Articles about Free Software

VMware has released major updates to its virtualization software products in the form of VM Workstation 16.0 for Windows and Linux, plus VM Fusion Player 12.0 for Mac.

Mac users gain a free 'player' version of VMware Fusion for personal use, while both products gain support for Kubernetes clusters, allowing users to run multiple app containers at once in specialized 'nodes'. Support for Windows DirectX 11 apps and games has also been added to virtual machines.

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Uniquely customizable browser Vivaldi gets another major update with the release of Vivaldi 3.3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new release adds a major new Break Mode feature to encourage regular screen breaks.

The new release also offers users the ability to create and apply custom themes to their Private Windows sessions -- a first among web browsers -- as well as several improvements to the Address Bar to improve security and navigation. Full-Page blocking is now supported in the Tracker and Ad Blocker tools, while users can now drag and drop Speed Dials to folders on the Vivaldi 'desktop' on the user’s home page.

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Google has released Google Web Designer 9.0, the third major update of its HTML-5 content-producing tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux in just over a year. The tool is particularly popular among web advertisers thanks to its user-friendly WYSIWYG user interface and time-saving tools such as syntax highlighting and code auto-completion.

Version 9.0 introduces a host of useful new tools, including an eyedropper for easy color picking, several image-processing tools, support for masking, and the ability to set up custom keyboard shortcuts.

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IObit has released IObit Uninstaller 10, major new update of its uninstall tool for Windows. IObit Uninstaller aims to clean programs (including Microsoft Store apps) more thoroughly from your PC than the apps' own uninstallers by detecting leftover files and Registry entries.

Version 10 promises vastly improved uninstall speeds and better leftover detection, plus improvements to its Install Monitor component. In addition, Pro users gain better bundleware detection, and newly added support for removing over 40 stubborn programs.

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Sony has released a new app which makes it possible to use your regular digital camera as a webcam. The app is called Image Edge Webcam and it is only available for Windows 10 -- it's not clear if Sony intends to release a macOS or Linux version as well.

Sony is not the first company to have released software that transforms digital cameras into webcams recently. It is thought that the move is likely a response to the number of people currently working from home, and the shortage of webcams that this has led to.

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One week after launching Vivaldi 3.2 for desktop, Vivaldi Technologies has released Vivaldi 3.2 for Android and Chromebooks.

The new Android build adds several improvements to its built-in tracker and ad-blocking tools, plus makes even more use of the bottom of the user interface. It follows on from last week’s desktop release, which improved the browser’s pop-out video feature with the addition of a mute button.

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The twin dilemma: how to create strong, secure passwords without forgetting them? The solution is obvious: make use of a password manager. They’re common as muck these days, but our favorite by far is the brilliant Bitwarden.

A quick precis of why we love Bitwarden: it has all the features you’d expect in a good password manager -- easy and convenient to use, while locking your sensitive data away in a watertight vault using end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption that ensures it remains private. There’s 2FA support for extra security, and it works across all your devices: desktop, mobile and browser.

It’s also open source, so completely transparent (and if you don’t want to trust your passwords to its ultra-secure servers, you can even set it up as a self-hosted server as we’ve done). It’s also completely free to use -- no key features are locked away behind a paywall, although affordable premium tiers exist -- just $10/year -- if you want to take advantage of extras like a password vault health check or TOTP generator and storage, or just want to support it financially.

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Microsoft has released a key update to its Remote Desktop app for Android. The app, which allows for the remote use of computers running Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise, Windows 8.1 and 8 Enterprise and Pro, Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, and Windows Server versions newer, now features full support for Virtual Desktops.

The update also brings the Android app in line with the iOS and macOS version, so all three versions of the app now use the underlying RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) core engine. The latest version of the app also brings support for Android TV devices, but there's even more to look forward to.

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How many boot discs or flash drives do you own? It’s possible to build up quite a collection, from Linux live CDs and antivirus rescue discs to boot media for apps as diverse as drive imaging to data recovery.

Thanks to Ventoy 1.0.15, you can now consolidate all your boot media: instead of five, six or however many boot discs you need, everything is stored on a single flash drive. The larger the flash drive, the more boot media you can install on it.

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Mozilla has released Thunderbird 78.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s the first major update of the popular open-source email client since August 2019, and is only available as a direct download -- existing users of the Thunderbird 68.x series are advised to wait for a future release that will provide an upgrade path.

A host of new and changed features have been implemented, although the long-heralded built-in support for OpenPGP encryption has been disabled by default for now due to some outstanding issues.

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German software developer Ashampoo has unveiled Photo Optimizer 8.0, a major new release of its Windows photo-editing tool. The first major update since June 2018, version 8 builds further on the 1-click optimization tool introduced in version 7, plus offers additional manual fine-tuning tools alongside a new perspective correction feature.

Photo Optimizer 8 opens with what Ashampoo admits is a 'significantly improved' 1-click correction tool, designed to detect potential weaknesses in the original photo and provide improvements with no user involvement required. The improved algorithm has undergone two years of development and trial runs, with many thousands of setting combinations tested to help lift photos suffering from dull colors, poor lighting and a lack of contrast.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 78.0, the latest in a long line of major updates to the veteran browser. Available for Windows, macOS and Linux, the new release is joined by Firefox ESR 78.0, the first major update of the Extended Support Release browser since Firefox 68 last year.

The release sees the Privacy Protections screen renamed to Protections Dashboard. It also gains two new features: the ability to track the number of resolved breaches directly from the dashboard itself, plus an option to check to see if any saved passwords have been exposed in a data breach. Type about:protections to access the dashboard quickly.

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In the crowded web browser market, finding unique selling points can be hard. Opera 69 launches with one major headline feature: a new sidebar providing users with easy access to their Twitter accounts.

The new feature joins other recent additions designed to make Opera stand out -- from ad and tracker blockers to free browser VPN -- and follows on from recently added support for Instagram, which Opera claims allowed it to "reach a record number of users in March 2020".

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Vivaldi Technologies has unveiled Vivaldi 3.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux. The release comes 48 hours after the first major update for Vivaldi for Android.

The desktop build unveils a major upgrade to its existing Notes feature in the form of a full-blown Notes Manager tool. The tool is now accessible via its own full-screen tab in the main browser window (click the link in the Start page or type vivaldi://notes/ into the browser’s address bar).

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The Document Foundation has released the first public beta of its upcoming LibreOffice 7.0 office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. Users are encouraged to download and test the software -- which installs alongside any existing production release -- ahead its final release, expected to be in August.

The new release doesn’t boast any major new features, but does update ODF support to 1.3, plus unveils improvements both major and minor to the suite’s major components -- in particular Writer.

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