Customizing Mozilla's browser with add-ons can give you a whole new experience when browsing the web though only one-third of Firefox users have installed an extension or theme.
Among the 100m+ users that did install an extension this year, adblockers were the most popular with Adblock Plus taking the top spot followed by uBlock Origin. Across the span of 2021, Adblock Plus had an average of over 6.1m daily users while uBlock Origin averaged just over 5m+ daily users over the course of the year.
While Adblock Plus led the charge at the beginning of the year, uBlock Origin was able to close the gap and if current usage trends among Firefox users continue, it may take the top spot in early 2022 according to a new blog post from Mozilla.
One of the reasons users choose Firefox as their preferred browser is to further protect their privacy online. While adblockers can stop ads from following you around the web, other popular extensions this year that protect against invasive tracking include Mozilla's own Facebook Container with 1.7m daily active users and Ghostery with 1.1m daily active users.
Firefox Recommended Extensions
In addition to putting out a list of the most popular extensions each year, the Firefox Recommended Extensions program is a curated list of third party extensions that meet Mozilla's highest standards of security, utility and user experience.
For those who often find themselves drowning in a sea of open browser tabs, Tab Stash may be the perfect extension as it adds a toolbar button that when clicked, saves all of your open tabs as temporary bookmarks. If you're using Firefox Sync, the service will automatically show your Tab Stash bookmarks synced to other devices.
Another interesting extension highlighted by Mozilla is Stylebot. This extension gives you the power to dramatically alter the way any website looks from font sizes to color schemes to content layout. Perhaps you're intrigued by vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge? Then the Sideberry extension can be used to organize your open tabs in a cascading “tree” tucked away to the side of your browser.
While web browsers have certainly come a long way, extensions allow you to further customize their look and fell as well as their functionality which can help you be more productive or just have a better browsing experience overall.
With iOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1 Monterey available to all, users can download the updates to their devices, alongside updating any existing apps to take advantage of what these updates bring.
Apple’s App Store Awards are the company’s way of highlighting developers who created apps that stood out in their category compared to other apps, in a theme of what Apple calls, connections. Whether that’s in video editing, streaming or games, they take advantage of recent features brought out by Apple and its software in an innovative way.
The company announced the year’s winners this month, with Carrot Weather, LumaFusion, DAZN, and League of Legends each winning in their categories for certain devices.
We spoke to the developers behind these apps to find out the challenges in designing the apps and their plans for the future.
Reflecting on their past
Every developer received an award that mirrors the App Store logo and its icon made from 100% recycled aluminum. During a video announcing the winners, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said, “From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year.”
First up, LumaFusion is a video editing app on the iPad and iPhone for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 19.99, that allows you to edit multiple videos at once with transitions and features that make it easy to turn a video into an engaging narrative. Its improvements this year made it the winner of the iPad app of the year award.
LumaFusion’s developers, Terri Morgan and Chris Demiris try to approach every release, whether that’s hardware or software, in how its users can benefit from their improvements in the app. “We couldn’t imagine where the iPad would go after ten years. Now, with Thunderbolt support and the M1 chip, we always see how we can adapt these updates into LumaFusion. Some of these features are easy to implement, such as ProRes and external storage support, but we're always looking to see which features would benefit users most.”
Morgan explains. “We’re inspired by how so many have used the app to help follow their passion, especially during lockdown, and it does help drive us to make the app even better, and more widely available to other users on Apple devices.”
(Image credit: Lumafusion)
League of Legends: Wild Rift was the winner of the iPhone gaming app of the year. Made by Riot Games, it's one of few franchises that's successfully made the jump from a console game to mobile with no compromises.
Michael Chow, executive producer on the game, reflected on developing the game since the start. “Usually when a game makes the move to mobile, there's a lot of negativity from their communities, so we wanted to make sure we avoided it with Wild Rift.”
With our positive impressions of running Rift on an iPhone 12 Pro earlier this year, we wanted to know how Chow and the team felt about releasing the game after a very long beta-test period.
“We’ve spent the past year rolling out the game across the world, and the results are pretty stellar,” Chow exclaims. “It’s not been an easy journey, as we weren’t sure if it was physically possible to bring League of Legends to mobile, but the results speak for themselves.”
