Qualcomm’s next flagship processor is embracing the same photo format technology championed by Apple, a move that will let you squeeze more pictures into your next high-end Android smartphone and maybe advance beyond ordinary snapshots. Last year, Apple introduced support for High Efficiency Image File Format, or HEIF, as part of an effort to improve …

Intel has made progress on a technology called spintronics that could boost your phone, laptop and smartwatch as conventional chip technology runs out of steam. Researchers at Intel and the University of California, Berkeley on Monday described spintronics work that could shrink chip component sizes to a fifth their current size while cutting power consumption by a factor of 10 …

Microsoft is reportedly giving up on the core technology in its Edge browser for Windows 10 and will rely instead on Google’s browser software. The new browser is codenamed Anaheim and will use software from Chromium, Google’s open-source project on which Chrome is based, Windows Central reported Monday. Specifically, it’ll use Google’s Blink, the browser engine with the key job of interpreting website coding and …

A background-blurring portrait mode arrived last year in Google’s Pixel 2 smartphone, but researchers used a hacked-together clump of five phones to improve how the feature worked in this year’s Pixel 3. The portrait mode simulates the shallow depth of field of higher-end cameras and lenses that concentrate your attention on the subject while turning the background into an undistracting …

Phase One has released a new version of its Capture One software with some features aimed at matching and beating Adobe Systems’ Lightroom, its dominant rival for photo editing and cataloging. Some of the big changes come to the critical task of masking — selecting particular elements of a photo that you might want to change, for example, to increase …

An expanded Firefox search deal with Google helped push Mozilla’s annual revenue up 8 percent to $562 million for 2017 — money that should come in handy as the nonprofit tries to salvage what’s good about the internet. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal and Russian election meddling have led plenty of people to question whether today’s tech is actually a …

A partnership between Airbnb and What3words means you can now use your phone to navigate to a tent deep in the forest of northern Mongolia. What3words gives every 10-foot-square patch of the Earth a three-word label, providing a digital locator not just to homes and businesses but to sites that don’t have addresses. For example, the enchanted river at the …

With a new mode called SpeedReader, the Brave browser will use AI technology to strip clutter out of websites so they load more than 20 times faster and trample your privacy a lot less, the startup said. Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Vivaldi Technologies’ Vivaldi, Microsoft’s Edge and other browsers have reader modes designed to show simplified versions of many websites, …

The US now can claim the top two machines on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, as Sierra, an IBM machine for nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, edged out a Chinese system that last year was the very fastest. The Top500 list ranks supercomputers based on how quickly they perform a mathematical calculation test called Linpack. …

If you’re tired of companies hoarding all kinds of personal data about you, you could be able to try an alternative approach next year from Inrupt, the startup from web creator Tim Berners-Lee. Inrupt is backing an open-source project called Solid that’s designed to let us keep control over our own data instead of leaving it in the data centers …