Microsoft is working towards adding a new "chat density setting" in Teams for web and Desktop to allow users to have a compact chat list. The new chat setting will condense the chat list, as a result of which more chats will be visible on the screen. How will it condense the chat list, you ask? Well, as per the Microsoft 365 Roadmap page, it will hide the message previews in order to make room for more chats to be visible on the screen.

If you are using Skype, you might already be familiar with the "compact chat list." In Skype, you need to switch on the Enable compact list mode toggle to disable message preview and have more chats on the screen. Teams users will also get a similar option in the app setting.

Skype for Mac showing Enable compact list mode toggle

Microsoft is targeting June for launching the compact chat list option for Teams users on the web and desktop platforms. But it might get delayed if something goes wrong. We have seen multiple instances when Microsoft failed to deliver on intended targets, so the release timeline is not carved in stone.

Microsoft wants you to have more Teams chats visible on screen

But what about members on the Canary and Dev Insider channels? Well, if that includes you, you can take it easy for the rest of the week. The Windows Insider Program Twitter account has confirmed the Canary and Dev channels are taking a rare weekly break.

The post does add that the Windows dev team are "hard at work prepping for next week". In the meantime, Insiders can now sit back, relax with your Windows desktop PC or laptop, and not have to keep checking that update status every couple of seconds for a few days.

Microsoft won't roll out Windows 11 Insider Builds for Canary or Dev channels this week

• This update addresses an issue that affects searchindexer.exe. It stops working after you sign out. This issue occurs after you upgrade your machine to Windows 11 Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and sign in to that machine.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Narrator. It does not announce text attributes correctly for words, such as “misspelled”, “deletion change,” and “comment”.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Server Message Block (SMB). You cannot access the SMB shared folder. The errors are, “Not enough memory resources” or “Insufficient system resources”.
• The update addresses an issue that sends unexpected password expiration notices to users. This occurs when you set up an account to use “Smart Card is Required for Interactive Logon” and set “Enable rolling of expiring NTLM secrets”.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS). It stops working. This occurs when you use Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
• The update addresses an issue that affects scheduled tasks. The tasks fail when they use stored local user account credentials. This occurs when you enable Credential Guard. The error message is “2147943726 : ERROR_LOGON_FAILURE (The username or password is incorrect).”
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) cluster. It might not come online. This occurs after a periodic password rollover. The error code is 1326.
• This update addresses an issue that affects access to Tab settings for IE mode sites.
• This update addresses an issue that affects dot sourcing. It fails files that contain class definition in Windows PowerShell.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the use of Event Viewer. The issue limits the number of event sources that users who are not administrators can access.
• This update addresses an issue that affects applications that perform certain actions in a callback. The applications might stop working. These actions include closing a Window (WM_CLOSE).
• This update changes the support phone number for Microsoft India for Windows activation.
• This update addresses an issue that affects certain printers. They fail to install if they connect to Wi-Fi automatically.
• This update changes the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) ranges for certain mobile providers.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Windows Firewall. The firewall drops all connections to the IP address of a captive portal. This occurs when you choose the Captive Portal Addresses option.
• This update addresses a multi-function label printer issue. It affects the installation of some of them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects devices that are joined to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). The Windows Firewall cannot apply the correct domain and profile for them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects audio playback. It fails on devices that have certain processors.
• This update improves the user experience (UX) and interactions for the search box on the taskbar.
• This update addresses an issue that might affect a large reparse point. You might get a stop error when you use NTFS to access it. This issue occurs after a canceled FSCTL Set operation changes the reparse tag.

You can check out the full blog post here.

Windows 11 (original release) Insider Release Preview Build 22000.2001 has many improvements

Microsoft plans to roll out these new features to the Release Preview channel gradually , but channel members can get all of them by going to Settings, then Windows Update and then turn on the toggle Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available.