“We quit our day jobs to start the company, and with Apple’s relentless efforts to make the iPhone better, it couldn’t make us more proud to receive this award from the company.”
(Image credit: Future)
DAZN is a streaming app for sports, and while it’s additionally available on iPhone and iPad, it’s available for AppleTV for which DAZN won the app award for. It allows subscribed users to watch sports such as MotoGP, UFC, UEFA, NFL and more for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 19.99 a month.
Ben King, Director of DAZN at DAZN Group, explained to us that the aim of the app was to make it accessible, flexible and affordable to those who just wanted to easily access their sports for a price that didn’t lock them into two-year contracts.
“We’re absolutely honoured to receive this award from Apple, but it doesn’t mean we want to stop with how we can offer content to our users in way of features and more kinds of sports.”
The app uses push notifications for the latest updates in other matches, such as red cards and goals, while you’re using another app. You can also watch three consecutive sports or games at once, mirroring a scene in Back to the Future Part II when Marty Jr would watches 16 channels at once.
(Image credit: DAZN)
Brian Mueller, is the developer of Carrot Weather, and won the 2021 App Award for the Apple Watch. Its complications to allow certain weather forecasts on watch faces, alongside its push notifications for upcoming weather changes, has allowed Mueller to bring the app, and its sass to the watch with no compromise.
“When the app launched in 2015, it was purely an entertainment app, with its achievements and Carrot’s personality,“ Mueller explained. “It wasn’t until the Apple Watch arrived that forced me to focus on making a really great weather app, instead of relying on Carrot’s jokes and the bizarre imagery.”
As the app grew since watchOS 2, Mueller realised that he could add more complications to the watch faces. “I found out a workaround in early versions that could allow me to add more than the one complication per watch face that the operating system allowed.” Mueller reveals. “ After this, users were asking me for certain weather sources to add to the watch faces, and I still love that, that fans of the app are giving me feedback to make the watch app better.”
(Image credit: TechRadar)
Where next for these apps?
While these developers are celebrating their success, they aren't stopping. We asked what’s coming up for their apps in the near future.
“We have a long list of feature requests, and in the past there's been features such as CoreML and smart background removal. But we have to pick and choose each time to really focus on how they best fit for LumaFusion.” Morgan explains. “I can see us doing cooperative editing with SharePlay eventually, but in the immediate future, key-frame easing where you can bring in images to videos, alongside subtitling and speed ramping are all coming soon.”
We also wanted to know whether there were plans for LumaFusion coming to macOS natively. “While you can export a project to Final Cut, we’re aware that there’s a need for LumaFusion on macOS.” Demiris explains. “We are working on a more complete version for macOS to take advantage of what the Mac brings.”
(Image credit: Luma Touch LLC)
With League of Legends: Wild Rift, Chow was enthusiastic about how the on-screen controls work well on the iPhone. But we asked if keyboard support in games, a feature of iPadOS 15, would come to the game to help users control their character more easily on the bigger tablet.
“Control in Rift is something that we spent a lot of time on, so I don’t think we’ll implement keyboard support anytime soon,” Chow explains. “But gamepad support is something that could work, especially for the Apple TV, so who knows.”
With DAZN, SharePlay support is something that’s of interest to King and the rest of the team. ”We’re all about flexibility, and while you can already join with friends in watching a game, SharePlay does bring something to the table. If enough users give feedback to us that it’s a feature they want on their iPad or Apple TV, it’s something we’ll consider for a future update.”
Finally, with accessibility a big part of Apple’s focus in software interaction, we asked King if there’s upcoming features to help with those with certain impairments when using DAZN.
“We have some really interesting ideas for accessibility,“ King reveals. “We don’t have to give you one audio stream for instance, so there’s no reason for using sign language as an alternative commentary, but for the moment, subtitles and closed captions for pre-recorded content are something that we’re currently working on. But there’s far more options compared to cable content that we can provide to help cater to someone who is either visually or auditory impaired, and we want to help them.”
When it comes to Adobe, Black Friday is a great time to look for a deal if you want to finally try out Photoshop or another of the Creative Cloud apps.
With a push from the company this year to make sure all of its apps work with Apple’s M1 Macs, there’s no better moment to see what offers Adobe may bring out.
