A new normal?

It's the first of a new month, which means that NetMarketShare's new OS market share numbers are out, and the predictable drumbeat of the coverage is all about how Windows 10 is gaining at Windows 7's expense.... even though Windows 10 gained more than Windows 7 lost last month. Never underestimate the extent of tech media's devotion to the pre-established narrative, I guess.

The reality of the current numbers, however, looks a little different to me. To me, it looks like Windows 7 is holding on remarkably well for an OS that's due to officially exit support in only 9 more months, continuing to be the OS of choice on 36.5% of the planets personal computers. That's not 36.5% of Windows PCs, mind, but of PCs overall, a remarkable feat considering that its successor's successor OS was released nearly four years ago, and was free for three and half of those years. To me, the fact that Windows 10 is still only 43.6% of the OS market looks more like a sign foretelling a long, Windows XP-like life for the older OS.

Let's be real, though; "Ten-year-old OS loses market share to four-year-old OS" is basically a dog bites man story. It's expected, and would be dead boring if not for the fact that it's happening a lot more slowly than expected... which is also boring. The more interesting story of the past year has been the movements in the overall OS market.

Remember that Firefox is an option

I consume a fair bit of basically-free online content, and don't have anything against "paying" the creators of that content by having a little advertising accompany it, as long as those ads are not intrusive, or disruptive, or loaded with crypto-jacking (or other) malware. I only went nuclear on online ads because advertisers couldn't get their shit together.

So, when Google announced that their Chrome browser's selective ad-blocking functionality would be rolling out worldwide, I was cautiously optimistic. I was even considering switching back to Chrome from Firefox, just to see what sort of a web browsing experience I could have on Google's browser, now that I didn't have to be running multiple extensions in order to block the bad guys.

And then, Google had to go and break everybody else's ad-blockers. Because of course they did; Google sells advertising, and obviously they want you to stop blocking as many ads as possible. Which sucks; they're basically taking away consumer choice, just to line their own pockets. Even worse, though, Google aren't just breaking ad-blocking extensions; they're breaking a whole bunch of other stuff in the process.

As reported by ZDNet:

A planned update to one of the Google Chrome extensions APIs would kill much more than a few ad blockers, ZDNet has learned, including browser extensions for antivirus products, parental control enforcement, and various privacy-enhancing services.

[...]

The biggest of these categories would be extensions developed by antivirus makers and meant to prevent users from accessing malicious sites and for detecting malware before it's being downloaded.

Yikes.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Microsoft may finally have stopped trying to make "fetch" happen

Following about a month after the news that Microsoft were finally planning to stop pushing Cortana on consumers who are plainly not interested, comes the news that they're also going to let go of another of their attempts to foist a doomed and unwelcome product on users who couldn't care less. That's right, Microsoft are apparently planning to finally listen to what consumers have been telling them since 2015 about Edge.

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I'm told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google's Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed "Anaheim," this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to remain anonymous. It's unknown at this time if Anaheim will use the Edge brand or a new brand, or if the user interface (UI) between Edge and Anaheim is different. One thing is for sure, however; EdgeHTML in Windows 10's default browser is dead.

Assuming this is accurate, Microsoft finally cutting the bullshit and doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing, is great news. The only downside is that Microsoft have taken three years to finally get here, after years of taskbar advertising, questionable battery use statistics, and refusals to allows Google's wildly popular Chrome browser onto the Microsoft store... because Google refused to adopt Microsoft's EdgeHTML rendering algorithm, while ditching the Chromium algorithm which has become the standard for all web browsers.

No official word has yet come from Microsoft, of course, so they might still find some way to screw this up, but considering how well-received this news has been today, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft won't go through with this. If once is an incidence, and twice a coincidence, we're just waiting for Microsoft to prove this to be a pattern by doing it just once more. We'll see if doing that now, after years of coercive bullshit, can win back enough good will among consumers to stop Windows' gradual-but-steady market share decline.

Microsoft's ongoing struggles with QA and Edge

After a terrible month of QA issues with Windows 10's 1809 update, and following revelations that those issues aren't actually over yet, even after 1809's re-release, comes news that Microsoft's other flagship product has similar issues. As reported by betanews:

Microsoft's update procedure for Windows 10 has been a little, er, wobbly of late. The Windows 10 October 2018 Update proved so problematic that it had to pulled, and even the re-released version is far from perfect.

Now it seems the cancer is spreading to Office. Having released a series of updates for Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 as part of this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has now pulled two of them and advised sysadmins to uninstall the updates if they have already been installed.

In both instances -- KB4461522 and KB2863821 -- Microsoft says that the problematic updates can lead to application crashes. While this is not as serious a problem as, say, data loss, it does little to quieten the fears that have been voiced about the quality control Microsoft has over its updates.

So, the bad news is that Microsoft's attempts to reassure consumers and Enterprise customers that their quality assurance procedures really are up to the challenge of delivering software-as-a-service seem to be failing. What's the good news?

Apparently, the good news is that Edge has failed so hard that Microsoft is now collaborating with Google and Qualcomm to bring the Chrome browser to Windows 10's ARM version. Yes, really.

LOL. Microsoft store denied! by Google.

Well played, Google. Well played.

As reported by The Verge:

In a surprise move, Google has published Chrome in the Windows Store this week, but not in the way you might be expecting.

Google has simply packaged an app for Windows 10 that opens itself to the Chrome download page. Downloading Chrome will then open up the link in your default Windows 10 browser. It’s a hilarious snub of the Windows Store, and makes it clear Google isn’t planning to bring its browser to Microsoft’s store any time soon.

There are many reasons Google won’t likely bring Chrome to the Windows Store, but the primary reason is probably related to Microsoft’s Windows 10 S restrictions. Windows Store apps that browse the web must use HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10, and Google’s Chrome browser uses its own Blink rendering engine. Google would have to create a special Chrome app specifically for Windows 10 S, much like it would have needed to do to support Windows Phone years ago. It’s extremely unlikely that Google is even considering the work involved in such a project.

It's good business, and good trolling, all in one tiny gesture. This "app" won't help anyone on Windows 10 S who wants to use Chrome, of course, but there are so few of them that it's not especially likely that Google gives a shit.

Or, as Mehedi Hassan at Thurrott.com puts it:

At the end of the day, the Google Chrome Installer is still very, very pointless — the only functionality of the so-called installer is to open the download link for Chrome on your default browser. It basically removes the need for you to open Internet Explorer (or Microsoft Edge) and manually go to the Chrome download page everytime you set up a new Windows 10 installation.

-5/5 stars.

That's not pointless at all; that's some solid value. If there's anything pointless in this picture, it would have to be the Windows Microsoft Store itself.

