Microsoft brings its Chromium Edge browser to Windows 7 and 8

Two months after Chromium Edge made its way to Windows 10, the browser is now available for testing on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. The company will be releasing daily Canary builds first with weekly Dev channel support coming soon. The installer is available over at Microsoft Edge’s Insider site. A lot of the features will stay the same. There will be support for Internet Explorer for enterprise customers coming as well as the new Collections feature to make it easier to collect information from the browser into a note. But there won’t be dark mode and support for AAD sign-in. Right now all iterations of it, including the macOS version, are still in testing. It isn’t clear yet when Microsoft plans to release this more broadly.

Source: The Verge

Chrome 70 enables picture-in-picture mode on the desktop

The latest version of Google Chrome makes picture-in-picture mode a default feature in the web browser. As we already know what picture-in-picture mode does, it keeps videos in a floating window that’ll follow you around as you browse or even as you open another program. A few conditions though, the developers need to support it and you’ll need to keep the original tab open so the video keeps running. But once you updated your browser to Chrome 70, you just need to head over to YouTube and when you start playing a video right click on the video twice until the Chrome dropdown menu shows up. You can just select Picture in Picture option from there and then you’re good to go. 

Source: Engadget 

Firefox adds VR support to its browser tomorrow

It took a bit of time but Mozilla is finally adding virtual reality support to its web browser. The Firefox 55 version will come out tomorrow, August 8^th. This web-based VR on Firefox will come to all Windows users that have HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset. Mozilla has been working on this for a while with a standard called WebVR, which lets browsers run virtual-reality experiences. It’s already available through Firefox’s pre-release version, Firefox Nightly, as well as limited availability in Servo, a browser engine built by individual developers and sponsored by Mozilla.

Aside from adding VR support, Firefox 55 will add a new tool called Firefox Screenshots. While still in beta when it comes out, this feature will automatically save your screenshots to the cloud and then copies these to your clipboard. These screenshots have an expiration date of two weeks unless you manually set it to last longer.

Source: The Verge

Google to bring a built-in ad filter into Chrome next year

In hopes to clean up its browser of “annoying or intrusive advertisements,” Google is creating its own ad filter for Chrome in the coming year. The company doesn’t want to call it an ad blocker as it will just block any pages that have ads that don’t meet Chrome’s guidelines. Examples are videos that auto-play with sound or interstitials that take up an entire screen. Sridhar Ramaswamy, the executive in charge of Google’s ads, says that even ads “owned or served by Google” won’t be exempted. The filter will work for both mobile and desktop. They will introduce a tool that can help publishers determine if the ads they have on their site are in violation of Chrome’s guidelines.

In concept, the idea of an ad filter can be used for good. It’ll help improve performance, since bad ads are known to make browsing slower and more annoying to users—giving you a better experience online. But this also puts into the hands of Google, an ad company, a whole lot of power over what ads we can or can’t see. It can put publishers in a bit of a bind as well as help cement Google’s dominance. But Ramaswamy says their goal is to make online ads better. “We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.” But again, we still can’t help but think about the implication of this move.