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The nascent VR market has more or less settled into two camps, Oculus and Vive. Four and a half if you count Oculus-powered Gear VR, Google Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality. Needless to say, there's a bit of fragmentation going on, especially when you factor in prices and system requirements. WebVR, and particularly Mozilla's new Firefox Reality, promises to democratize VR by making experiences available on all VR platforms and devices. And its first actually usable application is Hubs by Mozilla, a VR chat world where you take on the appearance of a clunky, floating robot.

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Emulated games from the otherwise-lost history of video games are coming to the Internet Archive. The original Internet Arcade project was started all the way back on August 6th of 2014, but only this year really blew up to its current size. In fact, the most massive portion of games in the archive now were just added this week - and will continue over the next few days!

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Biometrics are everywhere. Almost all smartphones these days, even mid-range ones, have fingerprint scanners. Laptops and convertible tablets are slowly getting there. And while Apple seems to be doing away with them, it is replacing fingerprints with faces, yet another biometric security factor. The only place where this secure authentication method isn’t available is where they matter the most: the Web. But if the World Wide Web Consortium, a.k.a. W3C, has its way, even websites like, well, Facebook will support password-less logins in the near future.

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Thanks to Facebook, online privacy has come under the spotlight once again. But if history repeats itself, the issue will blow over after a year or so and people, especially end users, will have forgotten the lessons they learned or should have learned from the fiasco. So while the topic is hot and the fear fresh in our minds, it’s best to take stock of the places where we leave our digital footprints and make sure that those are really the only things we leave behind.

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Google has just recently implemented a rather hard-handed change in its Chrome web browser that would effectively remove many of the most annoying ads on the Web. Some hail it as a huge step forward in ad control, others bemoan Google’s self-serving interests on the matter. Whichever side you’re on, the controversy around it, plus Google’s industry clout, could very well be the straw that breaks the Web ads camel’s back. Because at the end of the day, neither users nor publishers are happy with today's ads.

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Hulu has announced an update that, among other things, brings a channel guide to Live TV subscribers who access the service through the Web. The channel can be found via a small menu button added near the playback bar on the Web interface; it opens in a simple left-hand menu that presents the channels with info about whatever is currently playing.

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Allo is one of those "yet another Google messaging service" that both makes sense and, at the same time, doesn't. On the one hand, it tries to be a cross-platform iMessage in simplicity and non-discrimination between SMS and IM. But on the other hand, it wasn't truly cross-platform until it finally added web browser support last August. Even then it was still limited to only Chrome and only with Android devices. Now that changes with the launch of Allo for Web on Firefox and Opera and, most importantly, support for iOS.

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Google is often criticized for its business practices but most of the technology it develops are, more often than not, relatively accepted. Except, perhaps, for AMP. Short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s mobile-centric open standard for the web has, not so ironically, split the web. But while some platform creators aren’t exactly taking sides, it seems that Apple sneaked in a feature in iOS 11 that at least helps make AMP less intrusive. And that’s by simply stripping out AMP markers from URLs when sharing or copying links from the Safari mobile browser.

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Back in April, we reported on sources that claimed Google was going to bake an ad-blocker directly into its Chrome browser, something that would block advertisements deemed to be intrusive and/or disruptive for visitors. Google has confirmed that report today, shedding light on a crucial detail that was missing the first time around: Chrome will block all advertisements on a website that doesn't adhere to Better Ads Standards.

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It wasn't too long ago that word of a "dark mode" for YouTube broke out. While it was technically possible to try it out before it launched, the process was a bit too involved. The new dark mode hasn't exactly formally launched yet, but YouTube is now soliciting public feedback for it. Which means you can now easily test out the upcoming changes to YouTube's design, which, it turns out, also includes a new non-dark theme.

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‘Tis the season for giving. Or so they say. Sometimes, however, it’s also the season for giving back. Yes, we’re talking about that money you owe your best bud from your last Starbucks. OK, so maybe that’s not the only reason you need to send someone money or even, gasp, ask for money, but whatever the reason, Google is making it a lot easier to do just that. The new Google Wallet web experience isn’t just snazzier, it also lets you send and request payments right then and there on your browser, no apps needed.

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The holiday season doesn’t just usher in the shopping season, it also signals the count down to a new year. Which means that, in addition to trying to work off all that holiday food, people will obsess over resolutions, plans, and goals. Yes, it’s the perfect time to be a todo list app or a productivity app. And as if warming up the engines for the holidays, a handful of such apps and services have stepped up their game to deliver just a bit more smartness to their list of features. Here are five of the best known todo apps that have just made your productivity even more productive.

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