The company announced yesterday that it has begun testing several new features that will soon appear in Copilot, sharing a brief preview.

Among the new and improved features, Microsoft included the new DALL-E 3 model, which allows users to create higher quality images.

Another upcoming feature in Microsoft Edge is the ability to select text on a web page and rewrite it. According to Microsoft, this feature will be available very soon.

Bing is set to introduce a Deep Search feature powered by GPT-4, aiming to refine search outcomes. This functionality involves extending initial search queries into detailed descriptions, enabling the AI to furnish more pertinent results. Additionally, Bing will incorporate upgraded image search capabilities, leveraging GPT-4’s advanced vision functionalities.

“This year will be remembered as the moment that we, as individuals, began to harness the power of AI in our daily lives. The last 10 months reflect years of AI research, close partnerships, and breakthrough innovations coming together. This culmination is now unifying our product vision to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Yusuf Medhi, executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

The company is actively developing a code interpreter feature that empowers users to delegate
intricate tasks such as calculations, coding, data analysis, visualization, and mathematical operations. Presently, the company is in the process of collecting feedback as it prepares to launch this feature, indicating its imminent availability in the near future.

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.

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.

DeepMap’s technology will bolster the mapping and localization capabilities of NVIDIA DRIVE after the acquisition is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2021. According to Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at NVIDIA:

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people. DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

The latest release of Visual Studio Code 1.57 includes updates such as Workspace Trust, a new getting started experience, remote repositories and much more.

Workspace Trust lets users decide whether their project folders should allow or restrict automatic code execution and enables safe code browsing. What is more, the new Edge browser debugging feature integrates the Microsoft Edge Developer tools directly into VS Code.

• The new FIDO Developer Challenge invites teams to use the public FIDO2 WebAuthn API to showcase unique FIDO authentication ideas.

The FIDO Alliance stated that the projects should apply FIDO authentication protocols to address technical or social challenges within Fintech, eCommerce, IoT, retail, blockchain, gaming and education. The deadline for entry is July 2nd.

• The new Powered by Snowflake program is specifically designed to accelerate the ability of companies and application developers to deliver differentiated applications through all stages of the application in Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

The program will allow users to build better applications with faster engineering velocity by leveraging Snowflake design resources and will also drive awareness and adoption by co-marketing with Snowflake.

Those who participate in the program will also be able to optimize performance by working with support engineers who specialize in app development.

• The new version of TMS WEB Core includes package support to easily create custom components, Workspaces that allow users to manage multiple projects in one folder, and support for the use of the entire FNC component suite.

Using TMS WEB Core, modern client-side web applications can be created exclusively with the Object Pascal programming language without the need for HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

All new components and improvements are now available to Visual Studio Code users.

The teams unveiled a discussion and development forum at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, dedicated to developing standards for extensions. The forum, the WebExtensions Community Group, gives engineers a place to build a unified and more secure core foundation for extensions. The main aim is to make it easier for developers to write extensions because a shared standard will help bridge differences between browsers.

There’s not yet a public timeline for publishing a draft of the standard or building it into browsers.

Extensions are crucial to browsers on PCs. The bits of software can block ads, integrate with password managers, strip out code that tracks you on the internet and find coupons as you put items into your shopping cart. What is more, one extension lets users replace photos of Donald Trump with cats.

Google’s Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world. But differences among browsers mean it’s less likely that an extension developer will support other browsers. Standardization should align browsers to reduce developers’ difficulties. There will still be differences among browsers, but the community group plans to ensure a common core of abilities.

The Chrome browser modernized extensions by adopting some of the same technologies, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets used to display web pages. Firefox and more recently Safari have followed Chrome’s lead. Edge also tapped into Chrome’s extension when Microsoft adopted Chrome’s open-source Chromium technology.

The news comes from the Apple developers conference WWDC where Apple announced it was embracing Chrome’s extension approach in Safari, despite significant differences in packaging extensions for Safari remain. The idea of standardizing extension technology has been around for years.

Opera, another browser maker, tried to unify extension technology when it adopted Chrome’s extension approach in 2010. One thing that won’t change is how you get your extensions. Each browser maker has its own extensions download site, as well as procedures for vetting them.

Several aspects of the technology are up for discussion, according to the browser extension group’s charter. The group hopes to set programming interfaces that are compatible with today’s extensions as much as possible, that doesn’t slow website performance, that doesn’t hurt privacy and that beef up security to “reduce the harm compromised or malicious browser extensions can do.”

Compatibility is the top priority on the list. The group’s charter commented that it should be relatively straightforward for developers to port extensions from one browser to another and for browsers to support extensions on a variety of devices and operating systems.

Here’s how it works. When you type a URL, you’re obviously not starting it off with “http” or “https”. What the browser does right now is it defaults to HTTP and then redirects to HTTPS if the website supports it. Now, it’s going to use HTTPS by default.

