May 25 Tech news roundup: Firefox to get Vertical Tabs and Tab Group, Apple fixes Photos bug in iOS 17.5, Google Search is placing ads in AI overviews

Mozilla Firefox is getting Vertical Tabs Tab Groups, and Profile Management

Mozilla has big plans for Firefox, the browser maker announced its plans to add three user-requested features in the next year. The first of these is support for Vertical tabs. It will allow users to use a sidebar to scroll through their tabs, which should assist in finding tabs quickly, as opposed to looking for them in the horizontal tab bar. Next up is Tab Groups, which will let you stack multiple tabs into a single group. This can help organize things based on their category, like work, entertainment, sports, games, etc.

Firefox will also gain support for a Profile Management System that can be used to switch between multiple profiles. This is handy for keeping tabs and accounts related to your personal life separately, and those associated with work profiles in a different profile. The open source browser will also gain features such as tab wallpapers, and streamlined menus.

These features are already present in rival browsers such as Brave, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, but nevertheless, it is good to see that Mozilla is listening to feedback from users to add them to Firefox.

This may be the reason why browsing on Google Chrome is slow

Do you ever feel like Chrome is slow? The culprit may be none other than the extensions that you use. Researchers at Debugbear have published a report of their analysis of how extensions can affect the performance of Google Chrome.

The researchers state that most extensions resulted in adding 500ms to 2000ms to the processing time, which can impact the browsing speed, aka page loading times significantly. Unfortunately, several popular extensions were found to slow down the browsing experience. However, there is some good news. Content blockers, aka ad blockers, have the complete opposite effect, i.e. they help improve the speed of your browser. Extensions like uBlock Origin, Malwarebytes ranked high in the results, aiding in blocking ads, thus reducing the CPU processing of websites.

iOS 17.5.1 fixes bug that made deleted photos resurface in Photos

Apple released the iOS 17.5 update last week, but soon after users installed it, many people noticed that photos that they had deleted previously were now back in their Photos library. This caused users to panic and wonder how this was possible.

The reports reached Cupertino, and Apple hastily released the iOS 17.5.1 update to patch the issue. The release notes for the new software mentioned that Apple had fixed a rare issue where photos that were deleted reappeared in the Photos app. The company mentioned that this happened due to a database corruption. A theory pointed out that the deleted photos were only removed from the Photos app, and that a second copy of the images were saved in the Files app. When the operating system was updated, the Photos app reindexed the files, which resulted in the deleted images resurfacing.

Apple has not offered an official explanation about the issue, and the company’s silence about potential privacy issues has drawn criticism from users and security experts.

Google Search is putting ads into AI Overviews

Google is making some drastic changes to its search engine, and one of these modifications is a rather controversial one. Regular users may be aware that Google displays an AI overview at the top of the results page. You may also know that Google places ads on the results page. What happens when you combine the two? That seems like a nightmare, but unfortunately, it has become a reality.

The Mountain View company has announced that it will start displaying ads in the AI overviews. They are marked as sponsored to help users distinguish them from the content generated by the AI. The information that AI chatbots provide are not accurate, and sometimes fantasized, i.e. it can be incorrect data. But, Google thinks AI Overviews are helpful and users like it. The company says that users will interact more with ads in the AI Overviews, compared to ads in regular search results.

Windows 11 Snipping Tool to get visual search feature

Microsoft has announced that it will soon update the Windows 11 Snipping Tool and Paint. The built-in screenshot tool in Windows is gaining a visual search feature that is similar to the one in Google Lens. Users can right-click on a screenshot captured in the Snipping Tool, and select the option that says “Visual Search with Bing“. This will run a visual search based on the picture’s contents to help find similar images and objects.

The Snipping Tool is getting an emoji tool, that you can use to add an emoji to your screenshots. The app can now recognize QR codes in screenshots. Microsoft is adding an option to change the opacity of shape fill and outline colors in the Snipping Tool.

The Redmond company has revealed that it is renaming the AI-image creator in the Paint app. The feature, which was called
Cocreator is becoming Image Creator. The updated Snipping Tool is currently available for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview Channels.

Microsoft’s Recall AI feature can monitor what you do

Microsoft has launched a new AI-powered tool called Recall. The tool, which was formerly called AI File Explorer, is a memory feature. The AI will store snapshots, aka record user actions, to allow them to be recalled later.

In other words, it can monitor everything that you do, and you will be able to ask the Recall AI to look into your history, and pull information from it. According to reports, the tool will not record private browsing activity in Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera. But, alarmingly, all other data including passwords, financial information, and other private data could be recorded. Experts and users are worried alike that the Recall tool could be used for nefarious purposes, such as spying on people.