Like an operating system reinstall, resetting your web browser can fix all kinds of problems and improve performance at the same time — squash annoying bugs, clear out dodgy and outdated extensions and get a browser that's good as new with a hard reset. Here's how to carry it out on all the major browsers.

Rumours are spreading that Microsoft is ready to throw in the towel with Microsoft Edge, the browser that replaced the much-maligned Internet Explorer in the release of Windows 10. Not even four years in, Edge has failed to throw off the bad reputation of its predecessor, and now it looks like Microsoft is getting ready to start again from scratch. Here's everything we know so far.

One of the worst parts of trying to work with people located around the world is figuring out what time it is where they are. Coordinating meeting when everyone is in one time zone is hard enough.

Despite all the convenience and quality of Google’s sprawling ecosystem, some users are fed up with the fishy privacy policies the company has recently implemented in Gmail, Chrome, and other services. To its credit, Google has made good changes in response to user feedback, but that doesn’t diminish the company’s looming shadow over the internet at large.

If you’re ready to ditch Google, or even just reduce its presence in your digital life, this guide is here to help.

You might be unfortunate enough to have an annoying coworker in your vicinity. You know, the one that talks about how much he loves eating quiche for breakfast. Let's call him Chad. While you (probably) can't put Chad's headphones in jello to get back at him for pinning last week's soccer loss on your bum knee, you can slowly drive Chad mad where it hurts the most: in his precious YouTube goofing-off time.

If you're a serial mass tabber, like myself, it can be a pain organising said tabs into different windows, or even just ordering them. Chrome users, if you've been dragging your tabs around one at a time, there's a much, much better way.

The web's more media-heavy that it's ever been, with a great many sites serving images like Sanitarium Up & Gos out of the back of a Black Thunder. This isn't a problem until the image loading clogs up rendering of the rest of the page, causing your browsing experience to suffer. The good news is there's a Chrome flag you can enable to alleviate this.

Windows 10 is reportedly going to start warning users when installing a non-Edge browser. Beta testers are currently getting an early look at Microsoft’s upcoming October 2018 Windows Update, and some have noticed a rather annoying new inclusion.

It feels like every website today wants to send you notifications, regardless of how big or small they are. Visit a page in Chrome, for instance and you'll often start to see a popup box notifying you of new content even when you're not on their website. If you're sick of seeing these, it is possible to rid yourself of them forever... or selectively, depending on your mood.

Say a webpage isn’t loading right. Maybe it’s collapsed from too much traffic after going viral on Reddit. Maybe it’s blocked in your country thanks to a law like GDPR. Maybe it was recently deleted. Usually Google has a saved copy of that page. And the quickest way to get that saved copy is to type cache: in the address bar.

Thanks to faster internet and more mindful designers, websites are mostly quick to load these days. But on bandwidth-restricted and low-power devices, loading times remain a concern. An upcoming change in Chrome looks to warn you when a site is trying to stuff too much down the pipeline -- and let you halt the process.

Using a "dark mode" on your favourite website, app or operating system feels great. It's perfect for dark rooms or aeroplanes, when you need to conserve your battery a little, or you're just tired of having sore eyes from staring at a screen for hours.

Since its debut, Chrome has grown in popularity, though its once-stellar reputation has taken a bit of a hit as of late. Examples of Chrome-only sites are more and more common, reminiscent of the days when Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the web browser market. It's been shown to be a massive memory hog as well, slowing down machines as users create more and more tabs.

Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let's take a tour of some of our favourite services Google's killed off over the years.

Chrome: I can't recall the last time I didn't install an extension from the Google's Chrome Web Store. However, developers - up until now - have been allowed to offer their extensions as inline downloads. In other words, they could drop a download button on a website, you'd click on it and see a typical installation confirmation dialogue (as if you were installing the extension from the Chrome Web Store itself), and before you knew it, you were +1 to extensions.

If you're a Chrome power-user, you'll eventually want to set up an automatic URL redirect. Maybe you want to watch all your YouTube videos on a minimalist site; maybe you love — or hate — going to the mobile version of a site. Maybe you just make the same typo every time you enter a certain URL.

At this point, it seems as though there's a new data breach every week where users usernames, passwords and other personal information has been exposed to hackers. Keeping track of them all can be quite the undertaking.

There are plenty of extensions you can use to manage any organisational "difficulties" you have in Chrome. Here are a few of the ones I use to keep me sane.

Google's latest update to Chrome came with big changes about how the browser treats autoplaying videos, but it's now causing a lot of audio issues with various web apps and games.