the lightest and most optimized image compression formats, and has already gained praise from companies such as Netflix, which considers it superior to existing image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP. The acronym of AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. As its name hints, AVIF is based on AV1, which is a video codec that was developed in 2015, following a collaboration between Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who also worked with Mozilla). At the time, the three decided to pool their respective in-house video codecs (VPX, Thor, and Daala) to create a new one (AV1) that they planned to offer as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to all the commercial video codecs that had fragmented and clogged the video streaming market in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Slashdot reader techtsp writes: Starting with October's release of Chrome 86, the web browser will offer a way to limit JavaScript timer wake ups in background web pages to one wake up per minute, restricting the execution of certain background tasks — for example, checking if the scroll position changed, reporting logs, and analyzing interactions with ads. Google plans to achieve this courtesy of a new experimental feature called "Throttle Javascript timers in background."

Google recently experimented with a prototype that limits Javascript timer wake ups to one per minute. In this experiment, Google opened 36 random tabs in the background while the foreground tab was about:blank. At the end of the experiment, Google found that throttling Javascript timers extends the battery life by almost 2 hours (28 percent) for a user with up to 36 background tabs, and when the foreground tab is about:blank...

Chrome will provide developers with a message in the DevTools console when a Javascript timer is delayed by more than 5 seconds.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The first Android version to support 64-bit architecture was Android 5.0 Lollipop, introduced back in November 2014. Since then, more and more 64-bit processors shipped, and today, virtually all Android devices are capable of running 64-bit software (excluding one or two or more oddballs). However, Google Chrome has never made the jump and is only available in a 32-bit flavor, potentially leading to some unnecessary security and performance degradations. That's finally changing: Starting with Chrome 85, phones running Android 10 and higher will automatically receive a 64-bit version. A look at chrome://version confirms as much: The current stable and beta builds, version 83 and 84, note that they're still 32-bit applications. Chrome Dev and Chrome Canary (release 85 and 86) are proper 64-bit apps. Google confirms as much on its Chromium Bugs tracker.

When compared in a number of Octane 2.0 benchmarks, the 64-bit version got consistently better results than the 32-bit version. It's possible that there have been other optimizations that make Chrome 85 faster than 83 -- the architecture is not necessarily all there is to it. Still, the benchmark results suggest that there are some enhancements, even if these tests aren't easy to translate to real-world usage.

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: If I told you that my entire computer screen just got taken over by a new app that I'd never installed or asked for -- it just magically appeared on my desktop, my taskbar, and preempted my next website launch -- you'd probably tell me to run a virus scanner and stay away from shady websites, no? But the insanely intrusive app I'm talking about isn't a piece of ransomware. It's Microsoft's new Chromium Edge browser, which the company is now force-feeding users via an automatic update to Windows. Seriously, when I restarted my Windows 10 desktop this week, an app I'd never asked for:

1. Immediately launched itself
2. Tried to convince me to migrate away from Chrome, giving me no discernible way to click away or say no
3. Pinned itself to my desktop and taskbar
4. Ignored my previous browser preference by asking me -- the next time I launched a website -- whether I was sure I wanted to use Chrome instead of Microsoft's oh-so-humble recommendation.
5. Did I mention that, as of this update, you can't uninstall Edge anymore?

Both Edge and Chrome already allow users to try unreleased, experimental features (by typing about:flags in the address bar). Soon there'll be a similar "Firefox Experiments" option starting in Firefox 79.

Slashdot reader techtsp shares this report from the Windows Club: Mozilla has a dedicated Experimental Features page on MDN just for that. But limiting experimental features to Firefox's Nightly channel has a limitation: A fairly limited number of "curious" users. Now, extending some of these experimental features to stable releases will increase the scope of "Firefox Experiments" as a whole... This option will allow users to enable/disable experimental features under Preferences...

