According to the Chrome Platform Status webpage, the lack of custom text rendering settings has been an issue that users have been mentioning since 2015. With Microsoft’s intervention, Chrome will finally be more user-friendly.

Some time ago, Microsoft made changes to text rendering in Edge, and the main goal was to achieve nicer fonts, with improved range and contrast. Thanks to the ClearType Text Tuner settings in Windows that Edge uses, the browser has changed its look to a much better one, and the text has become easily readable.

Microsoft’s ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to improve the display of text on screens, with the goal of making text look like it’s printed on a piece of paper.

Microsoft engineers have integrated ClearType Text Tuner support into Chrome so that it picks up any changes in contrast and gamut, just like most other Windows apps.

Curt Cathy-Schmidt, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, is leading the effort in this area. In recent months, he has been involved in improving the text image in Chromium-based browsers, with a focus on improving accessibility in Edge and Chrome.

More than five years ago, the company switched to Chromium in its own Edge browser. At the time, Microsoft announced that it would “bring our Windows platform expertise to improve the performance of all Chromium-based browsers on Windows,” and that promise was kept. Microsoft contributed to improving scrolling in Chrome and many other features.

“Together, Lenovo and NVIDIA are driving a new era of Hybrid AI for businesses, designing the next generation of technology that delivers an AI-powered future now and unlocks the power of their data anywhere it is created. Lenovo’s expanded engineering and time to market partnership with NVIDIA simplifies the path to generative AI for all and helps customers anywhere rapidly use cutting-edge AI to transform their business”, said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.

The offerings were described by Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the annual global Lenovo Tech World keynote held in Austin, Texas, where they discussed businesses’ need for end-to-end solutions that bring together accelerated systems, AI software and expert services to quickly build and run custom AI models using their own data.

“With generative AI driving the greatest technology transformation of our time, enterprises are seeking solutions that give them the flexibility to develop and deploy workloads across their workstations, data centers and clouds. NVIDIA and Lenovo are providing a comprehensive portfolio of hybrid AI systems that businesses can rely on to power generative AI from virtually anywhere”, said Bob Pette, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA.

Supported by the new Lenovo AI Professional Services Practice, the solutions enable enterprises to use a hybrid cloud approach – building their custom AI models using NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud service and then running them with on-prem Lenovo systems powered by NVIDIA’s latest hardware and software designed for generative AI.

The goal of this idea is for Microsoft to gain an edge over Google in the race to embed advanced artificial intelligence tools in areas such as search and apps.

According to sources, it is discussing the possibility of investing up to $10 billion in OpenAI, creator of the artificial intelligence viral bot ChatGPT. The proposal under consideration calls for Microsoft to put up the money over several years, but the final terms could change.

According to a Semafor report, the deal Microsoft is discussing would give the company a 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it recoups the money from its investment, after which it would acquire a 49% stake in OpenAI. Semafor said it is not known whether the deal has been finalized, but said documents sent to potential investors in recent weeks outlining its terms point to a target completion by the end of 2022.

Microsoft’s GitHub, too, uses OpenAI’s linguistic artificial intelligence to help software developers with a program called GitHub Copilot. Copilot offers code snippets that can then appear in the program, much like an autocomplete bot trained to speak Python or JavaScript. It’s very useful for the programming equivalent of manual labor – filling in pieces of code that are necessary but not particularly complex or creative.

Microsoft executives said the company plans to develop the Copilot technology for use in similar programs for other job categories, such as office work, video game design, architecture and computer security.

The author of the “Out of Office Hours” blog, Michael Niehaus who is a developer and IT admin finds out that the Teams icon is actually saving space on your RAM when it is not placed somewhere on your taskbar.

In his posts he emphasizes on the usage of Windows 11’s widgets – Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge.

Widgets is not the only one which generates several Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes to make it work. WebView2 gives its users an opportunity to use Edge and its rendering engine and it is not necessary to launch Edge or try to use Edge’s user interface.

When united, those processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory in order to work.

All these processes, connected with the widgets, are not able to start unless you actually click the widgets button.

The Microsoft Teams’s processes run no matter if you are using the application or not. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, you can just uninstall it but according to Niehaus removing the icon from the taskbar is enough.

According to a Reddit user, a YouTube follow button has appeared in the address bar of YouTube pages. The new option makes its first steps and still, it doesn’t support all YouTube content creators. The feature is part of Edge’s “Collections” which allows users to see the latest posts from creators they like and follow.