Oh, well. Maybe next year...

UPDATED DEC. 20th:

Aaaaaaaand it's gone. From The Verge:

Google published a Chrome app in the Windows Store earlier today, which just directed users to a download link to install the browser. Microsoft isn’t impressed with Google’s obvious snub of the Windows Store, and it’s taking action. “We have removed the Google Chrome Installer App from Microsoft Store, as it violates our Microsoft Store policies,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

Citing the need to ensure apps “provide unique and distinct value,” Microsoft says “we welcome Google to build a Microsoft Store browser app compliant with our Microsoft Store policies.” That’s an invitation that Google is unlikely to accept.

[...]

The Verge understands Google created this installer app to combat the fake Chrome apps that can be found in the Windows Store, a problem Microsoft has been trying to address for years. Google’s workaround has now been removed from the Windows Store, so Windows 10 users will have to continue using Microsoft Edge to access the download site for Chrome if they want to access Google’s browser.

Wow. You'd almost think that Microsoft lack a sense of humour about their horrible digital storefront.

Comparing bowling balls to oranges

Earlier this month, security researchers at Google's Project Zero grabbed some attention when they called out Microsoft for leaving vulnerabilities unpatched in Windows 7 and 8.1 long after those vulnerabilities had been patched in Windows 10. This, GPZ's researchers argued, was bad practice, creating extra risks for Microsoft's customers on those older platforms... especially problematic for Windows 7, of course, since it still holds 47.21% of the desktop OS market.

This is not a new thing for Google, of course, who have been disclosing unpatched and actively-exploited vulnerabilities since 2013, in an attempt to goad Microsoft into patching some of them. This was the whole point of Project Zero - the vulnerabilities at issue were already actively being attacked, and the companies who should be plugging these security holes were dragging their feet on fixing them.

Microsoft's products, being in widespread use, were often targets of these attacks, and Microsoft have often been slow to patch them, which has led to Google's team embarrassing Microsoft over and over again, for four long years, on the subject of their products' security. Well, Microsoft appears to have decided that it's time for some tit-for-tat payback, of the absolutely pettiest sort, and are now going out of their way to embarrass Google over vulnerabilities in Chrome... which Google had already quite responsibly patched shortly after being privately notified of them, and without needing to be publicly shamed into doing so. Something that Microsoft currently aren't doing.

From Paul Thurrott:

“Security is now a strong differentiator in picking the right browser,” a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center begins.

Yikes.

Worse, Microsoft didn’t randomly discover a flaw in Chrome, alert Google, and then wait some period of time before disclosing it publicly. Instead, it specifically started a project to “examine Google’s Chrome web browser” for security problems. And it found some. Alerted Google. And then disclosed it publicly, after taking careful note of how long Google took to fix them. In short, Microsoft just wanted some revenge on Google.

To compare what Microsoft just did (attempting to embarrass Google for having responsibly patched a product in a timely manner after being alerted of a weakness) to what Google did two weeks ago (attempting to embarrass Microsoft into patching vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and 8.1 that they'd already patched in Windows 10, but inexplicably left open to attack for 53.1% of desktop PC users) is to compare bowling balls to oranges. The two things might both be round, but that is where the similarities end.

Microsoft's lax approach to security for Windows 7 and 8.1 users, i.e. most Windows users, is bad practice, and makes those users less safe. Google only started calling them out on this sort of shit, four years ago, because it was the only way to goad them into sluggish action where a quick response was clearly called for. The vulnerabilities that GPZ was calling Microsoft out for, two weeks ago, are still not patched, unless I've missed something.

For Microsoft to research security problem in Chrome is fine; most Windows users also use Chrome, so alerting Google of potential vulnerabilities keep Microsoft's customers safer, assuming that Google can issue patches in the timely fashion, which they did. For Microsoft to turn around and try to embarrass Google for responsible behaviour, however, behaviour in which Microsoft themselves do not engage, all in an attempt to push users from Chrome to Edge by baseless scare-mongering, is reprehensible.

Microsoft haven't just surrendered the high ground here; they've wallowed in the filth, and accomplished nothing in the process except to make themselves look desperate.

Microsoft's anti-consumer strategy... of self-destruction

I've spent plenty of time writing on this blog about Microsoft's anti-consumer bullshit; in fact, some may say that I've spent far too much time writing on the subject. But all of my writing on this topic has started from a single, straightforward, baseline assumption: that Microsoft want our money. 

If you assume that Microsoft want as much money as they can extract, and to extract money from as many of us as possible, then a lot of what they're doing seems at once obviously motivated, and bafflingly counter-productive. But what if that's not the goal? What if MS don't care about individual consumers at all?

That's the argument being put forward by Kareem Anderson at ONMSFT:

CEO Satya Nadella and by extension, software giant Microsoft doesn’t want you or me as customers.

Why might you ask?

Perhaps, because we’re fickle, fair-weather, shiny gadget chasing consumers whose financial investments are mostly spent perpetuating the status quo rather than helping to make the leaps necessary to shape a technology future envisioned in countless science fiction books and films.

Instead, Microsoft’s ideal customer is a 250,000 seat Office 365 licensee, or an aerospace facility using Azure as its backend cloud solution. Microsoft can no longer be bothered with our petty wants or needs as a Microsoft Health, Band, Windows Phone or Groove Music consumer.

Microsoft believes a future isn’t in the shackles of 5-inch plus rectangle piece of glass, the latest streaming media platform, or even the most powerful gaming console of the time. Instead, Microsoft is betting that the future is in an always-connected mesh network of interconnected devices, nodes, sensors and software that combine to anticipate, automate and regulate the lives of most people. And, quite frankly, it seems Microsoft is tired of walking consumers hand-in-hand through this process.

This is a perspective on Microsoft's anti-consumer approach to... well, everything, that honestly hadn't occurred to me, but it does make a horrible sort of sense. Customers are work. It seems a lot easier, at least on paper, to build the info-structure that other businesses will use to deal with all those demanding, unreasonable individuals, and then ignore all those little people to do business exclusively with other big businesses.

There's just one problem with that: the simple fact that personal computing is personal... and that interacting with those people directly is the only way to know anything about them. It's really hard to build a framework that will let you deliver services to individual consumers that you don't understand at all.

Don't call it a comeback

It's a little hard to believe now, but there really was a time when Mozilla's Firefox web browser was revolutionary.

