The speed boost and new features coming to the next version of Firefox are dramatic enough that Mozilla has given it a brand-new name: Firefox Quantum. The idea, of course, is that the upcoming version 57 is a quantum leap over predecessors — or, in the words of Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, a “big bang.” Company …

When Siri can’t give you an answer, it’ll now be Google filling in the gaps in Apple’s knowledge instead of Microsoft’s Bing search service. The Siri voice assistant built into iPhones, Macs and soon Apple’s HomePod smart speaker can handle plenty of requests, like reporting a stock price or defining a word you don’t know. When it can’t, it searches …

Chinese authorities have apparently squelched another service — Facebook‘s WhatsApp text-messaging service. The popular app — more than a billion people use WhatsApp, at least until the China ban — opens up an encrypted communication channel between two people. That encryption protects your privacy but also makes life hard for law enforcement, spies, and other forms of government snooping. China started …

In 2019, you may check your email with the help of a balloon 12 miles up in the sky. Project Loon, from Google parent company Alphabet, uses high-altitude solar-powered balloons instead of the usual land-based cell towers to provide your phone’s wireless connection to the network. It began as a somewhat bizarre project from the company’s X “moonshot” group, but …

With the flood of iPhone publicity this last month — this last decade, actually — you might think personal computers have become ho-hum. But Ron Coughlin doesn’t. The leader of HP‘s PC division thinks his industry has snatched the initiative for technological improvements back from phones. “The innovation is happening in PCs,” Coughlin said in an interview with CNET. His …

Editor’s note Sept. 20: Hewlett Packard Enterprise said Wednesday its Spaceborne computer successfully powered up. The original story about the announcement, from Aug 11, is below.  HAL seemed to have little trouble in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but here’s the problem with computers in space: a constant stream of cosmic rays seriously disrupt electronics. That’s why Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NASA …

If you like websites that look polished and load faster, good news: A technology called OpenType Variable Fonts is about to arrive. Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Apple created OpenType Variable Font technology in 2016 so designers and website developers could customize their typefaces. A font adapted with the technology essentially comes with a bunch of sliders that let people pick …

When Safari 11 arrives on iPhones and Macs later this month, Apple‘s browser will come with a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention that makes it harder for advertisers and publishers to track what you do online. Surprise! Advertisers hate it. Six advertising groups published a letter Thursday asking Apple to “rethink” the technology, warning that it will “sabotage the economic model for …

Apple has unequivocally rejected an ad industry request to “rethink” a privacy-protecting browser feature set to arrive this month in the newest version of its Safari web browser. Six ad industry groups said Thursday that a Safari 11 feature called intelligent tracking prevention breaks existing browser conventions and “will … sabotage the economic model for the internet.” On Friday, Apple …

We’re using our phone cameras to photograph a lot more than friends and flowers. It’s good for taking pictures of restaurant receipts, shopping lists, maps and other documents whose information we want tucked away in our pockets and cloud storage systems. Which is why Microsoft just updated its free Pix camera app for iOS to understand when it’s taking a …