Google's decision to hide the start of website URLs from Chrome's omnibox was a little controversial. While replacing https://www. and http://www. with icons indicating whether the site was secure or not, many people preferred being about to see that the HTTPS protocol is being used through the presence of those five letters.

If you're one of these people, there's some good news: Google seems to have been listening. Having previously implemented an experimental option to show full URLs on a one-off basis, preview builds of Chrome for macOS, Windows and Linux have a new "Always show full URLs" option.

Avast-owned Piriform is best known for its CCleaner software, a tool designed to help you clear out the crap from your computer. Now, after a preview period, the company has launched the Chromium-based CCleaner Browser 80.0.

Promising "no ads, no tracking, no junk[and] built-in security" CCleaner Browser is billed as a fast browser that gives users easy-to-use privacy tools that help to reduce digital footprints.

With a huge proportion of the world now in lockdown as governments take steps to stop the spread of coronavirus, millions of people are seeking ways to entertain themselves at home... and Pornhub has come up with a solution.

Having previously made its premium services available for free in Italy, Spain and France, the site says that it wants to "lend a hand". Looking to give people "an enjoyable way to pass the time", Pornhub Premium is now available to everyone around the world for free... for a while, at least.

There are a lot of VPN services to choose from these days, and a lot of reasons for wanting to use one. But there is the matter of money to consider. Whether you're strapped for cash, or just want to give a VPN a serious test drive before committing to it, the more generous the free data allowance the better.

hide.me is one of many VPNs that offers a free package, and it has just announced that the data allowance for people on this tier has increased fivefold. The increase to 10GB per month is generous, but the way the free tier works means that you actually get an unlimited amount of VPN traffic for free.

In times of crisis, information is important -- and this is certainly true of the current coronavirus pandemic. Google is well-placed to judge how much interest there is in the topic, and the company says that searches released to COVID-19 are the most popular right now.

Responding to this, Google has announced not only changes to the way it search engine works when people look for coronavirus information, but also that is it launching a dedicated COVID-19 website to provide easy access to information, help and resources.

'Write once, run anywhere' was the promise that Sun Microsystems made for Java in the mid '90s. But front-end development trends suggest that it's really JavaScript -- and its fast-evolving libraries and frameworks -- that are executing on that promise today.

To learn more about the JavaScript trends that are delivering an ever-faster, device and browser-agnostic web experience to users, we spoke with Guillermo Rauch, co-creator of the popular Next.js web framework.

Microsoft may be making great claims about the speed and security of Edge, but a recent study found that the browser is one of the least private. Douglas J Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, tested six web browsers to determine how often they phoned home, and what data they were sharing.

He pitted Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser against each other, and the results were rather damning of Edge. Among the findings was the disturbing fact that all URLs typed into Edge are shared with multiple Microsoft sites, as are unique hardware identifiers, opening up the possibility of history tracking.

Since switching to the Chromium engine, Microsoft Edge just became a whole lot more interesting -- and development has sped up dramatically.

As well as speeding up Edge, Microsoft has been busy adding new features such as a Potentially Unwanted Apps blocker, support for Chrome extensions and more. One of the latest changes does nothing to add new features, but it is important for anyone concerned with aesthetics; there is now support for Chrome themes to change the look of the browser.

Google competitor DuckDuckGo is already well-known as a search engine that goes further than others to protect user privacy. Now the company has open sourced Tracker Radar, its data set that details thousands of domains that track you as you use the internet.

DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar is something that the company already uses itself to power the tracker protection in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser mobile apps and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions. Now it is being made publicly available, and developers are invited to contribute to the ever-growing list of trackers to further protect user privacy.

Vulnerability researchers were able to hijack a series of subdomains belonging to Microsoft after the company was found to be employing poor DNS practices.

Subdomains including mybrowser.microsoft.com and identityhelp.microsoft.com were among ten hijacked by a team of security researchers from Vullnerability. In all, more than 670 Microsoft subdomains were found to be at risk of being taken over.

Let's Encrypt has discovered a bug in its Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) code and will have to revoke millions of certificates today unless customers force a renewal of their certificates.

Any site that fails to renew its certificate will display security warnings to visitors until the problem is rectified. While no specific sites have been mentioned, with up to three million certificates involved, there is a chance that some high-profile sites could be affected.

At the end of this month, SETI@home is closing down after two decades of alien hunting.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was an early example of distributed computing, using spare processing cycles from computers around the world to analyze signals from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Now the project has gathered enough data and is going into hibernation, rendering the famous screensaver useless.

Firefox users in the US will soon have DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) enabled by default. Mozilla is in the process of rolling out the privacy- and security-focused feature after an intensive period of testing.

DoH is an option for anyone outside of the US, but it will have to be manually enabled. Once enabled, DNS lookups are routed through Cloudflare or NextDNS using an encrypted HTTPS connection, hiding it from third parties such as your ISP.

Having previously contented itself with offering up algorithm-based suggestions about what you might like to watch next, Netflix has introduced a new feature that lets you see what other people are enjoying.

New lists of the top 10 films and series let you see what is currently popular on the streaming platform. Netflix has chosen to provide top 10 lists based on country, so you'll only see lists of the ten most popular series and movies in your country rather than globally.

Google has released a Firefox version of its Lighthouse browser extension, giving developers an easy way to test the performance of websites and web apps.

The open source extension makes use of the PageSpeed Insights API, and the new release brings Firefox in line with Chrome which has had a version of the extension for a few years now. The ultimate aim is to make it easier for developers to improve app and page performance by encouraging better practices.