How to Turn off Background App Refresh on iPhone or iPad

By default, your iPhone (or iPad) lets apps check for new data in the background. It can reduce loading times when switching back to an app, but it also reduces battery life, takes a bit of cellular data, and could allow some apps to spy on you. Here’s how to turn “Background App Refresh” off.

First, open the “Settings” app on your iPhone.

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Tap the "Settings" icon on iPhone

In “Settings,” tap “General.”

In Settings on iPhone or iPad, tap "General."

In “General,” tap “Background App Refresh.”

In General, tap "Background App Refresh."

Next, you’ll see the “Background App Refresh” settings. If you’d like, you can disable Background App Refresh on an app-by-app basis here. Just tap the switch beside each app you’d like to disable to turn it off.

In 2019, the Washington Post discovered that some apps use the Background App Refresh feature to send data about your activities through the internet when you don’t suspect it, so unless you completely trust an app vendor and think the refreshing is likely useful to you, it is probably best to turn the feature off for most of your apps.

In "Background App Refresh" settings, you can turn the feature on or off for individual apps.

Luckily, Apple also makes it easy to completely disable Background App Refresh. To do so, tap “Background App Refresh” at the top of the page.

Tap "Background App Refresh" again.

On the next screen, select “Off” from the list.

In "Background App Refresh," select "Off."

After that, exit Settings, and you’re all set.

Interestingly, Background App Refresh is one of the features that gets disabled when you enable Low Power Mode on your iPhone. Your iPhone will use less battery power in idle mode from now on.

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How to Add a Kids Profile to Google TV

Google TV devices, like the Chromecast with Google TV, are great at surfacing content to watch, but not all of that content is family-friendly. Thankfully, you can set up a specific profile for your kids, complete with parental controls.

You can have multiple profiles for everyone in your home on Google TV devices. The Kids profiles have a bunch of extra controls, including bedtimes, viewing limits, app monitoring, and more. Creating a Kids profile will add them as a member to your Google Family. It’s not the same as creating a Kids profile from scratch, as you won’t be assigning them a Gmail address.

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How to Turn off Save Password Pop-ups in Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge has a built-in password manager that offers to save all your passwords. When you log in to a new website, Edge will prompt you to save the login details. But this can get quite annoying. Here’s how to disable the pop-ups in Microsoft Edge. If you’re planning to use a password manager, we recommend that you go with a dedicated password management service like LastPass or Bitwarden. These services are not browser-dependent and have strong native clients as well as browser extensions.

But before you do that, first, let’s disable the save login prompts from Microsoft Edge. The steps are different for Microsoft Edge for desktop, Android, iPhone, and iPad.

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How to Install Add-ons in Mozilla Firefox

An extension is an add=on to the browser that adds functionality. Extensions can be tools that extend the abilities of the Mozilla Firefox browser. Other types of extensions add integration with services, making them more convenient to use in the browser. Firefox classifies extensions as a type of “Add-On” along with Themes. Unlike with some other browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox not only supports add-ons on your desktop, but also in the Android app.

Mozilla maintains a repository of all the add-ons. Not all of the extensions you can use on the desktop are available for Android. We’ll show you how to find and install them on both platforms.

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