Microsoft, having monopolistically driven their biggest competitor out of business (seriously, they lost the antitrust case after that one), was ruling the roost with Internet Explorer. Crucially, IE hadn't achieved market dominance by being a better product, and it actually wasn't that good; but Microsoft had successfully leveraged desktop OS dominance into a dominant position in the web browser business, and since IE's rendering engine was designed to be incompatible with other browsers, its dominance seemed to have achieved a self-sustaining state, sustained by web designers who were building web pages specifically for IE. The experience sucked, but there were no other options for Windows users, i.e. almost everybody. At one point, IE accounted for 95 percent of browser usage.

But then came Phoenix. Rising from Netscape's ashes, and bursting with innovative features like tabs and add-ons (yes, really), this early iteration of Firefox was simply better and more useful than Internet Explorer, and quickly converted a multitude of fans... to the tune of 32% of the browser market. Changing web standards, like HTML 4, spelled the end of IE-specific web page designs, and Microsoft was eventually forced to actually improve IE in response. It was too little, too late, though; the revolution had come, Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC web browser market was over, and it was Firefox that fired the first shots.

It would not be Firefox that reaped the revolution's richest rewards, though. Having made their name with breakthrough innovations, Mozilla... kinda stopped innovating. Google, meanwhile, having learned from Firefox's example, was bust building their own, innovative, new web browser. Early Chrome was not as good as the version of Firefox which was available at the time, but Chrome got better, fast, while Firefox stayed more or less the same. And now Chrome is 59.57% of the desktop browser market, and equally dominant on mobile, while Firefox holds only a 12.32% desktop share and 0.56% of the mobile market. Mozilla's former CTO declared the browser wars to be over, and Google to be the winners.

But that was way back in June, and this is August, and apparently Mozilla's current leaders are plotting a comeback, according to this piece on c|net:

Hundreds of Mozilla employees met a very different version of the Firefox mascot this June as they packed into a Hilton conference room in San Francisco for an all-hands meeting.

Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of afox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named.

The message isn’t subtle: Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14, is ready for battle. Its main rival is Google’s Chrome, which [...] lured tens of thousands of us away from Firefox after it debuted in 2008.

But Firefox 57 could be the version that gets you thinking about returning — and maybe about saving the web, too. Mozilla began testing Firefox 57 on Wednesday, the culmination of more than a year of engineering work.

[...]

The top priority is speed. We all get subconscious pleasure with a browser that’s fast and smooth at loading websites, clicking buttons and opening and closing tabs. If your browser stutters while scrolling or makes you wait a long time for a page to appear, you’re more likely to dump it. Speed improvements in recent months already have had an effect, Mozilla says, stopping a steady stream of defections from Firefox to other browsers.

It’s too soon to tell how much faster Firefox 57 will be, but in one broad browser test called Speedometer, Firefox performance jumped significantly. Comparing the June 2016 version of Firefox with the version expected this August, Firefox performance increased 38 percent on MacOS and 45 percent on Windows, says Jeff Griffiths, Mozilla’s Firefox browser product leader.

So, that's the hype. Now for the reality check.

I have both Chrome and Firefox installed. So, out of curiosity, I tested both browsers, with the following results.

Google's Chrome:

Mozilla's Firefox:

Now, I'll admit that this is hardly an exhaustive or especially rigorous testing process, but even so... if this is 45% faster than Firefox used to be, then I hate to think how slow it used to be. With this much of a performance gap, Firefox would need to be three times faster to be worth making the switch from Chrome.

Worse yet, Firefox 57 will undermine one key feature that helped put it on the map: extensions. Again, quoting the c|net piece:

But another change in Firefox 57 will break a venerable part of Firefox — the extensions technology that lets you customize the browser. For example, with extensions you can block ads, protect your privacy, download YouTube videos, translate websites and manage passwords. Extensions were a key advantage back when Mozilla first took on IE in 2004, but Mozilla is switching to Web Extensions, a variation of Chrome’s customization technology.

The change paves the way for real improvements like a snappier response when you click your mouse or close a tab. But thousands of extensions will be left behind unless their authors build new versions for Firefox’s new foundation.

“This transition is very painful for extension developers, and many existing extensions won’t take this hurdle,” says Wladimir Palant, a developer with Firefox’s most-used extension, AdBlock Plus. Programmers had to start working with Firefox’s replacement before it was mature enough to use, he says.Google’s Hangouts extension is another casualty.

So, Firefox 57 is unlikely to be significantly faster than Chrome, it will have no mobile presence at all, and not only will it have no features that Chrome lacks (and that people want), Firefox will be actively undermining the one competitive advantage that it does have, namely its large library of available extensions. Instead, they'll allow Firefox to use Chrome's extensions, an obvious concession to Google's dominance in the browser marketplace... but if Chrome's extension library is better than Firefox's, why wouldn't users just stick with Chrome?

Seriously, with this as the pitch, how is Firefox supposed to mount any kind of a comeback?

Sorry, Firefox fans, but their former CTO was right. Barring some sort of miracle, the browser wars really are over, Google Chrome really has won, and neither Mozilla's Firefox nor Microsoft's Edge have any chance of changing the browser landscape.

Adobe's Flash is mostly dead, and its remaining days are numbered.

The terminal prognosis comes from Adobe themselves.

From ZDNet:

Adobe finally has drawn a line in the sand, noting that Flash will no longer be supported after 2020.

Microsoft officials said they'd do their part to wind down Flash support in the company's Internet and Edge browsers, so that Flash support will be entirely removed from Windows by the end of 2020, as well. [...] Google, Mozilla and Apple also are committing to dropping Flash support by 2020 in their respective browsers. 

Adobe Flash was once the way that video played on the internet, including sites like YouTube, but HTML5 has been displacing it for a while now - most of the sites that I visit on the regular don't use Flash for anything except ads, which I mostly block. Still, after so many years of ubiquity, I'll admit that it's a little strange to see Adobe themselves finally pulling the plug on Flash.

Fare thee well, Adobe Flash! I won't exactly miss you, but it's going to be a little strange not having you around anymore.

In other news, Edge is still losing to Chrome.

Windows 10 isn't the only Microsoft product struggling to increase its market share - the Edge browser, which comes bundled with the OS, is also stagnant, according to stats from both NetMarketShare and StatCounter.

From NeoWin:

It has been almost two years since the release of Windows 10, which came with Microsoft Edge by default, but it appears that the browser just isn't gaining traction among users. As Neowin's Senior Editor Andy Weir pointed out, there are a number of features missing from the browser, one of them being extensive support for extensions.

According to NetMarketShare, Microsoft Edge only commands a market share of 5.65% - which is an increase of only 0.02 percentage points compared to last month. It is interesting to see that the browser was at 5.09% exactly one year ago, which means that it only grew by 0.56% year-over-year. On the other hand, Google Chrome has continued its dominance with a market share of 59.49%. As a point of reference, this is a sizeable growth of 10.84 percentage points year-over-year.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer fell to 16.84%, while Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari grew to 12.02% and 3.72% respectively. The "Other" section also showed a slight increase, and climbed to 2.29%.

