August 10 Tech news roundup: Google loses antitrust case in the U.S., Firefox gets new Reader view features, 3 AI features are coming to Chrome

Nvidia driver update may cause Blue Screens on older CPUs

Nvidia has ended support for CPUs that don’t support POPCNT, meaning its display drivers are not compatible with chips that don’t support the instructions. POPCNT, or Population Count, was first introduced in the SSE4.2 architecture that debuted in 2008, for the Intel Core Nehalem and AMD K10 Barcelona processors. Microsoft recently discontinued support for CPUs that don’t support SSE4.2

Users who install the latest Nvidia drivers on CPUs that do not support SSE4.2, may experience a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) for some users. For reference, Nvidia says that version 555 release drivers and beyond do not support the older CPUs, so if you have an older PC you should stick with version 554 of the display drivers to avoid crashing the computer. It is rather strange that NVIDIA has not blocked the installation of drivers on older systems that are unsupported.

Firefox update brings improvements to Reader View and Tab Previews

Firefox was updated to version 129.0, which improves the Reader View significantly. The feature removes distractions on a web page, making it easier to read. And now, you can customize the text and layout options such as the text size, font, character spacing, word spacing and the alignment of text. Users can use the theme menu to access two new options: contrast, and gray. It can further be tweaked with custom colors for the text, background, links, etc.

Tab Previews are rolling out to Firefox users. The feature displays a thumbnail of the web page when you mouse over a tab, it includes the title of the page, the domain, and a snapshot. This allows users to check the contents of a tab without actually clicking on it.

Google has lost the antitrust case against the U.S. DoJ

Google has been found guilty of abusing its power to create and maintain a monopoly in the search engine market. The Mountain Valley company was dragged to the District Court by the U.S. Department of Justice in a massive antitrust case last year. Several big names including Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, Apple executive Eddy Cue, and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, DuckDuckGo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg, provided their testimonies about their experiences in the search engine market.

Apple had partnered with Google in a deal that is reportedly worth $18 Billion, to have Google as the default search engine in Siri, and Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Microsoft had tried to negotiate a similar deal, but failed to do so. Other search engines such as Neeva, which was co-founded by former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy, were unable to attract users over. Ramaswamy accused Google of freezing the ecosystem in place with its deals with OEMs.

U.S. District Court Judge, Amit Mehta ruled that Google has an illegal search engine monopoly by paying Samsung, Apple, and other OEMS, to make Google as the default search engine on their devices and browsers. This hurt other search engines badly, and was deemed as an anticompetitive practice. Google will appeal the ruling, but it is not yet clear what will happen. The Department of Justice could force Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., to split its products into multiple companies and keep them isolated.

Firefox Nightly adds support for vertical tabs

Mozilla is making it easier for users to test the new vertical tabs in Firefox. The feature was introduced in the Nightly channel of the browser in June, but it wasn’t particularly convenient to activate the option. Users had to jump through a few advanced preferences in the configuration page. However, the latest version of Firefox Nightly makes this task a lot simpler. You can now enable vertical tabs in Firefox directly from the browser’s Settings page.

Vertical tabs in Firefox supports drag and drop, which lets you rearrange tabs, and it also gets the full right-click context menu as well. You may set the sidebar to hide automatically. By default, the sidebar only displays the favicons of the tabs, but you can click on it to view the title of the page.

It is worth mentioning that the feature is still in a very early stage, and as such only offers basic options compared to other browsers like Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi. Mozilla is expected to bring Vertical Tabs for Firefox in the stable channel in the coming year.

Apple Intelligence will be available in Europe, but there’s a catch

When Apple revealed iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS 18, one of the biggest announcements was the AI feature in the operating systems which is called, Apple Intelligence. It is deeply integrated in the OS, supporting almost all Apple apps, and even extends its capabilities to third-party apps. But, users in Europe were upset when Apple had said that it would not bring the new AI feature to European market because of the Digital Markets Act. The Cupertino company was worried that Apple Intelligence may not be compliant with the law’s requirements.

But, it seems that not all users may be affected by this. Apple will allow users in the EU to use Apple Intelligence, but only on Mac. Why is that? Because macOS is not affected by the DMA, only iOS and iPadOS are. So, macOS users will be able to use Apple Intelligence, but the catch is that you will need to set your device’s language to U.S. English. Apple Intelligence is only supported on Macs with an Apple M1 Silicon chip or later. The feature will not be available in China on iOS, macOS and iPadOS.

Google Chrome gets three artificial intelligence features

Google Chrome on desktop has been updated to add support for 3 AI features that have been designed to help improve the browsing experience. The search giant is improving the popular Google Lens mode, to allow users to search for what they see on a web page. Click on the Google Lens icon, which looks like a viewfinder, and click on an object on a web page. This brings up relevant search results with visual matches. You can narrow down the search further by adding details such as a color, or brand. Users can also interact with the AI and ask follow up questions about the search topic. This is essentially similar to how the Circle to search works on Pixel 8 phones.

The next AI feature in Chrome helps you with shopping online, by bringing price comparisons from multiple tabs together in one place. Google calls this Tab Compare, which provides a comparison overview generated by its AI, that lists key information like the price, product summary, and specifications of the items.

The third feature will let you find pages in your browsing history with Google AI by typing about the topic in the address bar. For example, you could ask it “What was that ice cream shop I looked at last week?”, and Chrome will list the tabs in your history that are related to your query. This makes it easier to find tabs that you opened but did not bookmark, and it does not save information from incognito tabs.