Tech News - Web Development

Last week, Mozilla, in an interview with German media outlet T3N, revealed its plan of launching paid subscription services in Firefox by October. By subscribing to this service, users will be able to access “premium” features like VPN and secure cloud storage. In the interview, Chris Beard, Mozilla’s CEO did not go much into details about the cost or new premium services and features that we may see in Firefox. However, he did mention two services: VPN and cloud storage. He said, “You can imagine we'll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription.” He further clarified that no costs will be charged for the currently free service. Mozilla started testing the waters last year by introducing a few paid subscription services. In October, it partnered with ProtonVPN to introduce a paid VPN service. This service was offered to a randomly-selected small group of US users at $10 per month. In February this year, it partnered with Scroll, a news subscription service that allows you to read your favorite news websites by paying a monthly fee. Now, the company is expanding its catalog to offer more subscription services in Firefox. “We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues,” said Chris Beard. Explaining the vision behind this paid offering, Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox, said in a statement, “A high-performing, free and private-by-default Firefox browser will continue to be central to our core service offerings. We also recognize that there are consumers who want access to premium offerings, and we can serve those users too without compromising the development and reach of the existing products and services that Firefox users know and love.” This news triggered a discussion on Hacker News. Going by the thread, we can say that many users are happy that Mozilla is upfront about this new business model. Several other users also commented about the list of features and services they would want in Firefox before they are convinced enough to pay for the subscription. One of the users commented: “Can confirm, I would pay for a version of Firefox with just four "features": - No Pocket anywhere in the code - No telemetry/experiments/ Normandy anywhere in the code - No network connections to third party hosts (other than websites I'm viewing) - No "discovery" feed / whatever they're calling the activity stream sponsored content thing now anywhere in the code Just let me monthly subscribe via Paypal or whatever, and give me a private build server link and tar.gz of the source.” You can read the entire interview on T3N’s official website. Mozilla makes Firefox 67 “faster than ever” by deprioritizing least commonly used features Mozilla’s updated policies will ban extensions with obfuscated code Mozilla puts “people’s privacy first” in its browser with updates to Enhanced Tracking Protection, Firefox Lockwise and Firefox Monitor

Yesterday, Google announced the release of Chrome 70. This version comes with support for Desktop Progressive Web apps on Windows and Linux and for public key credentials. Also, web Bluetooth is now supported for Windows 10 users. Support for Desktop Progressive Web Apps on Windows and Linux You can now install Desktop Progressive Web Apps on Windows and Linux. Once installed, they’re launched from the Start menu, and run like any other installed app, without an address bar or tabs. Credential Management API supports Public Key Credentials Signing in has become very simple with the introduction of the Credential Management API. It enables the communication between your site and the browser’s credential manager or federated account services like Google and Facebook to sign in. One more credential type named, Public Key Credential is introduced. It allows web applications to create and use, strong, cryptographically attested, and application-scoped credentials to authenticate users. Named workers With the help of workers, you can move JavaScript off the main thread and into the background. This will keep your site interactive as it will prevent the main thread from locking up when it is running an expensive or complex JavaScript computation. A new name attribute is added for workers in Chrome 70, which is specified by an optional argument on the constructor: const url = '/scripts/my-worker.js'; const wNYC = new Worker(url, {name: 'NewYork'}); const oSF = {name: 'SanFrancisco'}; const wSF = new Worker(url, oSF); You can now easily distinguish dedicated workers by name when you have multiple workers with the same URL. Miscellaneous updates Web Bluetooth is available for Windows 10 users. It allows your site to securely communicate with nearby user-selected Bluetooth devices. Chrome can now send intervention and deprecation messages to your servers using the Report-To HTTP Response header field or surface them in the ReportingObserver interface. Deprecations in Chrome 70 AppCache from insecure contexts removed AppCache potentially allows persistent online and offline cross-site scripting attacks, when used over insecure contexts. To avoid these attacks, AppCache is now only supported on origins that serve over HTTPS. Developers are advised to use service workers as an alternative. Gamepads.item() deprecated and removed The legacy item() accessor is no longer a part of the Gamepads array. This change improves compatibility with Firefox, the only browser to implement GamepadList. SpeechSynthesis.speak() without user activation deprecated Now an error is thrown by the speechSynthesis.speak() function if a document has not received a user activation. You can expect its removal in Chrome 71 by late November. They have listed all the deprecations in Chrome 70 on their official website. Read the full list of changes on the Google Developers website. Chrome 69 privacy issues: automatic sign-ins and retained cookies; Chrome 70 to correct these Google announces Chrome 67 packed with powerful APIs, password-free logins, PWA support, and more Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and others to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in favor of TLS 1.2 or later by 2020