Here is the changelog:

New! This update adds live captions for the following languages:

• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
• French (France, Canada)
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal)
• Spanish
• Danish
• English (Ireland, other English dialects)
• Korean

To turn on live captions, use the WIN + Ctrl + L keyboard shortcut. You can also use the Quick Settings accessibility flyout menu. When you turn it on for the first time, Windows will ask you to download the required speech recognition support. Speech recognition support might not be available in your preferred language, or you might want support in other languages. You can download speech recognition support from Settings > Time & Language > Language & region. To learn more, see Use live captions to better understand audio.

New! This update redesigns the in-app voice access command help page. Every command now has a description and examples of its variations. The search bar allows you to quickly find commands. The new categories provide further guidance. You can access the command help page on the voice access bar from Help > View all commands or use the voice access command “what can I say?” Note that the help page might not include all commands. Also, the supplementary information might be inaccurate. We plan to update this in the future. For a list of all Voice Access commands, see Use voice access to control your PC & author text with your voice.

New! This update adds voice access command support for the following English dialects:

• English (United Kingdom)
• English (India)
• English (New Zealand)
• English (Canada)
• English (Australia)

When you turn on voice access for the first time, Windows will ask you to download a speech model. You might not find a speech model that matches your display language. You can still use voice access in English (US). You can always choose a different language from Settings > Language on the voice access bar.

New! This update adds new text selection and editing voice access commands. Some examples are in the table below.

New!This update adds a VPN status icon, a small shield, to the system tray. It displays when you are connected to a recognized VPN profile. The VPN icon will be overlayed in your system’s accent colour over the active network connection.

New! You can now choose to display seconds in the clock on the system tray. To turn this on, go to the Taskbar behaviors section in Settings > Personalization > Taskbar. You can also right-click taskbar to quickly get to taskbar settings.

New! This update provides a copy button for you to quickly copy two-factor authentication (2FA) codes. These are in notification toasts you get from apps installed on your PC or from phones linked to your PC. Note that this feature only works for English.

New! This update adds access key shortcuts to File Explorer’s context menu. An access key is a one keystroke shortcut. You can use it to quickly run a command in a context menu using your keyboard. Each access key corresponds to a letter in the display name of the menu item. To try this out, you can click on a file in File Explorer and press the menu key on your keyboard.

New! This update adds multi-app kiosk mode, which is a lockdown feature. If you are an administrator, you can specify the apps that can run on a device. Other apps will not run. You can also block certain functionalities. You can configure distinct types of access and apps to run for different users on one device. Multi-app kiosk mode is ideal for scenarios in which multiple people use the same device. Some examples are frontline workers, retail, education, and test taking. Some lockdown customizations include:

• Limit access to Settings, except certain pages, such as Wi-Fi and screen brightness
• Show only the apps that are allowed on the Start menu
• Block certain toasts and pop-up windows

Currently, you can enable multi-app kiosk mode using PowerShell and WMI Bridge. To learn more, see Use MDM Bridge WMI Provider to create a Windows client kiosk and Create the JSON file. Support for Microsoft Intune, mobile device management (MDM), and provisioning package configuration is coming soon.

New! This update introduces live kernel memory dump (LKD) collection from Task Manager. Using LKD, you can gather data to troubleshoot an issue while the OS continues to work. This reduces downtime when you must investigate an unresponsive program or high-impact failures. To learn more, see Task Manager live memory dump.

To capture an LKD, go to Task Manager > Details. Right-click the System process. Select Create live kernel memory dump file. This captures a Full live kernel or Kernel stack memory dump. The dump will be written to a fixed location: %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\TaskManager\LiveKernelDumps. You can also go to the Task Manager Settings page to view or edit the settings for live kernel memory dumps.

New! This update replaces the settings for Show the touch keyboard when there’s no keyboard attached. These are located at Settings > Time & language > Typing > Touch keyboard. A new dropdown menu gives you three options to control whether tapping an edit control should open the touch keyboard. The options are:

• Never. This suppresses the touch keyboard even when no hardware keyboard is attached.
• When no keyboard attached. This shows the touch keyboard only when you use the device as a tablet without the hardware keyboard.
• Always. This shows the touch keyboard even when the hardware keyboard is attached.