Data from another firm, StatCounter, depicts an even more depressing situation for Microsoft. According to the report, Edge sits at 3.89%, however, this is an increase of 0.15 percentage points compared to the previous month. That said, when viewed in a broader perspective, this is still a minor 1.14 percentage points year-over-year growth.

Chrome is the king of all browsers according to these statistics as well, with a market share of 63.21% - a decrease of 0.14 percentage points compared to last month. Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari command 14%, 9.28%, and 5.16% respectively.

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that Edge isn't thriving, since it's exclusive to Windows 10 which has also stalled, but it's important to note that these numbers are only for desktop browsers. Chrome has 55.55% of the mobile market, too, a market where both IE and Edge don't even register. Safari is the the #2 mobile browser, at 33.17%, followed by the built-in Android browser (5.40%), and Opera Mini (3.18%), with every other browser failing to reach even 1.00% share.

It's nice to see Firefox regaining some lost ground, though. I've been giving Firefox another try lately, myself, and have been pleasantly surprised by how quickly it starts, and by how much it's improved. I don't know that I'd describe it as better than Chrome, but it's definitely as good as, and will import your bookmarks and such from Chrome as well, making switching a snap, and choosing between the two basically a coin flip decision. Edge can't say the same; two years after launching, Edge is still suffering from a poverty of quality extensions, and from Microsoft's determination to push their Bing search platform as the default search choice on both Bing and Cortana. And it shows; even the "Other" category is growing more quickly than Edge.

Microsoft's strategy seems to rely heavily on monopolistic tactics: giving Windows 10 away for free was supposed to garner a dominant share of the OS market, and bundling Edge with the OS would have leveraged that into browser dominance, too, driving adoption of Bing in the process, and effectively stealing the core of Google's business out from underneath them. It's a strategy that Microsoft have employed before, effectively killing Netscape's Navigator (and resulting in a costly antitrust suit in the process), but things seem to be playing out very differently this time. The market is speaking; whether Microsoft are listening is anyone's guess.

Microsoft's determination to make "fetch" happen may prevent Windows 10 S from happening, too.

In Microsoft's ongoing quest to become Amazon, and Apple, and Google, and Sony, few things have been as ineffectual, as desperate, or as irritating, as the way they're insisted on forcing Edge, and Bing with it, onto all their customers. Nailing Edge to Bing has prevented it from catching on among Windows 10 users - and since Windows 10 S limits users to Edge only, it may discourage users from picking up that version of the OS as well, along with the PCs that run it.

That's the argument put forth by Michael Allison, over at mspoweruser:

My issue with Windows 10 S lies in two aspects: search and the browser. With Windows 10 S, the browser remains locked to Microsoft Edge (or store skins of it), and Microsoft has now mandated that users of Edge use Bing — and only Bing as their primary search engine. This means that students who use Windows 10 S won’t be able to use Google Chrome, including its vast number of recommended extensions for education (cue the Microsoft fans arguing that you don’t NEED X extension because Y does just as well if you ignore its shortcomings in Z). [...]

Now, for fans of Microsoft products, there’s no reason why someone wouldn’t want to use Microsoft Edge or Bing. Both services are victims of a “works perfectly for me” mentality, and it is easy to imagine that both are completely serviceable apps and services with their own advantages. In the real world, however, many users aren’t a fan of Microsoft Edge, with users actively downloading and installing Chrome on their PCs despite Microsoft’s best attempts. Bing for its part is a lovely search engine, but it remains the punchline to many ribald jokes. [...]

I’d say that most people who use Google’s excellent Chrome browser don’t use it because it’s a classic Windows app, or because they have any particular love for Google, it is just that Chrome has a lot to offer. [...] It is in some ways its own web standard, with sites almost always guaranteed to be working with Chrome. [...] Similarly, most people who use Google use it because it is a good search engine. Google the company may have some odd practices, but that doesn’t matter to most people. Google the search engine is a pretty useful tool for research and general work. [...]

It has been argued in comments, in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and elsewhere that the lack of these two services isn’t a problem since Microsoft’s services can be almost as good as Google’s if you give them a chance — or so the saying goes. Well, I disagree. Just like people who prefer different brands of similarly tasting pizza, people simply prefer Google to Bing. You can make all sorts of arguments about why they should give your preferred pizza a try, but if there are choices, there’s no reason for them to favor your brand over their choices (especially if you happen to own the said brand).

It may be trivial right now to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro — but next year when comparing a new MacBook to a Surface Laptop, a consumer will see a £1000 laptop that doesn’t run Google Chrome until you pony up, and a £900 one that does.

I don't really have a whole lot to add this, except to say that the whole article is well worth reading. Allison's occasional cheerleading aside, I agreed with most of what he writes, including the assertion (near the end) that "Universal Windows Apps aren’t going to take off ever," a conclusion that I'd reached already - it's interesting to see others not only having come to the same realization, but mentioning it in passing while making larger points, as if the failure of UWP was a foregone conclusion, unworthy of elaboration.

Seriously, though... Microsoft need to stop trying to make "fetch" happen, here, If Bing wasn't good enough for people to use it when Microsoft was offering to pay them to do so, then it certainly isn't so good that Microsoft should be barring them from using alternatives. You'd almost think that they don't have any faith in their own product, or something...

Chrome now boasts better battery life than Edge. Your move, Microsoft...

Back in April, when Microsoft was  (yet again) trying to woo users of Google's Chrome browser over to Edge by boasting about Edge's battery performance, I predicted that it would only be a matter of months before Google improved Chrome's battery performance to be every bit as good as, if not better than, Edge's. Having previously confessed my unseemly love of saying, "I told you so," I will now take this opportunity to point out that Google have done precisely that.

From Mihăiță Bamburic at betanews:

Ask Microsoft which browser offers the best battery life on Windows 10 and it will not hesitate to tell you that Microsoft Edge is the best. And it has the test results to prove it: on a Surface Book, for instance, Microsoft Edge lasts a couple of hours longer than Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which is remarkable.

But, and there is a but, an independent test disputes Microsoft's claim. YouTuber Linus Tech Tips has pitted Microsoft Edge against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera and discovered that it does not deliver as strong a performance as Microsoft claims.

Linus Tech Tips took four Dell Inspiron laptops, with the same specs, and found that Microsoft Edge trails Chrome and Opera in battery life tests. It would seem that it still beats Firefox, after all. However, the results are much, much closer than what Microsoft's own tests indicate.