Yesterday, PrimeTek announced the release of PrimeReact 3.0.0, a UI component library for React. This updated version comes with few accessibility enhancements, the all-new Babylon create-react-app template, and more. Here are some of the changes PrimeReact 3.0.0 comes with: Enhanced accessibility and quality After reviewing the entire suite, the team has enhanced various components for keyboard and screen reader compatibility. They have also addressed the user feedback resulting in improved overall quality of PrimeReact. Babylon template Babylon is the newly introduced create-react-app template for PrimeReact. It comes with over 800 UI Variations with different menu options, 50+ PrimeReact themes, ready to use pages, and more. There are four flavors of Babylon menu: static, overlay, slim, and horizontal with dar/light color schemes. Additionally, a new grouped menu mode is also introduced in which submenus of the first level menu items are expanded for easier navigation. The template supports 51 built-in themes each of which offers accent, light, and dark options. You can also create your own theme by just defining a couple of SaSS variables. In the future releases, the team will be working towards adding support for more premium templates like Ultima, Serenity, Avalon, and Apollo in PrimeReact 3.0.0. They will also be improving PrimeReact core with features such as TableState, Carousel Component, Filtering for Tree/TreeTable, and more. You can read the full list of changes on PrimeTek’s website. npm JavaScript predictions for 2019: React, GraphQL, and TypeScript are three technologies to learn Introducing Cycle.js, a functional and reactive JavaScript framework JavaScript mobile frameworks comparison: React Native vs Ionic vs NativeScript

Yesterday, the team at WordPress released WordPress 5.0 (also known as Bebo) to give a seamless experience to users in building a website, revamping a blog or writing a code. Major improvements in WordPress 5.0 Blocks make it easier to work with WordPress This new release will let the users insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange as per the content. The content pieces will be arranged in the blocks which makes the process of uploading easy. Design WordPress 5.0 brings improvements to design and content. While building client sites, users can create reusable blocks which lets the clients add new content anytime. Source: Wordpress Theme WordPress 5.0 comes with the new Twenty Nineteen theme that features custom styles for the blocks.The editor styles are used in the themes to enhance them. Twenty Nineteen features ample whitespace, and modern sans-serif headlines along with serif body text. It also uses the system fonts for increasing loading speed.Twenty Nineteen can work for a wide variety of use cases, be it a photo blog, launching a new business, or supporting a non-profit cause. Classic editor plugin The classic editor plugin is very useful as it restores the previous WordPress editor and the Edit Post screen. WordPress 5.0 for developers Blocks let the users to change the content directly but also ensures that the content structure doesn’t get disturbed by accidental code edits. This lets the developer control the output and build polished and semantic markup that could be preserved through edits. WordPress 5.0 offers wide collection of APIs and interface components that creates blocks with intuitive controls for the clients. These APIs speeds up the entire development work but also provides a usable, consistent, and accessible interface to all users. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""] WordPress 5.0 is named Bebo in homage to the pioneering Cuban jazz musician Bebo Valdés.[/box] This new release has got some negative reactions from the users. Few think that the blocks won’t make things easier but would make the entire process complicated. Also, the release has received heat for having been announced on the wrong timing, as Christmas is almost around and retailers won’t be able to support the process of teaching the process of the new editor to the staff. Also developers will have to fix client sites broken by the new editor on an immediate basis and this might definitely create chaos. One of the users said, “Okay, I've now tested it on my main site, and I can definitely confirm that it's not a good fit for blog posts/news articles. Took me forever to post a simple 300 word article, in part because of all the random spaces it kept removing when I copied in paragraphs from my text editor.” https://twitter.com/MyFunkyTravel/status/1070848742738276352 https://twitter.com/anandnU/status/1070947019735425025 https://twitter.com/niall_flynn/status/1070762641700937728 The new editor is also causing troubles to existing sites and breaking them down. Few of the businesses have planned to move away from WordPress as they are not finding the change convincing. The users also are unhappy with the UI. Gutenberg: A disappointment? Last month’s Gutenberg release was met with disappointment and many ended up- uninstalling it,  with major issue being the lack of Markdown support. Usually before posting an article, a user writes it on Google docs or Microsoft word and then copies it to WordPress. Gutenberg makes it difficult for users to copy paste content as they must create the blocks multiple times given that every element is considered as a block. Also, it is still somewhere  between a post editor and a site builder plugin. One has to rewrite everything on Gutenberg as the blocks are complex. It could work best for large publishers who are comfortable with complicated layouts. Those working on HTML and CSS might find this jump to Gutenberg which is based on Javascript and React framework, very complicated. The idea of Gutenberg getting integrated with Core won’t be accomplished any day sooner as it has to go under a lot of documentation and work is still pending. https://twitter.com/_l3m35_/status/1070768052202033159 But there is still hope for Gutenberg, as the page builder market might appreciate the efforts taken for this editor. It could work well for the ones aiming for static content. Read more about this news on WordPress. Introduction to WordPress Plugin WordPress as a Web Application Framework WordPress Management with WP-CLI  