But Microsoft Edge is only going to use Automatic HTTPS if it thinks the website is “highly likely” to support the more secure protocol, at least by default. It has a list of websites that apparently includes hundreds of thousands of domains.
You can actually turn this feature up a notch though. There’s a feature you can find in edge://settings/privacy where you can change it so that all websites switch from HTTP to HTTPS. It also notes that if you choose this, there might be more connection errors.

Using websites with HTTPS is important because it’s more secure, or more specifically, because regular old HTTP is tremendously unsecure. As Microsoft puts it, with HTTP, bad actors can view or change your internet traffic while it’s in transit. In short, internet traffic can be intercepted, and if it’s not secure, it can be manipulated.

If you’re on the Dev or Canary channel and you don’t have it yet, you can enable a flag under edge://flags/#edge-automatic-https. After that, you should see the feature in Settings.

While this is in the Dev and Canary channels right now, it will probably arrive in Beta once Edge 92 ships to the channel. That’s scheduled to happen the week of June 8, so it won’t be a long wait. Of course, Microsoft could choose to hold it back for Edge 93 if it wanted to.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, has had this feature since Chrome 90. Being that it’s a security feature, one might expect that Microsoft would be working hard to catch up and get this in everyone’s hands when Edge 92 is released to the Stable channel during the week of July 22.

Microsoft has spelt out its plans to retire the venerable Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) browser from widespread use in a little over a year. Sean Lyndersay, an Edge program manager, commented:

“The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. With Microsoft Edge capable of assuming this responsibility… The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10.”

The forced retirement of IE11 will not be all-inclusive, as several editions of Windows, including 10’s Long-term Support Channel (LTSC) and Windows Server, will be spared from the directive. Likewise, Microsoft will continue to secure IE’s Trident rendering engine, which is embedded in Windows and crucial to the running of Edge’s IE mode.

Because Microsoft had previously promised customers that IE11 would be supported as part of the three Windows 10 LTSC versions released so far the end-of-support order won’t be applied to them. That’s not to say the separate IE11 application will survive that long. Microsoft alluded to as much when it said that the LTSB/LSTC versions were “out of scope at the time of this announcement” (emphasis added) of the June 15, 2022, date.

Even IE11 running on Windows 7 will be supported longer than next June. Commercial customers who pay for the third year of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will receive support for IE through the end of that contract, or until Jan. 10, 2023.

What’s most important to enterprises is that the June 2022 support deadline can be sidestepped by using Edge and its IE mode; that last calls up designated sites using IE’s Trident rather than Edge’s now-native Chromium. Businesses still wedded to aged internal sites and too-expensive-to-rewrite apps are to be pushed toward Edge and its baked-in IE mode. Not surprisingly, then, support for IE mode will run much longer, until 2029 for Windows 10 2019 LTSC and until May 2023 for Windows 10 Enterprise 20H2, which launched late last year.

Edge, launched in mid-2105 as part of Windows 10, was Microsoft’s attempt to stem the bleeding of browser share. That didn’t work. Even with Edge and IE combined, Microsoft’s share kept dropping. So Microsoft abandoned its own rendering and JavaScript engines and swapped in Google’s instead, relying on Chromium’s open-source nature, like other browsers before it, to become a clone of Chrome. Since then, Edge has edged up in share; as of April, it accounted for nearly an eighth of all browser activity.

It’s virtually certain that much of that growth has come from Microsoft’s best customers, the businesses, small and gigantic, that run on Windows. Some of those companies still required IE so that employees and partners could access old, very old in some cases, intranet sites and apps. IE mode made the back-and-forth between Edge and IE renderings, if not automatic at least configurable.

That was an advantage over Chrome when Google’s browser was adopted by IT administrators. Google had, of course, countered with what it dubbed “Legacy Browser Support,” or LBS, which was originally a browser add-on, then in 2019, integrated with Chrome itself. When faced with a URL designated as requiring IE, Chrome called up IE to paint that page. It was an inelegant solution that, unlike Edge, resulted in two open browsers.

The disappearance of IE11 means that Chrome won’t be able to handle the IE-dependent URLs and apps.

Last month, Google said that Chrome 90 could use LBS to open Edge in IE mode instead of opening IE11. Almost certainly, Microsoft gave Google a heads up that it was getting ready to ditch IE11 and leave Edge’s IE mode as the sole legacy solution.

The difference between then and now for Chrome and its LBS is significant. Users would not have done more with IE than they had to; it was old as Moses and crippled when compared to a modern browser. But with Edge, it’s going to be different. Once open, Edge may tempt Chrome users into staying with it, running it for more than rendering IE-reliant sites and apps. Edge may appeal to Chrome users enough, anyway, for some to wonder why they’re running two browsers when one will do.

Internet Explorer long outlived its usefulness and its sell-by date, technology-wise, wasn’t long after its October 2013 release. If not for Microsoft’s indulgence of its commercial customers and the company’s history of backward compatibility and support, IE should have vanished around the time Edge came on the scene. But if IE11’s demise helps out Edge, at least Internet Explorer succumbed for a good reason. Few browsers can say as much.

At that point it was estimated that around 8% of people were still using it.