New!This update enables Content Adaptive Brightness Control (CABC) to run on laptops and 2-in-1 devices. This feature dims or brightens areas of a display based on the content. It tries to strike a balance between saving battery life and providing a good visual experience. You can adjust the feature setting from Settings > System > Display > Brightness & colour. The drop-down menu gives you three options: Off, Always, and On Battery Only. For battery powered devices, the default is On Battery Only. Because the device manufacturer must enable CABC, the feature might not be on all laptops or 2-in-1 devices.

New! This update adds a USB4 hubs and devices Settings page. You can find it at Settings > Bluetooth & devices > USB > USB4 Hubs and Devices. This new page provides information about the system’s USB4 capabilities and the attached peripherals on a system that supports USB4. This information helps with troubleshooting when you need manufacturer or system administrator support. Some features include:

• You can view the tree of the connected USB4 hubs and devices.
• You can copy details to the clipboard to share them.

If your system does not support USB4 with the Microsoft USB4 Connection Manager, this page will not appear. On systems that support USB4, you will see USB4 Host Router in Device Manager.

New! This update adds a presence sensor privacy setting in Settings > Privacy & security > Presence sensing. If you have a device that has compatible presence sensors, you can now choose the apps that can access those sensors. You can also choose the apps that do not have access. Microsoft does not collect images or metadata. The device hardware processes your information locally to maximize privacy.

New! This update improves the performance of search within Settings.

New! This update changes the default print screen (prt scr) key behavior. Pressing the print screen key opens the Snipping Tool by default. You can turn off this setting from Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard. If you have previously changed this setting, Windows will preserve your preference.

New! This update introduces a limit of 20 most recent tabs in Settings > Multitasking. This affects the number of tabs that appear when you use ALT + TAB and Snap Assist.

New! This update improves the cloud suggestion and the integrated search suggestion. This helps you to easily type popular words in Simplified Chinese using the Input Method Editor (IME). The cloud suggestion adds the most relevant word from Microsoft Bing to the IME candidate window. The integrated search suggestion gives you additional suggestions that are like what you see on a Bing search page. You can insert a suggestion as text or search for it directly in Bing. To turn on these features, select a chevron button in the upper right of the IME candidate window. Then select the Turn on

This update also includes the following improvements (new toggle control not required):

• New! This update provides the full amount of storage capacity of all your OneDrive subscriptions. It also displays the total storage on the Accounts page in the Settings app.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Narrator. It now announces text attributes correctly for words, such as “misspelled”, “deletion change,” and “comment”.
• This update addresses an issue that affects exe. It stops working after you sign out. This issue occurs after you upgrade your machine to Windows 11 Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and sign in to that machine.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Server Message Block (SMB). You cannot access the SMB shared folder. The errors are, “Not enough memory resources” or “Insufficient system resources”.
• The update addresses an issue that sends unexpected password expiration notices to users. This occurs when you set up an account to use “Smart Card is Required for Interactive Logon” and set “Enable rolling of expiring NTLM secrets”.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS). It stops working. This occurs when you use Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) cluster. It might not come online. This occurs after a periodic password rollover. The error code is 1326.
• This update addresses an issue that affects access to Tab settings for IE mode sites.
• This update addresses an issue that affects dot sourcing. It fails files that contain class definition in Windows PowerShell.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the use of Event Viewer. The issue limits the number of event sources that users who are not administrators can access.
• This update addresses an Event Viewer issue. It affects the rendering of a forwarded event log.
• This update addresses a memory leak. It occurs every time you print a rich text document.
• This update addresses an issue that affects a computer when it renders a halftone bitmap. The computer stops working.
• This update addresses an issue that affects devices that have multiple, discreet GPUs. You cannot choose the high-performance GPUs from the default graphics settings page.
• This update addresses an issue that stops your device from working when it resumes from Modern Standby. The error is 0x13A KERNEL_MODE_HEAP_CORRUPTION.
• This update addresses an issue that affects applications that perform certain actions in a callback. The applications might stop working. These actions include closing a Window (WM_CLOSE).
• This update changes the support phone number for Microsoft India for Windows activation.
• This update changes the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) ranges for certain mobile providers.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Windows Firewall. The firewall drops all connections to the IP address of a captive portal. This occurs when you choose the Captive Portal Addresses option.
• This update addresses a multi-function label printer issue. It affects the installation of some of them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects devices that are joined to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). The Windows Firewall cannot apply the correct domain and profile for them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects audio playback. It fails on devices that have certain processors.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the touch keyboard. It shows the wrong layout for the French-Canadian language.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC). It might create audit events that you do not need. This occurs when you choose the Disabled: Script Enforcement option.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the touch keyboard. Sometimes, it does not show the correct layout based on the current input scope.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Chinese and Japanese Input Method Editor (IME). When you search the Emoji Panel (Windows key + period ( . ), search might fail for some of you.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Chinese and Japanese Handwriting Panel. It does not show text prediction candidates or stops responding. This occurs when you select a word from the candidate list of the Handwriting Panel.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the runas It stops working. The device behaves as if you did not sign in to your account.
• This update addresses an issue that might affect a large reparse point. You might get a stop error when you use NTFS to access it. This issue occurs after a canceled FSCTL Set operation changes the reparse tag.
• This update addresses a known issue that might affect some speech recognition apps. They might have sporadic speech recognition, expressive input, and handwriting issues. This occurs when the display language is Chinese or Japanese. The apps might not recognize certain words. They might not receive any input from speech recognition or affected input types. This issue is more likely to occur when the apps use offline speech recognition. For app developers, this issue only affects speech recognition that uses Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) in Media.SpeechRecognition. This issue does not affect other types of speech recognition.