At that moment, Microsoft is only testing the feature – “controlled rollouts”, as it is named  by the company. However, the plans for the followable web option are not clear yet.

Google has gone one step further than Microsoft and has announced that it is pulling the plug on Internet Explorer. According to a report by 9to5 Google:

“Google has confirmed that Internet Explorer 11 is no longer officially supported by the search engine.”

The official reason given is that Internet Explorer makes up only a very small percentage of searches worldwide. However, a Google software engineer took to Twitter and explained that it was actually ‘time’ to call it quits on Internet Explorer. The engineer tweeted:

“As a web developer this is one of the happiest announcements in a while: Google Search ended support for IE11 in its main product (you can still search but will get a fallback experience). I’m mostly posting this so you can send it to your boss. We did the Math. It is time.”

Internet Explorer 11 was released by Microsoft in 2013 along with Windows 8.1. It was ultimately the last version of the browser that Microsoft released as it was replaced by Microsoft Edge in 2015. Interestingly, Edge is built on Google’s Chromium engine. And Microsoft didn’t make Edge available to older versions of Windows. So the default browser on devices running Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 was Internet Explorer.

However, Internet Explorer has been on its last legs for a while now. Still, Internet Explorer had a 1% share in the desktop browser market in September 2021. This is perhaps down to the older devices still retaining Internet Explorer as their default browser. For those users, Google Search will not work or get a very scaled-down version, which won’t give them the best of Google.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that Edge, which relies on the same core Chromium technologies as Google’s Chrome, would follow that rival in shortening the interval between releases to four weeks. The first in the four-week cycle will be version 94 of both Chrome and Edge. Google plans to debut Chrome 94 on Sept. 21 with the follow-on v. 95 appearings Oct. 19. Meanwhile, Microsoft will launch Edge 94 on Sept. 23 and Edge 95 on Oct. 21.

Starting with version 94, Chrome and Edge will also offer what’s called an “Extended Stable” release that will use an eight-week interval rather than the default four. Obviously, a sop to enterprise IT admins unhappy at the idea of a sped-up update tempo, Extended Stable releases will occur at every even-numbered version. The next Extended Stable releases will then be v. 96, v. 98 and so on for Edge.

By default, Edge will update automatically every four weeks. The eight-week interval is thus opt-in, with the opting requiring use of the as-yet-undocumented TargetChannel group policy on the part of admins, or alternately, Intune from the Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Some details about how Microsoft will keep Extended Stable secure are still cloudy.

Microsoft said last month that “important security patches and fixes will be delivered as needed independent of the selected release option,” which implied that security updates for Extended Stable will continue in their current no-schedule-here fashion.

But Google, which as the power behind Chromium should be the outfit in the know, said in March that, “security updates on Extended Stable will be released every two weeks to fix important issues, but those updates won’t contain new features or all security fixes that the 4-week option will receive.”

Because of the long interval between releases for Edge’s Extended Stable, Microsoft has also altered its support policy for the browser. Prior to Extended Stable — and still applicable to all four-week-cycle copies of Edge — Microsoft provided what it called “Assisted Support” for the current version (call it N) and the two previous versions (N-1 and N-2). Here’s an example: The now-current version is v. 92, so Microsoft Assisted Support goes to v. 92, 91 and 90.

Extended Stable Edge, on the other hand, will be supported for N and N-1 only. When Edge 96 shows up, it and v. 94 will be eligible for Assisted Support.

That’s one less step JavaScript developers need to complete when debugging a project. In the past, developers would have typically installed VS Code extensions such as the popular Microsoft-made Debugger for Chrome or the Debugger for Microsoft Edge. Instead of installing and using these extensions, developers can start debugging a project by pressing F5 or activating the debug icon in the menu bar and selecting “Run and debug”.

Another option is using the VS Code command palette and running the “Debug: Open Link” command to debug in Chrome, Edge or Node.js. For Edge, Microsoft has added an extra “inspect” button in the debug toolbar, which launches Edge Developer Tools within a VS Code instance. Microsoft added this button in the May 2021 release of VS Code. Microsoft noted in a blog post:

“The first time you activate this button, the editor will ask you to install the Microsoft Edge DevTools for Visual Studio Code extension. Once you have this one installed you won’t be prompted again.”