After the successful conference at Amsterdam, Vuejs recently conducted the first ever VueConf.US in New Orleans on March 26th-28th 2018. The conference congregated hundreds of Vuejs developers from around the world and the VueJS Core team and featured workshops and talks from members of the Vuejs community and Vue experts. It also witnessed new releases and project processes. The conference commenced with an inaugural keynote by Evan You, the creator of Vue. He talked about the growth of Vue since 2016, also highlighting new developments coming soon. In his keynote, You said that “Vue will be moving to a standardized release cycle with new minor releases every three months and a minimum six-month notice prior to major releases.” They will also be shifting from a single release channel to four separated release channels. The VueConf.US conference covered 4 major workshops by Vuejs experts. In the first workshop, Evan You talked about building simple versions of libraries for features such as routing, state management, form validation and i18n using basic Vue features. Chris Fritz, conducted a second workshop on the basics of building world-class Vue applications. Topics included configuring Webpack for single-file components, setting up the most advanced workflows currently possible, and more. Sarah Drasner organized a workshop on animation in Vue to creating complex effects in performant and visually stunning patterns. Rachel Nabors, presented a talk, "Vue In Motion", on implementing animations and transitions in Vue. In the fourth workshop, Blake Newman presented his views on Vuex, a state management pattern. The VueConf.US conference also featured multiple presentations by key Vue experts. Daniel Rosenwasser, Program Manager on TypeScript at Microsoft, presented his views on making TypeScript and Vue seamless to make sure that JavaScript users of all communities can use Typescript. In another interesting presentation, Jen Looper talked about creating an Engaging Native Mobile App with Vue and NativeScript all the while retaining shared code between the Vue created website and mobile app. Edd Yerburgh, Vue core team member and author of "vue-test-utils", spoke about testing Vue applications. He presented an adapted the testing pyramid for the front end, consisting of end-to-end tests, snapshot tests, and unit tests. In a talk, “Vue & SSR: The best practices”, Sebastien Chopin talks about common problems with server-side rendering and how to deal with them. He also shows Nuxt.js as a possible solution to most of these problems. Community support was the highlight of the VueConf.US conference with a large number of talks mentioning the importance of Vue community support. The attendees were extremely positive about the conference and stated how comfortable and welcoming the community was. Each attendee shared a similar level of excitement about the platform and its possibilities and was excited about meeting the wide variety of developers and to know their experiences. All talks were recorded and will be posted soon on VueMastery.