[In Firefox 79] Navigate to Preferences by entering about:preferences in the browser's address bar or click the gear icon and got to "Preferences." Discover and set browser.preferences.experimental to True. Now, you should be able to see the "Firefox Experiments" menu under Firefox 79 Preferences.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought "Lol." Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need all of Windows Vista? In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0. "Every Windows and OS X app will be re-built for the browser!" I thought. Outlook > Gmail. Excel > Sheets. Finder > Dropbox. Photoshop > Figma. Terminal > Repl.it. All of your files would be accessible by whoever you wanted, wherever you wanted, all the time. It was obvious. Revolutionary. I haven't installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!). Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

Docs and Sheets haven't changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can't easily interact with a Sheets API (I've tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF! Even though I have an iPhone and a MacBook, I've been married to Google services. I browse Chrome. I use Gmail. I get directions and lookup restaurants on Maps. I'm a YouTube addict. Yet I've been ungluing myself from Google so far this year. Not because of Google-is-reading-my-emails-and-tracking-every-keystroke reasons, but because I like other software so much more that it's worth switching. At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. [...] I've given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people. The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone's default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I'm never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don't have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. DuckDuckGo's privacy is an added bonus.

With Safari on iOS 14, MacOS Big Sur and iPadOS 14, you'll be able to log in to websites using Apple's Face ID and Touch ID biometric authentication. That's a powerful endorsement for technology called FIDO -- Fast Identity Online -- that's paving the way to a future without passwords. From a report: Apple disclosed the biometric authentication support in Safari on Wednesday at WWDC, its annual developers conference. "It's both much faster and more secure," Apple Safari programmer Jiewen Tan said during one of the WWDC video sessions Apple offered after the coronavirus pandemic pushed the conference online. The change is a big boost for browser technology called Web Authentication, aka WebAuthn, developed by the FIDO consortium allies. Apple's not the first supporter -- it's already in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and works with Windows Hello facial recognition and Android fingerprint authentication.

Google said Wednesday it was changing the defaults on its services in an effort to store less browser history and location data on its servers. NBC News reports: Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the first time a person turns on location history, the default option would be for the data to be stored for 18 months. Activity from the web and from apps would also default to 18 months for new accounts, he said. "This means your activity data will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it," Pichai said. There will be no automatic change for existing accounts and people who already have location history turned on in their Google settings, but the company plans to inform existing users of the option to set up auto-delete after three to 18 months, he said. People also have the option to turn the setting off.

Safari 14, scheduled to be released later this fall with iOS 14 and macOS 11, is a release that is packed choke-full with features. From a report: The biggest and most important of the new additions is support for WebExtensions, a technology for creating browser extensions. What this means for Safari users is that starting this fall, they'll see a huge influx of new Safari extensions as add-on developers are expected to port their existing Chrome and Firefox extensions to work on Apple's browser as well. Apple said that, for now, WebExtensions will only be available for Safari on macOS.

Safari 14 is also an end of an era, as this will be the first version of Safari that won't support Adobe Flash Player content. But while old stuff is being removed, new stuff is also being added. One of the new technologies added to Safari is support for HTTP/3, a new web standard that will make loading websites faster and safer. Another important addition in Safari is support for WebP, a lightweight image format that has been gaining widespread adoption across the internet. The format, created by Google, serves as an alternative to the older JPEG format, and Safari has been the last browser to add support for it. [...] But Safari hasn't been lagging behind other browsers just in terms of HTTP/3 and WebP support. Apple has also added support for another cool feature, namely breach alerts, already present in both Chrome and Firefox. Starting this fall, Apple says that Safari 14 will scan a user's locally-stored passwords and show a prompt if one or more of the user's credentials are present in publicly available lists of breached accounts.

Some Firefox users have discovered that the new default Windows 10 browser, which is shipped to their devices via Windows Update, sometimes imports the data from Mozilla's application even if they don't give their permission. Softpedia reports: Some of these Firefox users decided to kill the initial setup process of Microsoft Edge, only to discover that despite the wizard shutting down prematurely, the browser still copied data stored by Mozilla's browser. Several users confirmed on reddit that this behavior happened on their computers too. Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on this, so for the time being, it's still not known why Edge imports Firefox data despite the initial wizard actually killed off manually by the user. Users who don't want to be offered the new Edge on Windows Update can turn to the dedicated toolkit that Microsoft released earlier this year, while removing the browser is possible by just uninstalling the update from the device.