Linus Tech Tips' video is worth a watch:

 
Yet another Microsoft product claim debunked? That hasn't happened since Friday.

This is how Microsoft's month has been trending. After managing to go weeks with nary a negative headline in sight, they've now managed to fumble their response to WannaCry twice, are scrambling to do damage control after a source code leak, and had both their Windows 10 S security claims and their Edge browser battery life claims debunked, by experimentation, in the last week. I don't know why they thought that PC consumers would simply accept their PR releases as fact without independent benchmarking, given that independent tests have only been part of the PC culture for a few decades now, but Microsoft seem to have done exactly that. Winning!

So, in the face of all these headwinds, what is Microsoft's current focus? Apparently, mobile. Yes, again.Yes, really. From ZDNet:

The PC is Windows' stronghold, and, despite predictions of its demise, the PC seems to be holding its own, thanks in part to some nice hardware designs coming out of Microsoft recently.

But a few projects that Microsoft has been working on recently also show how it wants a life for Windows beyond the classic PC.

One of these is the effort to get Windows 10 running on ARM. Running Windows on ARM chips - the same chips used to run smartphones - means that Windows could start appearing on small, lighter, always-on devices. The first hardware is expected later this year.

Another project that could still show promise is Continuum, which allows a Window Phone device like the Elite X3 to dock with a keyboard and monitor and perform like a PC.

And finally there is Windows 10 S - a locked-down version of Windows 10 that aims to compete with Chromebooks on ease of use.

All these projects are looking at slightly different things, but they are all linked in their goal to take Windows beyond its traditional PC - that is, desktop and laptop - territory.

[...]

The bigger question is whether Microsoft can make a real breakthrough with any of these new categories. The desktop is Microsoft's home territory but when it comes to mobile it's an outsider at best. Android and iOS are firmly in control and as Microsoft found last time around, dislodging them is going to be incredibly hard.

However, it seems that Microsoft could be finally getting over the technical issues that have held back its ambitions beyond the desktop. The next question is to persuade consumers why they should make the switch.

Did I mention that Microsoft and Qualcomm are being threatened by Intel with possible patent infringement litigation for that Windows 10 on ARM project? Because that also happened last week. It's almost as if Intel realized how many of Microsoft's future plans were depending on Windows 10 on ARM to be their linchpin, and pounced.

Did I mention, too, that Microsoft themselves now can't be bothered to develop natively for UWP, essentially signalling the beginning of the end for a platform which is critical to their mobile efforts? Or that Microsoft have other lawsuit troubles, with their defence against Kaspersky Lab's antitrust complaint not exactly getting off to a strong start? Added to all of that, it's nearly month end, putting us just days away from learning just how stagnant Windows 10's growth has been over the last 30 days.

Honestly, Microsoft have so many issues, on so many fronts, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of them all. Their efforts seem to be focused on everything, which sounds impressive until you think about it for a second, and realize that "Microsoft is focused on everything" is just another way of saying that Microsoft lacks focus. The strain has been showing for a while now, but the cracks in the facade are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and it's hard to say what benefits, if any, are being realized through this seeming lack of strategic focus. I know that Microsoft want Windows 10 to somehow make them everything to everybody, on every device, in every circumstance, all the time, but somehow that seeming less and less like a realistic plan, and more and more like the Underpants Gnomes.

It's Microsoft's move, but with the situation becoming less tractable with each passing month, I'm not sure how many more chances they'll have to make "fetch" happen. Especially since their competitors in all these various tech-driven spaces aren't exactly standing still, waiting for Microsoft to catch them and pass them. How many more moves will Microsoft get, before it's effectively game over? Rich as they are, how many more missteps and outright failures can even Microsoft afford?

The soul of Windows is choice, not Edge or Bing

Most of the reaction to Windows 10S and Microsoft's new Surface laptops seems fairly positive, but the fly in the ointment is, once again, Microsoft's monopolistic, anti-consumer bullshit. Not only will Windows 10 S not allow you to install programs that you haven't bought through the Windows store, it won't let you change your default browser or search engine, either, and even people who might be more-or-less okay with the first restriction are balking at the second.

Por ejemplo, Aaron Souppouris at Engadget, who starts by calling Windows 10 S "a walled garden with a $49 exit," and rambles a bit about how that might still work anyway, before finally getting to the core of the issue:

Regardless of its OS, the first thing I do with a new laptop is install Google Chrome, and I'm not alone in that preference. Despite being shipped as the default browser on Windows 10 (and the OS constantly nagging you to give it a shot), data from last year suggests that only one in five Windows 10 users are using Edge. The vast majority are using Google Chrome, which isn't currently available on the Windows Store.

Even if Google brings Chrome to the store tomorrow, it won't make things much better. While it wasn't mentioned at yesterday's event, Microsoft has since said that the default browser cannot be changed in Windows 10 S. That means every time you click a link in an app or message, it'll open Edge.

Microsoft can and probably will point to improved battery life, RAM usage and security as a reason for this decision. By restricting user choice, it can ensure everyone is using a safe, modern browser that won't make cheaper machines run like garbage. But if that were true, why is it also locking in Bing as the default search engine? That's right: Unless you manually navigate to google.com and get searching, all of your search results are going to come from Bing.

Take these two restrictions together and it's clear that this has nothing to do with security or performance. It's Microsoft desperately trying to prop up its browser and search efforts by restricting choice. Yesterday Windows chief Terry Myerson described 10 S as "the soul of Windows," but to me and millions of Windows users around the world, the soul of Windows is choice, not Edge or Bing. It's an inherently hackable, customizable platform.

This is clearly user hostile [...] the fact remains that there are some users, myself included, who aren't happy with this behavior, and locking 10 S down in this way will only empower those warning about UWP to create a walled garden within Windows to complain louder. To me, restricting both the apps that you can install and the default search engine is pushing users a little too hard

Others, like Zach Epstein at BGR, are even more blunt, calling Win10 S "a complete non-starter:"

It has only been one day since Microsoft laid out its strategy to win back the classroom, so it remains to be seen how this new breed of affordable Windows laptops will be received. Overall, Windows 10 seems like a solid operating system, but for me personally, there’s one reason Windows 10 S is a complete non-starter.

[...]

Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, isn’t even available for download in the Windows app store right now. But let’s assume that Google decides to add it in the near future. Once you do install Chrome on your Windows 10 S laptop, you won’t be able to make it your default browser. Instead, any links you click on in emails or other apps will open in Edge.

Nope.

Now, once you’re in the Edge browser and you type a search into the URL bar, your search will be processed by Bing. Would you rather use Google as your default search engine like most people on the planet? Too bad, you won’t be able to change Edge’s default search settings.