On Monday, Opera Touch was made available for iPhone users that aims to challenge Apple’s default browser, Safari. It particularly targets the newly launched Apple phones, iPhone XS and XS Max and the upcoming iPhone XR. Opera Touch is your on-the-go browser which helps you instantly search the web with one hand. It comes with Flow to make sharing links, images, videos or notes much easier. Instant searching Opera Touch opens up in search mode to help you instantly find things on the web. You can search using text input, voice, or a QR code. Also, the core elements of the interface are located at the bottom of the screen making them easy to reach. Seamless browsing experience with Flow You can use Opera Touch on iPhone together with your Opera computer browser for a seamless web browsing experience across devices. The plus point here is that you do not need to create an account to connect your iPhone with your computer browser. Simply, start the Opera computer browser and scan the QR code displayed there with Opera Touch and you are good to go. After connecting, you can send links, videos, and notes to yourself with a single click through Flow and they will be displayed across all your Flow-enabled devices. Your on-the-go browser It makes searching on-the-go easier as you can conveniently explore the internet using just one hand. The Fast Action Button present in the bottom middle of the screen provides the browser’s key functions, including access to your most recent tabs and search. You can hold and swipe the button open to switch to your most recent tabs, reload or close the page or send the current tab to your computer in Flow. Safe and secure browsing The data shared with Flow is fully end-to-end encrypted. Its opt-in ad blocker, blocks intrusive ads, making web pages load faster. Also, the browser comes with Opera’s cryptojacking protection that reduces the risk of your mobile getting overheated when you browse the web. Learns from your browsing patterns The browser will learn from your browsing pattern giving you a more personalized browsing experience. It will automatically add your favorite sites to the browser’s home screen. Read more about Opera Touch on Opera’s official website and to download the browser head over to the App Store. Vivaldi 2.0, a hyper-customizable browser, releases with Vivaldi Sync, Resizable Tab Tiling, and more! Firefox Reality 1.0, a browser for mixed reality, is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature

PrimeTek announced a brand new theming engine PrimeReact bringing the Nova theme family and the PrimeReact Theme Designer tool to create your own themes with ease. PrimeReact theming infrastructure has been reimplemented from scratch and the Nova theme family has been introduced to give a modern and premium look to the components. Nova themes are open source under MIT license and the css ships with PrimeReact. You can experience the live demo that runs on Nova. Please note that older themes are removed as they can no longer support the new engine. The premium themes such as Ultima, Serenity, Avalon will be updated to PrimeReact 2.0.0 by mid September. Additional features in PrimeReact 2.0.0 PrimeReact designer API is a SASS based theme engine to create PrimeReact themes easily featuring over 500 variables, a demo application and a base sample theme. If you have your own style guide or need a custom theme quickly, Designer API is a perfect tool to design and bring them to existence. Designer also includes the SASS structure and whole variables of Nova theme family, so if you’d like to customize Nova, you may consider Designer as well. Team has also spent significant time on improving the overall quality of maintenance issues. “PrimeReact is very close to 2.0.0-Final release, two remaining main tasks are rewriting the Tree and TreeTable components, we plan to release 2.0.0-Final by the end of September.”, says the PrimeReact team. Is your web design responsive? Tips and tricks to optimize your responsive web design Is novelty ruining web development?  

Google's App Maker, has come out of its private preview mode and is now generally available. App Maker is an online tool for building and deploying business apps on the web. The company has remained quiet about its development ever since the launch one and a half years ago. However, now seeing the surge in making everything open source, App Maker remains open and free for all developers who want to give it a shot. App Maker is available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers, as well as G Suite for Education customers. If App Maker isn’t yet enabled for your eligible domain, you can turn it on in the Apps > Additional Google services section of the Admin console. The newly designed App Maker also has multiple features added to its basket. Most prominently, it now offers built-in support for Cloud SQL bringing high performance, scalability, and convenience. It has a Bring Your Own Database (BYODB) model, letting you connect it to the database of your choice using JDBC or a REST API. The new Google App Maker is fast and highly automated for app designing and development with Responsive templates, samples, a drag-and-drop UI design and declarative data modeling. It can be easily connected with data and services such as Gmail, Calendar, or Sheets. You can also use Apps Script to access over 40 Google services, Google Cloud Platform and other third-party services that support JDBC and REST. In fact, G Suite administrators will have complete visibility over the apps running in their organization. They can now view owners, usage metrics, and OAuth permissions. For example, you can view the activity of users using the Drive audit logs, or view the activity of end users in the OAuth Token audit logs. Administrators will also be able to prevent apps from running without their approval with expanded OAuth Whitelisting controls. You can read the details on Google Blog. For more information on App Maker, check out the Help Center. Google’s translation tool is now offline – and more powerful than ever thanks to AI Top reasons to use Google Lighthouse 3.0 Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10 is now generally available and ready for enterprise use

