Web

The extension, available for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, essentially serves as a series of shortcuts for accessing Microsoft 365 apps, documents, and files. It’s also seemingly quite popular: the extension has more than 6 million users on Chrome and more than 4 million users on Edge.

Microsoft will retire the extension on January 15th, 2024, according to a support document. I’ve asked Microsoft if it can detail more about the decision.

A member of the Threads team just posted about it. I was able to log in from Chrome on iOS; on Safari, for some reason, I wasn’t. I’m assuming that whatever is going on there will be fixed sometime soon.

And even though I’m running into that issue, I’m happy that using Threads through a mobile browser is an option at all. I’m weird: I like to log in to social media services through the mobile web instead of downloading an app.

Last night, a friend pointed me to Radio Garden. The site (or iOS app) is simple, presenting a swipe-able digital Earth covered in green dots. Some represent collections of local stations, and some, like the lonely, all-shellac-78s Arctic Outpost AM1270, solemnly broadcast into the Earth’s farthest reaches.

James did a good job documenting the unexpectedly simple, nostalgic joy of Radio Garden in his Verge story years ago.

Wired reported yesterday that the “Altitude” tool gives small user-created content platforms access to a central database of content deemed to be created by terrorist organizations. Altitude joins similar past Jigsaw tools for toxic speech moderation and CSAM identification.

The database, maintained by the UN-backed online counter-terrorism group Tech Against Terrorism, is already used by major tech companies.

Domino’s apparently flew too close to the sun this week when the internet figured out, via the always-reliable Wario64 and others, that its free pizza codes were infinitely reusable.

Read all about the chaos in Kotaku’s story.

Well, if it’s rolled out to you. With Chrome 119, Google has been slowly rolling out the ability to check how much memory that tab is using just by hovering over the tab, 9to5Google reports. 9to5Google also has details on the flag to enable if you want to switch the feature on for yourself. Handy!

That’s all thanks to Chrome’s Core Web Vitals feature, which allows website owners and developers to evaluate how well their site performs. According to a blog post shared by Google, Core Web Vitals and other small tweaks also made the average page load in Chrome 166ms faster.

After acquiring FakeSpot earlier this year, Mozilla is putting its product review smarts to work in a new AI chatbot that’s designed to answer your questions about products you’re considering buying. Fakespot Chat is Mozilla’s first LLM, and can respond to questions on a product’s “quality, customer feedback, and return policy.” Click here to try it yourself.

With Black Friday just around the corner, Google Search is launching a new hub that surfaces relevant deals on a single page. Searching for “shop deals” will reveal a whole bunch of products on sale across different categories, but you can narrow your search by typing, “shop headphones deals” or “shop sneaker deals.”

Google is also rolling out some shopping features for Chrome, including a new price insights feature that was previously available on Search, as well as an easier way to check for discounts by clicking the tag icon in the address bar.