Nope nope nope.

Windows 10 S looks like a reasonably good Chrome OS rival, and Microsoft has support from plenty of hardware vendors who are already planning to release Windows 10 S laptops. You know what? I won’t bother with a single one of those laptops knowing that Microsoft won’t let me take full advantage of apps and services I find to be superior to the company’s own alternatives.

Or you could look to Matthew Hughes at TNW, who points out, I think correctly, that Windows 10 S can't succeed unless Microsoft start learning from their mistakes, and changing their anti-consumer ways:

Yesterday, Microsoft announced its newest operating system: Windows 10 S. The S, we’re told, stands for several things, like speed and security.

Allow me, if I may, to propose an additional S: Slightly reminiscent.

That’s because Windows 10 S feels like a throwback to the short-lived Windows RT, which was a disaster of Michael Bay proportions.

Okay, that’s a bit extreme. There aren’t any gratuitous explosions here. That’s Samsung’s shtick. But there are clear parallels between Microsoft’s latest effort, and its previous misstep, Windows RT.

He then goes on the point out that the Windows Store is still a dumpster fire, in spite of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to improve it, and then goes on to ask who Win10 S is intended for, exactly:

One advantage Windows 10 S has over Windows RT is that it has a more clearly defined target audience: School students. The decision to launch it at the Microsoft Education event was smart, and for what it’s worth, I genuinely think it’ll do well in this space.

[...] By having a laser-focus on the lucrative education space, Microsoft will be able to craft a compelling message for Windows 10 S, and effectively market it.

But it seems like Microsoft has fallen back into its own ways, and is trying to pitch Windows 10 S to average consumers and professionals.

A clear example of that is the company’s gorgeous and appealing new flagship laptop, called the Surface Laptop, which is a triumph of style and design in one potent package. It’s expensive, too, retailing at $999. And yes, it runs Windows 10 S.

Why? I genuinely don’t know. It’s a head-scratching decision that only serves to hamstring some truly exceptional hardware. It’s a bit like asking Usain Bolt – the fastest man alive – to run a 200-meter race wearing flip-flops.

So, you have a platform that appears to have been intended for students and teachers, being marketed to everybody and their dog, installed on thousand-dollar laptops that can't even run the world's most popular browser, and which will still do everything Microsoft can imagine to force users to Edge and Bing, two products that The Market has very clearly declared that it has no interest in. Microsoft are still trying to make fetch happen, here, and muddling their message in the process. So, can this all still; work, in spite of Microsoft's own self-destructive habits?

Let's just say that Prabhakar Raghavan, the Google vice-president responsible Google's range of productivity apps, isn't sounding worried. From Business Insider UK:

"I'm happy to see a validation of the approach we've taken," the exec said mildly. "What educational institutions have demanded is simplicity. It's a real test tube for all of us, whether it's Microsoft or any of us, right."

[...] In short: Google says it's not worried about Microsoft's entry into the market, and they're focusing on looking at the changing ways people use products.

There's been one positive development since the big roll-out: Microsoft, apparently realizing that walled garden with a $49 exit fee may not be an attractive proposition, have announced that "upgrading" your Win10 S laptop to Win10 Pro will be free for the rest of this year. Of course, they also said that the upgrade to Windows 10 would stop being free, generally, at the end of last July, and that hasn't happened yet, so it's anyone's guess how long this latest "free" offer is actually good for, but it's something, at least.

This is why Edge can't take browser market share away from Chrome.

Just last week, I was blogging about Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to trash-talk Google's Chrome browser's battery life, when I wrote this:

Saying that Chrome is a better browser because it includes the features that users want in a modern browser, while providing acceptable battery performance, is not the same as saying that Chrome is perfect. Chrome can still be improved, and Google proved themselves willing to work on improving it [...] Not because they were losing market share, because they weren't and aren't, but because they wanted to keep winning, and saw no reason to concede any part of the field to Microsoft.

I wasn't thinking about ad-blocking, specifically, but built-in ad-blocking is perfectly in line with this kind of thinking. And so, naturally, Google is experimenting with adding build-in ad-blocking to Chrome.

From Gizmodo:

It’s not just you, online ads are getting worse. Auto-play video has become a standard, pop-ups are back in a big way and those inline ads seem accidentally clickier all the time. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is well aware of this and it’s planning to add a built-in ad blocker to the Chrome browser. [...]

The Journal reports that sources familiar with Google’s plan say that both the mobile and desktop versions could soon feature an ad-blocking system that would be turned on by default. But it wouldn’t filter out all ads, only the ones that don’t comply with the Coalition for Better Ads list of standards. For instance, auto-playing video ads with sound and large sticky ads would be out. The company is reportedly still deciding whether or not to block individual ads or all advertising on any site that doesn’t meet the “threshold of consumer acceptability.”

But why would a company that makes billions on advertising add a feature to its own free product that would block advertising? Simply put, Google doesn’t want more people downloading ad-blockers that it has no control over. Google has seen the reports that as many as 26% of desktop users have some sort of software to hide advertisements and it doesn’t want that number getting any larger.

The lack of extensions, or even the ability to add extensions, was one of the things that hurt Edge right out of the blocks. Ad-blocking is just standard practice now, for anybody who values their privacy, security, or just plain sanity; I actually run two different ad-blocking extensions, and would love for Chrome to just build in ad-blocking, so that I can free up those system resources for other things. This, assuming Google follow through on it, is a great, pro-consumer move. 

It's also a feature that Microsoft would absolutely have to add to Edge before they'd have any hope of competing for browser market share. Are you listening, Microsoft? This is what your customers actually want in a web browser. If you add this to Edge before Google adds it to Chrome, then you'll actually have a competitive edge in the browser wars, however briefly... on Windows 10, anyway.

Doubling down on a losing argument

Microsoft is once again trying to make Edge relevant by bad-mouthing the competition. ZDNet has a pretty good breakdown, in a piece titled, "Windows 10: Chrome vs Firefox vs Edge. Guess which wins Microsoft's battery-life test?"

Microsoft says a PC running its Edge browser will last 77 percent longer than Firefox, and 35 percent longer than Chrome.

To prove its point, Microsoft has once again employed a time-lapse video of three unplugged Surface Books side by side streaming video for several hours with Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

The Surface running Edge lasts 12 hours and 31 minutes, while the Chrome device peters out after nine hours and 17 minutes, with the Firefox unit lasting seven hours and four minutes.

Microsoft released similar video last June, again showing Edge outlasting its rivals, which prompted a reply from Google showing Chrome's battery improvements.