Its replacement, Microsoft Edge, has an Internet Explorer compatibility mode, which will continue to function.
Some very old websites – and crucially, internal company web-based tools – were built on older web technology, which modern browsers have trouble processing.

Microsoft Edge

In a blog, Microsoft Edge programme manager Sean Lyndersay wrote that the newer browser was “a faster, more secure and more modern browsing experience“, and was also now better able to handle older applications.

In a separate post dealing with questions, Microsoft clarified that there would be some exceptions to the retirement, including on older versions of Windows.

Between 2000 and 2005, Internet Explorer enjoyed a 90% market share (Google Chrome is the most used browser today). But in 2013 Microsoft was fined €561m ($731m; £484m at the time) for failing to promote alternative browsers within its Windows operating system.

It had introduced a “browser choice” pop-up in 2010, but the feature was dropped in an update the following year. Microsoft said this had happened by mistake.

New Font

In April this year it was announced that Microsoft is planning to change its default font, which has been Calibri across all of its products since 2007.
It is inviting users to vote on their favourite from five contenders, and says the most popular will form its new look.

You can install Microsoft Edge if you want. While it’s officially unsupported on Chrome OS, you can install the Linux version that was released in beta recently. Perhaps you want to install Edge for testing purposes, or more importantly, just for fun and to tinker around with things. Whatever the reason, this is how you can do it:

1. Head over to the Microsoft Edge Insider page. It will detect your operating system and give you a message that you’re not supported.
2. Click on ‘More platforms and channels’, and you’ll be greeted by an expanded message about how Chrome OS isn’t supported for Microsoft Edge. Scroll down and click the download button under ‘Linux (.deb)’.
3. Choose whether you want Edge Beta or Edge Dev. Beta is updated every six weeks (it will be every four weeks soon), and Dev is updated weekly.
4. Next, head over to Settings -> Advanced -> Developers. In ‘Linux development environment (Beta), click ‘Turn on’.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the Linux environment.
6. Once that’s done, open the Microsoft Edge installation file that you downloaded. The process should be pretty straightforward. Once it’s done, you’ll find it in the app drawer under a ‘Linux apps’ folder.
7. If you’d like, you can sign in with a Microsoft account. This will allow you to sync your favorites, history, passwords, and so on.

However, it should be clear that this isn’t going to be your default browser or anything like that. If you’re really looking for a primary browser that’s not Chrome, you should probably go out and buy something that has a more open operating system. 

The Windows Subsystem for Linux now includes the first preview of support for GUI applications. This means you can now run your favourite GUI editors, tools, and applications, to develop, test, build and run your Linux apps. Check the demo below.

Task Manager supports Microsoft Edge process classification

Partnered with the Microsoft Edge team, Build 21364 will now support process classification in Task Manager. The classification is broken down into several different components like Tabs, Browser processes, Utility plugins, Dedicated & Service workers etc. It also includes separate icons for each process to help you identify them including a favicon for the website.

Photo Credits: Blogs Windows

NOTE: This feature is available to users that are running the latest Microsoft Edge Canary or Dev builds. Insiders can download the latest version here.

Eco mode in Task Manager

Photo Credits: Blogs Windows

“Eco Mode” is the new experimental feature of Task Manager that provides users with an option to throttle process resources. It also helps identify apps that are already running in Eco mode. This feature is helpful when you notice an app consuming high resources and would like to limit its consumption so that the system gives priority to other apps which will lead to faster foreground responsiveness. Here are the steps how to enable Eco mode for any process:

1. Open Task Manager.
2. Click on the Processes tab.
3. Right-click on a child process or an individual process.
4. Click on “Eco mode” in the context menu to apply throttling.
5. The status column in the Processes tab should show Eco mode for the process.

NOTE: This feature is rolling out to a subset of Insiders in the Dev Channel at first, to help us quickly identify issues that may impact performance and reliability.

Japanese 50-on touch keyboard

Here is the new touch keyboard layout for the Japanese, 50-on touch keyboard. A 50-on touch keyboard is a popular layout widely used for Kiosk devices in Japan. It allows you to input Japanese texts intuitively without knowing how to compose Hiragana characters.

Photo Credits: Blogs Windows

Photo Credits: Blogs Windows

You can switch to 50-on layout from [⚙] > [50-on]. This feature also provides alphabet and symbol views designed specifically for the layout. You may notice some known issues with the full-width space using the Shift key. The Microsoft team is actively working on addressing them.

Changes and Improvements

• Microsoft is updating the notification that used to say “We need to fix your account (most likely your password changed)”, to be more representative of what it’s for, and now say “Select here to sign in to your account to continue using apps between this device and your other devices.”
• When you turn on or off the night light manually, for example via the Action Center, the night light will now turn on immediately rather than slowly transition.
• You can now turn off Aero Shake via Settings > System > Multitasking and choosing the “off” toggle under “Title bar window shake”. This setting is now off by default so those who want it back will need to turn this setting on. [ADDED 4/22]

You can go and check out the whole Windows Insider Program documentation here, including a list of all the new features and updates released in builds so far.