Apple has unveiled the next version of macOS: Big Sur. From a report: The new operating system brings the biggest redesign since the introduction of macOS 10, according to Apple. Big Sur borrows a number of elements from Apple's iOS, including a customizable Control Center, where you can change brightness and toggle Do Not Disturb, and a new notification center, which groups related notifications together. Both interfaces are translucent, like their iOS counterparts. A number of apps have received streamlined new redesigns, including Mail, Photos, Notes, and iWork. Apple has introduced a new search feature to Messages (which organizes results into links, photos, and matching terms), as well as inline replies for group chats, a new photo-selection interface, and Memoji stickers. There's a new version of Maps for Mac that borrows features from the iOS app, including custom Guides, 360-degree location views, cycling and electric vehicle directions (which you can send directly to an iPhone), and indoor maps. Apple introduced a number of new Catalyst apps as well. Dock buttons have also been redesigned to look more similar to their iOS counterparts, in an effort to "be more consistent with icons across Apple's ecosystem while retaining their Mac personality," according to the company.

Apple also announced the biggest update to Safari since the browser was first introduced. The company claims its browser is 50 percent faster than Chrome and can show more tabs on-screen. Hovering over a tab now gives users a preview of its page, and right-clicking on the tab will give you the option to close all the tabs to its right. The new Safari also has a customizable start page and a built-in automatic translation feature that can interpret entire webpages in seven languages, Apple says. Safari is also getting support for extensions made for other browsers, and a dedicated extension store. (Unlike many other browsers, Safari will allow you to customize which sites your extensions run on). And there are new privacy features, including a Privacy Report that details actions the browser has taken to prevent tracking on the websites you visit.

"All the pieces are coming together for Microsoft to launch a direct competitor to Chromebooks..." argues an industry analyst writing for ZDNet: Since adopting the Chromium rendering engine, Microsoft Edge has featured virtually perfect compatibility with Chrome, right down to being able to install extensions from the Chrome app store. It's also enabled Microsoft to more easily support operating systems that Edge didn't previously support such as macOS and Linux. But now that Edge is working well, might Microsoft try to go after Chrome OS? While a "lite" version of Windows has been rumored for years, many of the other pieces are already in place or announced.

First, Microsoft has made no secret of how it covets the education market that has embraced Chromebooks. It has fought back with low-cost Windows notebooks from partners that are competitively priced with such devices but may lack Chrome OS' perception of simplicity and security.

Second, after years of having the web apps of office.com languish as Microsoft emphasized the PC versions, the online suite will be the first to take advantage of Fluid Framework, the company's open-source component framework that allows the embedding of applet functionality and collaboration into a range of container documents such as Edge pages. Third, while the idea of Microsoft limiting the opportunity for Windows developers on a platform might have been unthinkable years ago, times have changed. Many developers, Microsoft included, have made web apps mainstream. Outside of the Windows-boosting Surface team, Microsoft seems indifferent as to where you access its subscription-based client and cloud offerings.

Finally, Microsoft now has the cross-processor architecture support to take the battle to Google -- although, at least for now, it has exclusively focused on high-performance Qualcomm Snapdragon designs as opposed to Mediatek or Allwinner ARM-based chips in budget Chromebooks...

Microsoft's strongest competitive point would be the greater focus on privacy, one of the best reasons to use Edge versus Chrome today.

A new feature in Windows 10 might allow Google to streamline Chrome, and we know it works because Microsoft is already using it. From a report: According to Microsoft, its recent update implemented a new memory management feature in Edge known as SegmentHeap. In the latest version of Windows, developers can opt into SegmentHeap to lower the RAM usage of a program. Microsoft says it already added support to the new Edge browser, and it has seen a 27 percent drop in the browser's memory footprint.

After Motherboard discovered multiple servers on Discord containing pirated porn, the chat platform removed them and banned the owners of each. From a report: "Discord prohibits the sale, dissemination, and promotion of cracked accounts," a spokesperson told Motherboard. "We ban users and shut down servers that are responsible for this behavior. In cases of copyrighted material, we respond promptly to DMCA takedown requests and take the appropriate action." The bans are permanent, and the owners can no longer access their accounts for any purpose. Former members of those servers can no longer access those servers, either.

During Motherboard's reporting, Google removed an OnlyFans scraping Chrome extension when approached for comment. Stolen content is a problem that has plagued the adult industry for as long as porn has existed on the internet. Several owners of premium platforms similar to OnlyFans urged the industry to do better in how it safeguards content, by protecting models from theft using more advanced fingerprinting, watermarking, copyright takedown support, and technology that could prevent scrapers from using these tools to begin with.