Fact checking is increasingly a mainstay of the modern internet, and that now includes ‘dead’ web pages. The Internet Archive has started adding fact checks and context to Wayback Machine pages to explain just why they were removed. If a page was part of a disinformation campaign or pulled due to a policy violation, a conspicuous yellow banner will explain as much.
The checks come from a variety of well-established outlets, including FactCheck.org, Politifact, the AP and the Washington Post.
The archivists saw the fact checks as striking a balance between historical preservation and acknowledging the problems with resurfacing false info. It hoped users would “better understand what they are reading” in the archives. It’s also striving for neutrality — one banner for context explained that including a page in the Wayback Machine “should not be seen” as endorsing the content.
This move won’t please people who’ve accused internet companies of political bias, whether or not it’s justified. Even ‘dead’ pages are now subject to scrutiny, after all. It might be necessary in ghe long run, however. It’s an acknowledgment that political material on the web rarely exists in a vacuum, and that future visitors might not always know why a page vanished from the ‘live’ web.
Microsoft may have finally devised a way to get people to stop using Internet Explorer once and for all (via ZDNet). When the company releases the next version of its Edge browser, currently slated to come out sometime in November, Internet Explorer users won’t be able to access some 1,156 websites, including popular destinations like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and ESPN. Instead, they’ll be promoted to go to those websites using Microsoft’s more modern, Chromium-based browser.
The list is held on a DLL file Microsoft has been adding to Edge installations over the summer. IE loads the file through a plugin, which then monitors what websites you’re visiting through the browser. When you navigate to one that Microsoft would prefer you not visit through IE, you’ll see the following support page. “You've been redirected to Microsoft Edge where you can continue your browsing uninterrupted,” the company says on the page. “If you come across a site that needs Internet Explorer, you can load that site in Internet Explorer mode without ever leaving Microsoft Edge.”
Four years after Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, you might think the browser is a non-entity. However, like older versions of Android, there’s still a small but sizeable contingent of people who continue to use the software to navigate the internet. According to StatCounter, as of September 2020, IE has a 1.19 percent share of the worldwide browser market. This IE behavior is part of Microsoft’s plan to deprecate the browser finally. As always, IT administrators will have some say in the matter. But short of not having Edge installed on their PC, there’s little way for consumers to avoid the move.
Google has spent years trying to reduce Chrome’s notorious appetite for memory, and it’ll soon offer a substantial improvement for Windows 10 users. WindowsLatest has learned (via MSPowerUser) that a Google engineer recently revealed that a future Chrome release will use a technique from Microsoft Edge to lower RAM usage and theoretically boost performance. Chrome will switch to “Segment Heap” memory management that, in Microsoft’s experience, cut memory use by 27 percent.
The improvements in Chrome could vary wildly depending on the system, but tests indicated that it could sometimes save “hundreds of MB” in the browser and system processes. “Many-core” systems are most likely to see the largest benefit, the engineer said.
You should see the feature soon after Google can build Chrome using the right Windows 10 developer kit. This won’t necessarily lead to massive improvements in performance, but it could help if you either have limited memory in your system or simply like to keep many browser tabs open.