It makes sense for Microsoft to add a built-in JavaScript debugger in VS Code for developers building apps in it or in Microsoft’s own superset of the language, TypeScript. JavaScript is the most widely used language, ahead of Java and Python, and TypeScript has quickly become one of the most popular languages for writing large web applications.

Separately, Microsoft has been working on ways to improve security for developers through a feature it calls Workplace Trust, which provides “extra security against code execution when browsing unfamiliar source code.”

Microsoft has introduced a Restricted Mode “where potentially harmful functionality is disabled so you can more safely browse the code and eventually make an informed decision.” But Microsoft is still refining its approach to pop-up notifications every time developers open up new folders.

The outfit’s engineers also patched nine vulnerabilities, five tagged as “High,” Firefox’s second-most-serious label. Two of the nine were found only in the Android edition of the browser, but none were marked “Critical,” the direst flaw category.

Firefox 90 can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, and Linux from Mozilla’s site. Because Firefox updates in the background, most users can relaunch the browser to install the latest version. To manually update on Windows, pull up the menu under the three horizontal bars at the upper right, then click the help icon. The resulting page or pop-up shows that the browser is already up to date or displays the upgrade process.

Unblocks Facebook log-ins

For June’s jump to version 89, Mozilla delivered an extensively tweaked user interface (UI) previously known by the code name “Proton.” Mozilla touted the changes as a significant look and feel overhaul, and said it was “designed to win you back” to the open-source browser, which has continued to slump in popularity. After a major effort upgrade, the follow-up, Firefox 90, was relatively sparse on new and shiny features meant to tempt users to abandon rivals.

In Firefox 90, anti-tracking “reacts by quickly unblocking the Facebook login script just in time for the sign-in to proceed smoothly,” according to Thomas Wisniewski and Arthur Edelstein, web compatibility engineer and senior product manager for privacy and security, respectively. In other words, the usual block is temporarily lifted long enough for authentication, at which point the block resumes so that a user is protected while navigating to other websites.

It seems odd that Mozilla, which prides itself on its privacy stance, and more specifically, with blocking trackers, has decided to initiate the feature with Facebook, whose privacy and tracking reputations are, to put it kindly, lamentable.

Background updates, but only for Windows

Background updates, which Mozilla broached in April, finally arrived in Firefox 90 for Windows users.

Prior to version 90, Firefox updated itself only when the browser was running. Much like rivals, including Chrome and Edge, Firefox looked for pending updates and upgrades when it was launched, then downloaded them in the background. The update or upgrade was not actually installed until the browser was restarted. Thus, users who left Firefox open indefinitely or spent weeks between system reboots might well be running an insecure version, even though a patched edition was available and already on their machine.

As of Firefox 90 on Windows, the browser will check for updates every seven hours when it’s not in use. Mozilla will, as it typically does, roll out this feature in stages, so not everyone will notice it immediately. Users can, however, enable the feature through the about config pane. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Not our fault!

Elsewhere in Firefox 90, Mozilla added a diagnostic tool to the Windows version that users can reach by typing about third-party in the address bar and pressing Enter or Return. Some software, Mozilla said, loads code into browsers, Firefox included. “Sometimes, these applications load harmful modules that cause Firefox crashes, reduced performance, or compatibility issues,” Mozilla contended.

Mozilla seemed most interested in users not blaming Firefox for problems actually caused by these freeloading modules. “You may not notice that a malicious or unexpected module has been loaded and it may cause problems that appear to be Firefox issues,” Mozilla added.

Microsoft first adopted CET through an implementation known as Hardware-enforced Stack Protection back in March of this year. Hardware-enforced Stack Protection leverages the Intel CET chipset security extension to secure Windows applications from Return-Oriented Programming (ROP), Jump Oriented Programming and other common exploit techniques.

While Edge will soon use CET to provide users with an even safer browsing mode, there is a big catch as you’ll need to be running either an Intel 11th Gen or an AMD Zen 3 processor to enable this feature.

Control-flow Enforcement Technology

Although CET support was originally intended to ship with version 94 of Edge in September, according to a new post in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, this feature has been slightly delayed and will now be arriving in October with the release of Edge version 95.

Organizations that wish to disable CET can do so by changing Image File Execution Options (IFEO) using group policy.

Although many organizations are planning to adopt hybrid work polices, many employees are still working from home and by adding CET support to Edge, Microsoft will help keep workers safe from attacks and exploits designed to be delivered remotely.