Under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), technology giants such as Google and Apple could be made to open up their services and platforms to other firms and developers.

Messaging apps, for example, could be required to work with smaller rival applications.

The legislation will not apply in the UK because of Brexit.

In the European Union, the act will change the rules for companies of large size and influence – the so-called gatekeeper firms.

But some of the larger firms have expressed concern about the DMA’s potential impact on security and innovation.

Under the DMA, smaller messaging apps will be able to ask the tech gatekeepers to allow their users to send and receive messages via the bigger firm’s platform.

However, large firms will not be required to make more advanced features interoperable immediately. Under the plans, audio and video calls between two individual users or groups of end users on different platforms will not happen for four years.

The larger firms may also be required to allow their users to chose different app stores.

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Firefox 106 download and update

Firefox 106.0 and Firefox 102.4 ESR downloads are available already. Most Firefox installations will receive the updates automatically, thanks to the browser’s built-in updating functionality. Users who want to speed up the updating process may do so in two ways: run a manual check for updates or download Firefox from the official Mozilla website and install the new version manually.

Do the following to check for updates in Firefox.

1. Select Menu > Help > About Firefox.

Firefox displays the installed version and runs a check for updates. It will download and install any new version that it discovers during that check.

Direct downloads are also available, follow the links below to Mozilla’s download website, to download the new version of the browser.

• Firefox Stable download
• Firefox Beta download
• Nightly download
• Firefox ESR download
• Firefox for Android on Google Play

The sale of PCs in the third quarter of the year fell nearly 20% compared to a year ago, the largest drop in decades and the fourth straight quarter of year-over-year declines, according to preliminary research by two analyst firms.

The surge in PC sales created by the pandemic and the tremendous uptick in hybrid and remote work is over and no longer adding to computer sales. Back-to-school PC purchases also showed “disappointing results, despite massive promotions and price drops, due to a lack of need as many consumers had purchased new PCs in the last two years,” according to Mikako Kitagawa, a director analyst at Gartner.

On the business side, geopolitical upheavals, such as the war in Ukraine, and economic uncertainties “led to more selective IT spending, and PCs were not at the top of the priority list,” Kitagawa added.

Globally, PC sales fell a whopping 19.5% in the third quarter of 2022 — the largest decline since Gartner began tracking sales in the mid-1990s. Research firm IDC pegged the year-over-year drop at 15%, and echoed Gartner’s take on the issues effecting sales, according the firm’s Worldwide Tracker.

“During the peak of the pandemic, many consumers, schools, and business sought new PCs and that surge has been largely fulfilled,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers.

The US PC market dropped 17.3% in the third quarter of 2022, the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year shipment decline. Slow laptop sales drove the overall US market down, while desktop sales showed modest growth — driven by pent-up demand among businesses as well as the public sector, according to Gartner.

“Inflation is the biggest concern in the US. market, but smaller businesses are showing relative optimism about macroeconomic conditions,” Kitagawa said. “While laptop demand among large enterprises sharply decreased in the third quarter of 2022, small and midsize businesses did not show as steep of a drop.”

The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions were hit particularly hard by plummeting sales, decreasing 26.4% year-over-year in the third quarter to 17 million units – the steepest decline among all regions, according to Gartner. It was the third negative quarter for the EMEA PC market following a boom at the start of the pandemic.

Globally, shipments of PCs totaled 74.3 million, according to IDC. (Gartner pegged global sales of PCs at 67.9 million.)

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New research from Slack has found that two and a half years after the UK government enforced its work from home order in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, 88% of desk-based employees in the UK are working from the office at least one day a week, with the average worker visiting the office three days a week.

While 60% of survey respondents coordinate their office attendance with their teams, the survey, based on responses from 1,000 knowledge workers of all ages, job levels and locations across the UK, found that being in the office actually makes employees feel less productive due to the wrong tasks being prioritised, a disorganised approach to communications and meetings, and time spent catching up with colleagues.

Speaking at Slack’s Frontiers event earlier this week, Daniel Hansens, EMEA senior director at Slack, said that over the last two years, we’ve seen that when offices are taken out of the equation, businesses can still survive and thrive in many cases.

“One of the interesting things that the research pulls up is, it’s not just about getting more people into the office, or getting them together as a team, the question is what they’re actually doing when they’re in the office,” Hansens said.

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Businesses should rethink the way staff use their time in offices, says the boss of the messaging platform Slack.

With the rise of hybrid working, lots of people now divide their working week between home and going into their workplace.

But being in the office should be an opportunity to do things that cannot be done at home, argues Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive.

Sitting at a desk with headphones on is not one of them, he says.

Of course the boss of an online messaging platform is not going to go so far as to say staff should leave their laptops at home, but he does say it would “put a strong line in the sand about what the purpose is of getting together”.

Slack has headquarters in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and India.

Reflecting on its offices before the pandemic, Mr Butterfield says: “The 80% of the floor space that we dedicated to kind of factory-farm, battery-chicken housing for people to use their desks all by themselves and listen to their headphones, and not talk to anyone else… was a bit of a waste.”

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European MPs have voted for a law requiring all new portable devices to use the same type of charging cable.

Smartphones and tablets, including the Apple iPhone and iPad, would have to use a USB-C charger from 2024, while laptop manufacturers would have until 2026 to make the change.

There were 602 votes in favour and 13 against, with eight abstaining.

Member states are expected to grant approval on 24 October, before the rule is signed into law at the parliament.

Following a provisional agreement by the European Union, in June 2022, the UK government told BBC News it was not “currently considering” introducing a common charging cable.

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