Yes, this is basically the same argument that Microsoft was making last June, to exactly zero effect on Edge's market share. Having already lost this argument once, they're now trying to win it again, apparently with zero understanding of why this pitch didn't sell Edge to users the first time around.

Listen up, Microsoft: I'm going to do you a solid here. I'm going to tell you why this sales pitch didn't work last time, and won't work now. Ready?

1. Nobody browses the Internet for 10 continuous hours. Users are doing other things with their PCs (or phones, natch) instead, most of which are way tougher on their batteries than browsing the net. If you're doing anything on a laptop for an entire work day, then you're plugging that puppy in at some point. 10 continuous hours of Internet browsing really is more than enough, for almost everyone.

2. While people don't really care about squeezing out 2 extra hours of Internet browsing from their laptops, they DO care about the features of the browser they're using. Edge has recently added some much-needed functionality with the latest update, bringing it to a point which arstechnica described as "on the edge of being good," but it's still an inferior product to both Chrome and Firefox. Two extra hours of a terrible browsing experience on an inferior browser is just not attractive to users. The market has already spoken on this one; a good experience is better than a longer experience, especially when the "shorter" experience is already ten continuous hours long.

3. "Microsoft says Microsoft product is better than the competitions'" is not news. Never mind that click-hungry tech blogs have run with this story because their business models require them to publish as much content as possible, regardless of its quality; very few of them are treating this like a serious news item. Of course Microsoft's own testing shows their product outperforming the competitions' products (on a metric that the users don't care about), but users already knew that Edge gave better battery performance. They just didn't care, because Chrome has every other feature that they want in a browser, features which Edge is still trying to add in, now more than a year and a half after release.

4. Google is going to continue improving Chrome's battery performance. Saying that Chrome is a better browser because it includes the features that users want in a modern browser, while providing acceptable battery performance, is not the same as saying that Chrome is perfect. Chrome can still be improved, and Google proved themselves willing to work on improving it, in response to Microsoft's previous battery-life broadside. Not because they were losing market share, because they weren't and aren't, but because they wanted to keep winning, and saw no reason to concede any part of the field to Microsoft. They won't be resting on their laurels this time, either; expect new battery-life improvements for Chrome to be announced within a month.

There you go, Microsoft. Does that help?

Instead of slagging your competitors over a battery-life metric that the market has clearly indicated your users don't care about, maybe focus on improving the experience of using Edge. When Edge has all the features of Chrome that users care about, then the fact that it extends users' battery life slightly can start to make a difference; until then, though, publicizing these claims just make Microsoft look desperate.

Windows 10 still struggling

It's the first day of a new month, and NetMarketShare have released their OS Market Share report for the end of February. And it's not pretty.

For the record, this is what the end of January looked like:

And this is the end February:

Here's The Inquirer's take:

Windows 7 market share rises at the expense of Windows 10

BEING THE first of the month, the latest figures are in from Net Applications' NetMarketShare service and desktop operating systems have had another fairly interesting month.

First, the winners. Windows 7, now grandfathered by Windows 8.x and Windows 10 has seen a full percent jump in its market share to 48.41 percent (+1.21) giving it its highest cut of the market since last June.

As we've repeatedly pointed out, when you're doing the maths here, you have to allow for the fact that Windows 10 is available in form factors beyond the desktop meaning the gap between Windows 7 and Windows 10 on 25.19 (-0.11 - yes, down slightly!) is actually bigger than it appears.

Windows 10 only went above the 25 percent mark last month and to immediately have a drop, and more importantly, Windows 7 have a gain is a little cringemaking. If it was a tiny fraction, we'd probably speculate it as a ‘blip' but this is an out and out change of over one percent. Ouchy.

And BetaNews':

Bad news for Microsoft as Windows 10 loses market share -- again

According to NetMarketShare, in January, Windows 10 hit a big milestone. The new OS managed to grow by nearly one percentage point, to give it over 25 percent of the market. That’s pretty good going.

However, in February, Windows 10 went back into reverse gear, losing share, and not for the first time.

If you recall, back in September, Windows 10 was reported to have lost 0.46 percentage points. February’s drop, which sees the OS falling from 25.30 percent to 25.19 percent, a decline of 0.11 percentage points, isn’t as dramatic, but it’s still far from good news for Microsoft.

Windows 7 was, naturally enough, the beneficiary of this decline, rising from 47.20 percent to 48.41 percent, an increase of 1.21 percentage points, showing the aging OS isn’t going away any time soon.

I'd previously said that changes of less than 0.5% probably weren't worth getting excited over, so Windows 10's 0.11% drop is probably just noise in the data. Windows 7's 1.21% gain, though, is significant, especially since Windows 7 isn't available for purchase anymore. Any uptick in Win7's numbers are likely due to people migrating from Win10; the fact that Win10 is managing to hold fairly steady is entirely down to it being the only Windows version available on new PCs.

It's not just their new OS that's struggling to gain converts, either. Win10's Edge browser is also not gaining market share. From Softpedia:

NetMarketShare data for the month of February shows that Edge barely moved the needle last month, while its rivals improved their shares in a more substantial manner.

Google Chrome is the world’s number one PC browser with a share of 58.53 percent, so nearly 6 out of 10 computers are running this particular browser at the moment. This is undoubtedly impressive, especially because Chrome is not the default browser on Windows, which is the dominating operating system on the desktop.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dropped to 19.17 percent, and this is a drop that was more or less expected, especially because the browser is no longer actively improved. Internet Explorer isn’t getting any new features, but only security patches and fixes, with Microsoft focusing entirely on Edge in Windows 10.

The third browser in the charts is Mozilla’s Firefox, which is now running on 11.68 percent of the PCs out there, while Microsoft Edge has approximately half of this share despite Redmond’s rather aggressive push for everyone to switch to Windows 10.
Edge is running on 5.55 percent of the PCs, up from 5.48 percent the month before, which shows that its adoption is primarily impacted by the limited availability in Windows 10.

Again, changes of only a half a percentage point are probably just blips in the data, so Edge's gain of 0.7% isn't very impressive. The bigger problem for Microsoft in the browser wars is that Chrome isn't just the most popular browser on PCs, generally; it's also the most popular browser for Windows 10, specifically. It's simple maths, again: if 25% of PCs run Windows 10, but only 5% of PCs run Edge, then...

It's satisfying to see Microsoft's scaremongering and anti-consumer, anti-competitive bullshittery continue to reap the rewards they deserve: none. I wonder how long this has to go on, though, before Microsoft admit that they've fucked this up, and change course? How many months of zero growth have to go by, with Windows 7 users digging in deeper while gaining in numbers, and Google's Chrome wiping the floor with Edge even as Google shames Microsoft for failing to patch vulnerabilities that Edge and IE share? How long does Satya Nadella keep pretending that everything is going to plan, when it's blatantly obvious that the plan is failing?