Last week, Bleeping Computer reported that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Microsoft Edge will not allow users to disable hyperlink auditing that was possible in previous versions. What is hyperlink auditing? The Web Applications 1.0 specification introduced a new feature in HTML5 called hyperlink auditing for tracking clicks on the links. To track user clicks, the “a” and “area” elements support a “ping” attribute that takes one or more URIs as a value. For example: When you click on the hyperlink, the “href” link will be loaded as expected, but additionally, the browser will also send an HTTP POST request to the ping URL. The request headers can then be examined by the scripts that receive the ping POST request to find out where the ping came from. Which browsers have made hyperlink auditing compulsory? After finding this issue in Safari Technology Preview 72, Jeff Johnson, a professional Mac, and iOS software engineer reported this to Apple. Despite this, Apple released Safari 12.1 without any settings to disable hyperlink auditing. Prior to Safari 12.1, users were able to disable this feature with a hidden preference. Similar to Safari, in Google Chrome hyperlink auditing was enabled by default. Users could previously disable this by going to “chrome://flags#disable-hyperlink-auditing” and setting the flag to “Disabled”. But, in Chrome 74 Beta and Chrome 75 Canary builds, this flag has been completely removed. Microsoft Edge and Opera 61 Developer build also removes the option to disable/enable hyperlink auditing. Firefox and Brave, on the other hand, have disabled hyperlink auditing by default. In Firefox 66, Firefox Beta 67, and Firefox Nightly 68 users can enable it using the browser.send_pings setting, the Brave browser, however, does not allow users to enable it at all. How people are reacting to this development? The hyperlink auditing feature has received mixed reactions from developers and users. While some were concerned about its privacy implications, others think that this process makes the user experience more transparent. Sharing how this development can be misused, Chris Weber co-founder of Casaba Security wrote in a blog post,  “the URL could easily be appended with junk causing large HTTP requests to get sent to an inordinately large list of URIs. Information could be leaked in the usual sense of Referrer/Ping-From leaks.” One Reddit user said that this feature is privacy neutral as this kind of tracking can be done with JavaScript or non-JavaScript redirects. Sharing other advantages of the ping attribute, another user said, “The ping attribute for hyperlinks aims to make this process more transparent, with additional benefits such as optimizing network traffic to the target page loads more quickly, as well as an option to disable sending the pings for more user-friendly privacy.” Though this feature brings some advantages, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) encourages user agents to put control in the hands of the users by providing them a feature to disable this behavior. “User agents should allow the user to adjust this behavior, for example in conjunction with a setting that disables the sending of HTTP `Referer` (sic) headers. Based on the user's preferences, UAs may either ignore the ping attribute altogether or selectively ignore URLs in the list,” mentions WHATWG. To read the full story, visit Bleeping Computer. Google dissolves its Advanced Technology External Advisory Council in a week after repeat criticism on selection of members Microsoft’s #MeToo reckoning: female employees speak out against workplace harassment and discrimination Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

According to a story by Windows Central, Microsoft is working on a Chromium based web browser. This will likely be a replacement to their current web browser on Windows 10, Microsoft Edge. Edge never took off the Edge Microsoft Edge was launched in 2015 built from scratch with EdgeHTML. Microsoft tried to get it into adoption by making Windows 10 update free for a limited time. However, the browser was not well received at the early stage itself due to a large number of issues. Since then it has not been very stable driving developers and users away from it. Due to this, Microsoft is reportedly abandoning Edge and the EdgeHTML framework for Chromium. Chromium is a rendering engine used in Google Chrome. The new browser’s name is codenamed Anaheim and will be replacing Edge as the default browser in Windows. It is not known if Edge will be renamed and if the UI will be different. But EdgeHTML will no longer be used in Windows 10’s default browser. Using the Chromium engine instead Using Chromium means that the websites on Windows 10 default browser will load as they do on Google Chrome. Default browser users will no longer have to face the loading and connectivity issues that plagued EdgeHTML based Microsoft Edge. For smartphones, nothing will change much as Edge on smartphones already use platform specific engines. Recently, 9to5Google reported that Microsoft engineers are committing code to the Chromium project. This would suggest that they are working on their own browser by using Chromium instead of EdgeHTML. The browser may likely be out next year. Public reactions A comment on hacker news reads: “You[web developers] don't test your work in Edge and because you tell all your friends and family to use Chrome instead of Edge. So stop complaining about monoculture. Many of you helped create it.” Some sarcasm thrown in another comment: “I test my app in Edge, every time a new version is released. When it inevitably fails, I shake my head in disbelief that Microsoft still hasn't paid a dev to spend a couple months fixing their IndexedDB implementation, which has been incomplete since the IE days. Can't expect a small rag-tag group like Microsoft to compete with a rich corporate behemoth like Mozilla, I guess :)” Another comment says: “How can I test Edge when Microsoft don't release it for Mac and Linux? A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.” https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/1069796773017710592 Another Tweet suggests that this move towards Chromium is about ElectronJS stronghold over app development and not about Microsoft wanting a Chrome like browser experience on its default browser: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1069776335336292352 After years of Internet Explorer being ridiculed and Edge not being the success they hoped for, it would be nice to see the Windows default browser catching up with the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Introducing Howler.js, a Javascript audio library with full cross-browser support Firefox Reality 1.0, a browser for mixed reality, is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream Microsoft becomes the world’s most valuable public company, moves ahead of Apple

