Hasta La Gadget!

Google Chrome is well into its adolescence and is celebrating its 15th birthday with a redesign and new safety features. Say goodbye to the standard white background because Google is rolling out background customization using its Material You design language, including new colors and smoother access to light and dark modes.

To change the design of your browser, click a new button at the bottom of your homepage titled “Customize Chrome.” Then, a pop-out gives you the option to change themes, with colorways ranging from yellow to purple and everything in between. Chrome will automatically switch to whichever choice you click on, so you can explore the different colors before committing to one. Here’s where you can also choose to have your browser be in light mode, dark mode or to match your computer’s settings. Your settings can differ based on which Google account you’ve logged into (and can even stay the standard white if you prefer).

Google has also added more options to Chrome’s drop-down menu that the company says will make it quicker to access tools like Google Password Manager and extensions. You can also check out a public preview of Chrome’s”fresh, modern” web store. It now has an AI-powered extensions tab and an Editor’s spotlight section if you want recommendations for ones to download. 

The birthday updates are mostly design-centered, but Google is also attempting to improve its Safe Browsing technology. Instead of updating its internal list of sites with phishing or malware threats every half hour to hour, Chrome should now check sites in real time. Google claims that 60 percent of bad sites exist for less than 10 minutes and that this change should improve protection by 25 percent. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/chromes-15th-birthday-present-is-a-new-design-and-safety-features-130013138.html?src=rss

Intel is one of the latest companies to invest in Arm, joining the ranks of Samsung, Alphabet, Nvidia and more, Tom’s Hardware reports. The move comes as Softbank preps Arm for its IPO, with plans to offer 95.5 million shares at $47 to $51 each. The company is valued at $52 billion — more than the almost deal selling Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion that fell off in 2022 (barriers included the Federal Trade Commission suing to block it).

Investing in what is, essentially, its competitor allows Intel to expand beyond its x86 chips — which are not nearly as efficient as those Arm is currently manufacturing. Stuart Pann, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel Foundry Services, confirmed the investment during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference Call. “80 percent of TSMC’s wafers have an ARM processor in them,” Pann said. “The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing ARM at this level, investing in ARM, doing partnerships with ARM, should give you a signpost that we’re absolutely serious about playing in this business because if you’re not working with ARM, you can’t be a foundries provider.” As an “anchor investor,” Intel should have better access to Arm’s future chip design IP which it can then produce via its burgeoning contract factory plans.

As part of this expansion, Pann added that the company would be focusing more on other low-power chipsets, including RISC-V, which he said is where the “volumes” are at in the new world of mobile-first computing. After all, the point of Intel opening up its factories to third parties in the first place was to admit that its own efforts in this space hadn’t been as successful as its much-smaller rival.

Intel’s decision to invest in Arm comes at a time of tremendous growth in (and incentives to grow) the chip manufacturing industry. Earlier this year, the Biden administration released funding applications for companies to get a piece of $39 billion devoted to semiconductor manufacturing. More recently, Apple extended its licensing deal with Arm until 2040. The iPhone maker was a founding backer of the company, first using its technology in its (ultimately doomed) Newton and now, more recently, as the backbone of its entire lineup.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/intel-joins-apple-alphabet-and-samsung-as-an-arm-investor-120115199.html?src=rss

Samsung has unveiled a 4TB version of its 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs with an optional heatsink targeted at gamers and content creators. The new model promises the “fastest random read performance among PCIe 4.0 interface consumer SSDs on the market,” Samsung claims, along with faster read/write speeds, improved power efficiency and longer life. 

The 4TB SSD 990 Pro is available with and without a heat sink, and features a slim design that can fit into an ultra-thin laptop or gaming console, according to Samsung. With the company’s V-NAND chips, a PCIe 4.0 interface and an improved controller, it can hit read speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and write speeds of 6,900 MB/s — best-in-class and the same as its 1TB and 2TB versions. 

Random speeds are also identical to the smaller versions at 1,600K and 1,550K IOPS read/write, respectively. However, endurance doubles from 1,200 TBW (terabytes written) to 2,400 TBW over the 2TB version, thanks to the higher capacity. It also has twice the cache size at 4GB.

Though not as fast as the latest PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs (which can hit 11,700 MB/s read and 9,500 MB/s write speeds), the 990 Pro is among the highest-speed PCIe 4.0 models out there. It’s also 50 percent more power efficient than the previous 980 Pro, Samsung said. That makes it ideal not just for PC expansion, but also consoles like Sony’s PlayStation 5 — and 4TB would be pretty sweet in a PS5, given the ever-increasing size of AAA games. 

The 990 Pro 4TB will go on sale for $345/$355 for the regular and heatsink versions, starting in October at Samsung.com and “select retailers.” That’s over twice as much as the 2TB version, which is normally $190 but is currently discounted to $135 on Amazon. Once it starts to hit stores in force, though, we should see discounts on the 4TB model, too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-adds-a-4tb-option-to-its-high-speed-990-pro-ssds-104521791.html?src=rss

Opera has rolled out a new version of its browser for gamers with the same generative AI features that launched with its One browser. The company debuted its Aria AI with the One browser that came out in June. At the time, Opera also gave its Android browser the AI treatment, but the GX browser for gamers remained AI-less. Now, the company is giving GX users the choice to use Aria’s features — if they want. They’ll have to enable “Early Bird” in settings and then switch on “Aria Extension” and “Aria Command Line” to be able to use the AI assistant. And, like in the other versions of the company’s browser, users will have to log into their Opera account. 

Once they activate the AI, though, they’ll get a new command line where they can type ctrl+ / on Windows or cmd+ / on Mac to display an overlay where they interact with Aria. They can then ask Aria questions through that overlay, which they can also launch from the sidebar. Opera said users can ask Aria gaming-related questions, such as “Has [a certain game] finally launched yet?” and “How can I kick off my streaming career?” Of course, users can easily find the answers to those questions by using a search engine the old way, but Aria provides an in-browser alternative in the same way Edge’s AI co-pilot does. 

In addition, users can take advantage of Aria’s AI Prompt capability by highlighting any text in the browser to bring up contextual information. When Opera introduced its browser’s generative AI features, it included examples in which Aria turned chunks of text on the page into soap opera dialogue or into quiz questions. Aria AI is now available in over 180 countries, so most people can access it with GX and Opera’s One browsers. Those interested can download the browser for gamers if they want to give it a try from Opera’s website. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/operas-game-focused-browser-gets-an-ai-copilot-100023864.html?src=rss

Voters must “do everything” within their power to defeat the former president, said the Clinton-era labor secretary.