In previous years, there’s been deals up to 40% off the Creative Cloud subscription. When you factor in $ 599 / £508 / AU$ 871 for a yearly subscription, it could be a significant discount for Cyber Monday as well, especially if you’re looking to use the suite for a project or a student assignment.
But there could be a bunch of deals that you may be interested in but not sure which one to go for. With this in mind, here’s a few deals we’ve come across in recent years, and which ones to look out for, just in case.
Which deals usually appear?
(Image credit: TechRadar)
Being able to save on the following plans can make a big difference in the long run, especially if you’ve decided to add Photoshop, Lightroom, or other Adobe apps into your workflow.
With Adobe’s improvements to Apple’s new MacBooks, alongside Photoshop coming to the web, it looks to make that subscription more justified if you’re still wavering.
Adobe Student Plan
While there’s a Student deal that saves users over 65% for a Creative Cloud subscription, in the past there’s been Black Friday deals that have offered monthly discounts of up to 30%, and yearly discounts of up to 45%.
The yearly subscription of $ 599 / £508 / AU$ 871 could be a big dent in your bank account, while a monthly charge of $ 52.88 / £49.99 / AU$ 76.88 can be as much as an iPhone 13 Pro contract for three years.
Adobe Photography Plan
This plan offers Photoshop, Lightroom and 20GB of cloud storage for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 9.99 a month.
If you want to only edit photos and only photos, it's an ideal plan for this.
Last year for Black Friday, this plan was 16% off the above pricing, so we may see something similar appear in the coming weeks from Adobe.
Adobe Creative Cloud Plan
The most common plan that many go for, where every essential app from Adobe is included in the plan.
Priced at $ 52.99 / £49.99 / AU$ 76.99 a month, you'll be able to use the apps on your Mac, your PC, and your iPad if you wish.
All of the apps can be downloaded and updated from the main Creative Cloud app, so you can pick and choose which apps you want to install at certain times.
Are subscription plans the new normal?
There was a time where you could buy Photoshop for a one-off fee, and you could use it as many times as you wanted for that specific version before a new one would be announced.
However, as devices became more powerful and the alluring choice of having more than one device, there was a reason for Adobe to replace one-off payments with subscriptions.
Microsoft was one of the first to do this with Office 365, and now it’s a common trait. Apple with iCloud and other services, alongside Microsoft and Game Pass, and much more.
But Adobe doesn't just offer one plan, several are offered to better help your needs. Some that you’ll most likely go for may be the Photography plan that offers Photoshop, Lightroom and 20GB of cloud storage for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 9.99, to the Dreamweaver plan for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 19.99.
We aren’t far from seeing what Adobe will offer for Black Friday weekend. But if you’ve recently upgraded your PC or Mac, and you want to get the best out of Adobe’s apps, you’re going to be in a great position once the deals are announced to help save you a significant chunk of change.
Adobe Max is the software giant's equivalent of Apple's WWDC, and some of the event's most exciting announcements have been for its popular photo editing package Lightroom.
Photoshop is likely the more famous app of the two, and has just stolen some of the Adobe Max headlines with the arrival of Photoshop for Web. But Lightroom is the organizational and editing bedrock of many photographers' workflows, and all three versions of the app – mobile, desktop and Classic – have just received some great-looking updates.
We’ll bring you a full review of the latest version of Lightroom as soon as the updates roll our into our Creative Cloud subscription – look out for Lightroom Desktop version 5.0, iOS version 7.0 and Android version 7.0 any day now.
But whichever version you use – or are thinking about stumping up for – here are the five biggest new features coming to all versions of Lightroom.
For the longest time, 'masking' has been a solid answer to give when someone asks why you would round-trip an image to Photoshop. Sure, Lightroom has always offered masking – we could barely function without its excellent and easy-to-use gradient filter – but now, for the first time, we'll get proper, adjustable and refine-able masks.
Lightroom will also get two new types of mask, joining the gradient, circular, and brush options, with Select Sky and Select Subject both making their AI-powered way over from Photoshop. Masks can be inverted as well – this was possible before with gradient and circular masks, but not with masks that you’d applied manually with the brush tool. As you’d expect, you can create multiple masks.