The year 2018 proved to be interesting for the team at Thunderbird, a free email application, as they released the latest ESR, Thunderbird 60, which had improved security, stability, and the app’s interface. However, 2019 has some upgrades to Thunderbird’s calendar. With the new year, Thunderbird has come up with some interesting plans and is working towards bringing improvements to UI, Gmail support, notifications and much more. Let’s dive deeper into the plans and goals marked by the team at Thunderbird for this year. The roadmap towards making Thunderbird better Making Thunderbird faster than ever The team is working towards addressing technical debt, UI-slowness, and general performance issues across the application (Thunderbird). They will be focusing on methods for testing and measuring slowness and working on solutions to address the pain points. They will also be working on faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird and simultaneously will be working towards a multi-process Thunderbird. Better UI and Gmail support 2019 will mark improvements in Thunderbird’s UX/UI. The team plans to focus on integration improvements in various areas. They currently have plans for better Gmail support in mind, considering that it is one of the biggest Email providers, it would definitely make sense to work on this area. While addressing Gmail label support, Thunderbird is also ensuring that other features specific to the Gmail experience translate properly into Thunderbird. This will help Thunderbird become more native on each desktop and will make managing notifications from the app easier. The team also plans to work on encrypting email and ensuring secure communication in upcoming releases. They have plans for bringing architectural changes to support smoother operations. Better notifications (system integrated) The team is improving notifications in Thunderbird by integrating with each operating system’s built-in notification system. Earlier they worked towards unifying the implementation across platforms, but this was not completely finished and might get accomplished this year. The team might drop a lot of platform dependent implementations and unify the content production logic. Improvements to rewrite and mail filters Currently the filtering is synchronously done in C++ and might be changed to async JavaScript implementation this year. Filtering will be made contextual, which means the team will be adding the ability for pre-filter MIME processing so that filtering can work on a message representation instead of on the raw MIME. Thunderbird will be addressing the problem of not having filters on mobile and ensuring that the filter can sync up to the server. Calendar improvements In 2019, Thunderbird will remove the use of all calendar XPCOM components and will replace them with simple JavaScript classes. The calendar and tasks tabs will be self-contained and will be only using HTML. The Thunderbird UI integration will be changed so that most calendar features get visible once triggered. Improved .ics handling Thunderbird will now handle inline event display better. This year will bring improvements to invites in order to see the new event details before taking action. Users are excited about the upcoming development and have their share of suggestions. One of the users commented on HackerNews saying that he would want improved native CardDAV and CalDAV support, Native PGP and much more in the coming releases. Another user commented, “Full-text indexing for PGP mail would be nice too once it's native (Mailpile and CanaryMail helped pave the way on this I believe).” Read more about the updates expected in Thunderbird’s mailing list. Microsoft’s move towards ads on the Mail App in Windows 10 sparks privacy concerns Email and names of Amazon customers exposed due to ‘technical error’; number of affected users unknown LinkedIn used email addresses of 18M non-members to buy targeted ads on Facebook, reveals a report by DPC, Ireland