Fix Windows 10's privacy issues, Microsoft! Give users back control over their data, their desktops, and their PCs' updates, and apologize for being such dicks about it all for the last year and a half, and people might just be willing to finally adopt your new OS. But it's pretty damn clear that users are in no rush to migrate to Windows 10 until those things happen. Doubling down on the wildly unpopular Windows Store isn't going to sell people on the dubious benefits of switching a perfectly workable OS out for your glorified Windows Store front end, either.

Google researchers reveal another unpatched IE/Edge vulnerability

Microsoft want Windows 10 users to switch from Chrome to Edge. They've tried bribing users into switching, and bullying users into switching, but they've ended up losing so much market share that Edge not only has fewer users than Chrome, it also has fewer users than Firefox:



Well, if Microsoft are looking for advice, I have a new thing that they might want to try, which might help them attract users to their shiny new browser: they can fix the fucking thing. Because right now, it's apparently full of unpatched security vulnerabilities -- something of an embarrassment, considering that everything about Windows 10 is supposed to be the most secure ever.

From BleepingComputer:

Google has gone public with details of a second unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft products, this time in Edge and Internet Explorer, after last week they've published details about a bug in the Windows GDI (Graphics Device Interface) component.

At the time of writing, the bug remains unpatched after Microsoft canceled February's Patch Tuesday security updates, citing a "last minute issue."

[...]

The bug, discovered by Google Project Zero researcher Ivan Fratric, is tracked by the CVE-2017-0037 identifier and is a type confusion, a kind of security flaw that can allow an attacker to execute code on the affected machine, and take over a device.

Details about CVE-2017-0037 are available in Google's bug report, along with proof-of-concept code. The PoC code causes a crash of the exploited browser, but depending on the attacker's skill level, more dangerous exploits could be built.

Fratric found the bug at the end of November and disclosed it today after the 90-day deadline Google provides to affected companies had expired.

Oops.

In the past, this is the sort of issue that Microsoft would have fixed quickly, and quietly patched as soon as the patch was ready, but patches are now a once-monthly event... something which we now know, for sure, includes unpatched security flaws in their products. Not exactly the way I'd go about (re)building consumer confidence in my new OS or web browser, but what do I know? I'm just a consumer.

I'll tell you what I do know, though. I know that I won't be switching to Windows 10, or to Edge, anytime soon. Sort out your shit, Microsoft.

No, Win7 users of Google's Chrome browser do not need to switch to Win10

Users of Windows XP or Windows Vista, however, may want to give Firefox another try.

From Digitaltrends:

Many reasons exist to upgrade to Windows 10, and for Windows XP and Vista users — which according to some data represent a bit more than 10 percent of all PC users — perhaps the biggest reason is for the night-and-day differences in support and security that Windows 10 provides. Google just offered another reason update to Windows, specifically that Gmail will reduce support for Windows XP and Vista, as Google announced on the G Suite blog.

While those users will still be able to access their Gmail messages, they will be doing so with the much less robust HTML version as early as December. The Windows version is actually a secondary cause of the reduction in functionality. More specifically, Google will be shifting all users running Chrome Browser v53 or below and it just so happens that the latest Chrome version supported on Windows XP and Vista is v49.

[...]

Google’s specific statement regarding the reduced functionality is as follows: “Gmail will continue to function on Chrome Browser v53 and below through the end of the year. Users who remain on Chrome v53 and below could be redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as Dec 2017.”

As a Windows 7 user who's currently running Chrome v56, I can say categorically that this does not affect users of Win7 and up (unlike some reports that you may have seen), so 47.2% of Windows users will not be affected by this. Chrome, however, currently runs on 57.9% of all PCs, so there's definitely some significant portion of PC's Chrome user base that will be affected by this. It will be interesting to see whether those users stick with Chrome and accept the reduced Gmail functionality, or switch to Firefox to get a better experience.

The odds of them dumping Gmail, naturally, I rate at basically zero. Switching your email address is such a pain in the ass to do, I can't imagine that anyone will bother with it, especially since the main cloud-based email alternative is probably Hotmail, which Microsoft is presumably keen to marry to both Bing and Edge.

Reminder: Microsoft are still dicks, and Windows 10 is still annoying

From TrustedReviews:

Windows 10 has effectively become that annoying vegan friend who judges you when you order a burger and tells you the harrowing story about how it came to your plate.

As part of a new series of Windows 10 tips, Chrome and Firefox browser users are being informed ‘you know what, actually, Edge is far safer for you.’

As spotted by illCodeYouABrain on Reddit, Users are seeing a pop-up on the Edge icon saying “Microsoft Edge is safer than Firefox. It blocks 21% more socially engineered malware.”

It then offers a link to do “learn more,” which in this instance is Microsoft’s “you should really educate yourself about the issues.”
...
If you don’t want to hear Microsoft’s ‘annoying vegan friend’ act, the firm told VentureBeat that tips can be easily switched off in system settings.
...
Or you could listen to Microsoft, which has gleaned that 21% safer figure from a report it commissioned NSS Labs to create.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this one. Not because I expected Microsoft to learn anything from the GWX backlash that has 48% of all PC users sticking with Windows 7, but simply because I can't figure out who the target audience is, here.

People who are tech-savvy enough to still be using other browsers aren't going to fall for this; all Redmond is accomplishing is to irritate them. Meanwhile, everybody who lacks the technical savvy to know better is probably already using Edge, just as they were probably using IE before being switched to Windows 10. Who is this for?

Also, didn't Microsoft already try this same tactic, with zero results? I'm pretty sure they did, before trying outright bribery to try (and fail) to lure users to their new browser. What makes them think they'll get better results this time?

Also, commissioning a dubious report that you then cite in propaganda? That's lying with statistics, again, and they aren't even trying to be subtle about it.

Also, how exactly is Edge supposed to be protecting users from social engineering? The whole point of social engineering is that it relies on bad habits on the part of users to bypass the systems that would otherwise protect them.

The single biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it does nothing to address the issues with Edge that sent people back to Chrome, Firefox, et al. Edge didn't support extensions out of the box, and doesn't have any extensions available to download now that Redmond finally have added this critical feature of modern browsers, because there are no users of Edge. Software developers don't develop for users that don't exist.

Which is why users of Chrome outnumber users of Edge by 10 to 1, and why Edge only grew its browser share by 0.1% last month. So, yeah, I understand why they're desperate; they're losing, and they're out of ideas. Desperation isn't attractive, though; I don't they're going to catch any more fish this time around, using this same rancid bait.