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(Image credit: Adobe)
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(Image credit: Adobe)
Another power-user feature of the new masking and selection tools is the ability to name masks, which is another useful feature that Photoshop users will like. All in all, the new masking and selection tools make Lightroom significantly more powerful – in a lot of ways they become de facto adjustment layers, and in our experience, will save on round-tripping images out to Photoshop pretty often. That’s not to be sniffed at – round-tripping images is expensive both in terms of time and storage.
We have questions. What will happen to masks if you create them in Lightroom and then attempt to open an image in Photoshop? Is there a limit to the number of masks you can create, and does the inclusion of “select sky” presage the development of the “replace sky” tool currently in Photoshop proper? These questions should largely be answered when the upgrade touches down.
The new masking feature is coming to all versions of Lightroom, plus Adobe Camera Raw. The sky and subject selection tools, meanwhile, are coming to all versions, with the exception of a currently-unannounced list of unsupported mobile devices. Are we jazzed about this one? Embarrassingly so.
The other main improvements to Lightroom are constrained to the cloud-based Lightroom (rather than what we refer to as 'proper' Lightroom Classic), as well as Lightroom Web and its mobile iOS and Android versions.
These include the 'strange it wasn’t there at launch' inclusion of crop overlays – you know, the ability to see gridlines on your images when you crop them.
(Image credit: Adobe)
These will include traditional grids and rule-of-thirds guidelines, as well as golden ratio and spiral guides to go alongside the already-included ability to crop to a particular aspect ratio.
A little strangely, this one’s only coming to the desktop version of Lightroom, with keen-to-crop mobile and web users left out in the cold.
3. Recommended presets
Adobe is continuing to lean into cloud computing and AI with recommended presets, a feature that's coming to Lightroom (not the Classic version), as well as the mobile and web versions of the software.
Described as a “springboard” for those looking for editing inspiration, Recommended presets will look at the image in question and suggest a preset that might suit it. Impressively, this won’t be restricted to the presets you have stored locally, but will include presets released (presumably) for free by the community.
(Image credit: Adobe)
This could be a really great way of finding appropriate presets, and for those stuck without a clear vision for how an image should look, a great way of getting started without the trial and error.
On the subject of presets, Adobe is continuing its foray into the world of paid-for presets, with another pack of eight preset packs to be released soon and available for all versions of Lightroom.
4. Community Remix
The question of creating a successful social network that appeals to photographers has been a vexed one for some time. With Instagram increasingly focusing on video to counter the threat caused to its numerical supremacy by TikTok, Adobe fancies it can see a gap in the market. Consequently, give a warm welcome to Community Remix, coming to the desktop versions of Lightroom initially, with rollout to other platforms coming “soon”.
(Image credit: Adobe)
The premise is simple – share an image online and the community will be able to open it locally, edit it, and upload the results to the applause (perhaps) of the masses. You’ll also be able to do that the other way around, of course, opening the work of others to provide your own interpretation of their image.
It’s a really interesting idea, particularly for those starting out photographically and looking to do justice to their images in post-production. A useful way of learning new skills, looking at your images differently, and stretching your knowledge to the limits? It all depends on how warmly the new feature is greeted by the community, but it’s a promising idea to say the least.
5. Lightroom Academy
On a similar educational theme, the web version of Lightroom will also be branching into photography education with a new resource called Lightroom Academy.
The aim is apparently to teach learners some of the fundamental concepts of photography in an interactive way, starting with a series on composition. You can work through the lessons at your own pace, and they looked nicely laid out if not exactly revolutionary.
(Image credit: Adobe)
The images come from the Lightroom community, while the quiz-like challenges and 'On Your Own' exercises bring a crucial interactive element, although it's a shame these don't take place within Lightroom. Still, it's entirely free (including non-subscribers) and Adobe is promising to update Lightroom Academy with new classes and resources in 2022.
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Q2, 2021 saw the Colonial Pipeline breach, the JBS breach, fallout from the Microsoft Exhchange breach, a massaive Facebook data leak, another large health system breach and more municipal breaches.
Cybersecurity is one of the most important topics on the global agenda, boosted by the pandemic. As the global digitalisation is further accelerating, the world is becoming ever more interconnected. Digital ecosystems are being created all around us: countries, corporations and individuals are taking advantage of the rapid spread of the Internet and smart devices. In this context, a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect. Threatpost
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