Two days ago, the team behind FFmpeg released their latest version of FFmpeg 4.2, nicknamed “Ada”. This release comes with many new filters, decoders, and demuxers. FFmpeg is an open-source project composing software suite of libraries and programs to handle multimedia files. It has cross-platform multimedia framework which is used by various games and applications to record, convert and stream audios and videos. The previous version FFmpeg 4.1 was released last year in November. The FFmpeg team has announced on Twitter that the follow-up point release (4.2.1) will be released in a few weeks. FFmpeg 4.2 has a AV1 decoding support through libdav1d. It also supports decoding of HEVC 4:4:4 content in nvdec, cuviddec and vdpau. It has many new filters like tpad, dedot, freezedetect, truehd_core bitstream, anlmdn, maskfun, and more. Read More: Presenting dav1d, a new lightweight AV1 decoder, by VideoLAN and FFmpeg PCM-DVD has been included as an encoder in FFmpeg 4.2. It also introduces numerous demuxers such as dhav, vividas, hcom, KUX, and IFV. This version also removes libndi-newtek. The new version allows the mov muxer to write tracks in any unspecified language. Earlier, a mov mixer could write in only English, by default. The latest version also supports clang to compile CUDA kernels. Users are happy with the FFmpeg 4.2 release and seem to be excited to get hands on with the new features in their applications. https://twitter.com/Poddingue/status/1158840601267322886 A user on Hacker News comments, “Massive "thank you" to FFmpeg for being an amazing tool. My app pivotally depends on FFmpeg extracting screenshots of videos for users to browse through.” Another comment on Hacker News reads, “Nice to see improved HEVC 4:4:4 support in Linux” Additionally users have appreciated the growth of FFmpeg project in general. A Redditor comments, “Man ffmpeg is so awesome. It's still mind blowing that something so powerful is FOSS. Outside of programming languages, operating systems, and essential tools like the GNU suite, I think an argument can be made that ffmpeg is one of the most important pieces of software ever created. We live in a digital world and virtually everything from security cameras to social media sites to news stations use ffmpeg on some level” Check out the FFmpeg page to read about the updates in detail. Firefox 67 enables AV1 video decoder ‘dav1d’, by default on all desktop platforms Fabrice Bellard, the creator of FFmpeg and QEMU, introduces a lossless data compressor which uses neural networks Introducing QuickJS, a small and easily embeddable JavaScript engine

Yesterday, the Ember project announced the release of version 3.4 of the three core sub-projects: Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI. Ember is an open source JavaScript frontend framework, which is based on Model-View-Viewmodel (MVVM) pattern. It enables developers to create scalable single-page web applications by incorporating common idioms and best practices into the framework. Ember.js 3.4 Ember.js 3.4 is an incremental, backward compatible release of Ember with bug fixes, performance improvements, and minor deprecations. Angle bracket invocation You can now use angle bracket invocation instead of the classic invocation syntax. For example: Instead of using the following syntax: Source: Ember You can use: Source: Ember This release does not deprecate the classic invocation syntax, but using angle bracket invocation will provide more syntax clarity. As component invocation is often encapsulating important pieces of UI, a dedicated syntax would help visually distinguish them from other handlebars constructs, such as control flow and dynamic values. Custom Component Manager This version comes with the new Custom Component Manager feature enabled by default. This allows addon authors to access a low-level API for creating component bases classes which addon users can re-use and extend components from. Deprecations Use closure actions instead of sendAction When using sendAction, the developer passes the name of an action. When sendAction is called, Ember.js would look up that action in the parent context and invoke if it exists. This poses a few problems, such as: The action is looked up only when it is about to be invoked. This makes it easier for a typo in the action’s name to go undetected. When you use sendAction you cannot receive the return value of the invoked action. Closure actions solve these problems and are also more intuitive to use. Ember 2 Legacy This is the last version that will work with the polyfill addon for features that were deprecated in 2.x. If you have been using ember-2-legacy, it's time to upgrade. Ember Data 3.4 Ember Data is the data-persistence library that provides many of the facilities of an object-relational mapping (ORM). Ember Data 3.4 is the first Ember Data LTS release. This release has received a ton of bug fixes to address many known issues that have been reported over the last several months. Some of them are listed here: TrackableRequests for when async leakage is detected. This feature enables app developers to better use async... await while simultaneously detecting asynchronous test leaks in their data layer. External partner testing is now enabled to run the tests of external apps and addons against commits in ember-data. Transpilation issues with @ember/ordered-set are fixed. Tests are added for createRecord+unloadRecord. ember-inflector is upgraded to v3.3.0. Added module-unification adapter and adapter-test blueprints. Ember CLI 3.4 Ember CLI is the command line interface to create, develop, and build Ember.js applications. Ember CLI 3.4 is an LTS release candidate. It will receive critical bug fixes for the upcoming 6 release cycles, as well as security patches for the next 10 release cycles. Added support for Node 10 Support has been added for Node 10 and support for Node 4 has been dropped from Ember CLI's support matrix. When upgrading to Ember CLI 3.4, make sure to use it together with Node 6 and above. Template linting Automatic template linting is added to your application via ember-template-lint according to the recommended list of rules. Ember CLI will generate a TemplateLint test file for each of your templates to your test suite automatically to be run via ember test. To run the linter you can also use the new command npm run lint:hbs or yarn run lint:hbs respectively. Read the full list of changes on Ember’s official website and also check out its GitHub repository. Ember project releases v3.2.0 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI Getting started with Ember.js – Part 1 Getting started with Ember.js – Part 2

