Good news: Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome are working to reduce the amount of memory and other resources their browsers use. You might have noticed that browsers impose an increasingly onerous burden on your phone or laptop. Websites are getting bigger and browsers are getting features that make them more like full-fledged operating systems than …

Google, one of the top companies in the hot area of artificial intelligence, will begin letting customers directly use its custom processors for the technology starting in October. Google’s TPUs, or tensor processing units, accelerate AI tasks like understanding voice commands or recognizing objects in photos. Today, Google will let you pay to do that kind of work on its …

Google is trying out a new Chrome interface that for the first time in a decade presents a very different look for the tabs and address bar at the top of the widely used web browser. Since its public debut in 2008, Chrome has featured a trapezoidal tab for each website you have open. But tabs now look very different …

When it comes to navigation, we live in an age of miracles. Speak a few words to your phone and it’ll lead you to your friend’s house. But there’s still room for improvement. What3words CEO Chris Sheldrick What3words How do you tell your sister where to meet at the concert festival? Where along that dirt road is the trailhead? Today’s …

Firefox is getting smarter about using your computer’s memory for a bit of a speed boost. The changes come in Firefox 61, released Tuesday, the latest version to sport the Quantum brand that for the last half year has embodied Mozilla’s effort to restore its browser’s reputation and reclaim ground lost to Google’s dominant Chrome. One change, called retained display …

Loupedeck, an editing console geared specifically for photographers who spend a lot of time editing photos in Adobe Systems‘ Lightroom, just got a hardware and software update in a refresh called the Loupedeck+. And the price got an upgrade, too. The original Loupedeck debuted in 2017 for $300, though you could find it for $210 this year. The Loupedeck+ debuts …

Brave, a browser that blocks conventional online ads and strips privacy-invading trackers off the web, has begun testing its own technology for supplying advertisements. The startup, co-founded by former Firefox leader Brendan Eich, announced a special test version of Brave that will show about 250 prepackaged ads to those who sign up for an early-access version of the software. It’ll …

JPEG turns 25 this year, a remarkable achievement when you think about how the latest smartphone becomes ho-hum in a matter of months. But to celebrate JPEG’s birthday, we might finally be seeing something better. That’s because the Joint Photographic Experts Group has begun work on a successor, called JPEG XL that at a minimum should cut photo file sizes …

Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, is exploring a very different web browser called Scout that’s operated by voice rather than keyboard, mouse or touch-screen taps. The nonprofit revealed the Scout project in an agenda item for an all-hands meeting taking place this week in San Francisco. “With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice,” …

If you want to install Chrome extensions, Google’s Chrome Web Store soon will be the only place to get them. Extensions — the software that lets you do things like block ads, manage your tabs better, explore art on your new-tab page or cover your screen with doge dogs — can be useful and fun. Unfortunately, they can also be …