The Ember project released a new version of the three core sub-projects, Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI. Version 3.2.0 kicks off the 3.3 beta cycle for all sub-projects and consists of a variety of add-ons and deprecations. Ember.js Ember.js is the core framework for building web applications. The version 3.2.0 has a new feature and three deprecations, along with bug fixes, performance improvements, and minor deprecations. Ember.js has a new Block let template helper to create new bindings in templates. It is like with but without the conditional rendering of the block depending on values passed to the block. The deprecations are: Use of Ember.Logger is deprecated. You should replace calls to Ember.Logger with calls to console. In order to avoid collision with user-defined properties or methods, the Router#router private API has been renamed to Router#_router. Assigning computed properties directly is deprecated to support ES5 getter computed properties. Developers should replace these assignments with calls to defineProperty. Ember Data Ember Data is the official data persistence library for Ember.js applications. Ember-data v3.2.0 has three new features: Lazy Relationship Payloads are fixed in Ember Data 3.2.0; It is now compatible with polymorphic relationships. Ember Data Feature Flag are all removed in Ember Data 3.2. There is a new addon to support the ds-improved-ajax API. Ember CLI Ember CLI is the command line interface for managing and packaging Ember.js applications. There are two new features and one deprecation in the Ember CLI 3.2 release: The qunit-dom dependency will be added by default to all apps and addons to make DOM assertions more readable. The ember-cli-qunit dependency has been updated to ensure that the find() helper available in the Ember 3.0 style of testing. Ember CLI v3.2 deprecates ember-cli-babel 5.x. Babel 6 support has been out for a long time now and works quite well. Detailed list of updates with bug fixes and other performance improvements are available on the Ember project blog page. Getting started with Ember.js – Part 1 Getting started with Ember.js – Part 2

The Tor Project team has released Tor Browser 8.0 today. The update comes with an upgraded language page, new onboarding experience for new users, additional language support and optimized bridge fetching technique. The Tor Browser, based on Mozilla's Extended Support Release version of the Firefox web browser, helps users anonymize their Internet connection. The browser is famous for bundling data into encrypted packets before passing them through the network, thus keeping user’s identity at bay. This new version powered by Firefox 60 ESR (Extended Support Release) is a level up from the previous Firefox 52 ESR. 3 major upgrades in Tor Browser 8.0 #1 A New Onboarding Experience It is now really easy for new users to understand what the Tor browser is and how to use it.  The welcome tour provides users with all the information needed to get started with the Tor browser. The ‘About’ section of the browser takes viewers through aspects that make Tor different than other commonly available browsers. Users are also taken through privacy and security settings to ensure that they have a smooth experience using the browser. Source: ghacks.net #2 Optimized Bridge Configuration Flow Bridge Fetching, has been optimized in the new version. In the previous versions, users had to send an email or visit a website to request new bridges for locations where Tor browser is blocked because of censorship related issues. With the Tor 8.0, users have to only  solve a captcha in Tor launcher toto request new bridges from within the browser directly. All that has to be done is- Activate the Tor button in the browser interface and select Tor Network Settings. Enable the "Tor is censored in my country" checkbox on the page that opens. Select "Request a bridge from torproject.org". Solve the captcha displayed. Source:ghacks.net #3 Improved Language Support Previous versions of Tor supported fewer languages, which meant that users were unable to use the browser in their native language. The Tor Browser 8.0 has introduced the support for nine languages - Catalan, Irish, Indonesian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Hebrew, Swedish, and Traditional Chinese. The browser has added Component and library upgrades to new versions while Blocking navigator.mozAddonManager so that websites can't see it. You can read the full release announcement for more information on the upgrades introduced in Tor 8.0. Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released Baidu releases EZDL – a platform that lets you build AI and machine learning models without any coding knowledge Splinter 0.9.0, the popular web app testing tool, released!