You can check out the full blog post here.

Windows 11 Insider Release Preview Build 22621.1776 adds more live caption languages

• New! This update brings back an improved search box experience on the Windows 10 taskbar. If you have a top, bottom, regular, or small icons taskbar, you will see the search box appear. You can use it to easily access apps, files, settings, and more from Windows and the web. You will also have access to the latest search updates, such as search highlights. If you want to restore your previous search experience, you can do that easily. To do that, use the taskbar context menu or respond to a dialog that appears when you use search.
• New! This update now displays up to three high priority toast notifications at the same time. This feature affects apps that use Windows OS notifications to send notices for calls, reminders, or alarms. Up to four toast notifications might appear at the same time. This means that there can be three high priority notifications and one normal priority notification.
• This update addresses an issue that affects App Installer. Sometimes, MSIX apps fail to update.
• This update addresses an issue that affects Server Message Block (SMB). You cannot access the SMB shared folder. The errors are, “Not enough memory resources” or “Insufficient system resources”.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS). It stops working. This occurs when you use Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
• The update addresses an issue that affects scheduled tasks. The tasks fail when they use stored local user account credentials. This occurs when you enable Credential Guard. The error message is “2147943726 : ERROR_LOGON_FAILURE (The username or password is incorrect).”
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) cluster. It might not come online. This occurs after a periodic password rollover. The error code is 1326.
• This update addresses an issue that affects access to Tab settings for IE mode sites.
• This update addresses an issue that affects dot sourcing. It fails files that contain class definition in Windows PowerShell.
• This update changes the support phone number for Microsoft India for Windows activation.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the PublishDfsRoots policy. It does not apply correctly to a targeted client that has mobile device management (MDM). One example of MDM is Microsoft Intune.
• This update changes the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) ranges for certain mobile providers.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Windows Firewall. The firewall drops all connections to the IP address of a captive portal. This occurs when you choose the Captive Portal Addresses option.
• This update addresses a multi-function label printer issue. It affects the installation of some of them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects devices that are joined to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). The Windows Firewall cannot apply the correct domain and profile for them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects signed Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) policies. They are not applied to the Secure Kernel. This occurs when you enable Secure Boot.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the touch keyboard. Sometimes, it does not show the correct layout based on the current input scope.
• This update addresses an issue that sometimes fails to open the touch keyboard.
• This update addresses an issue that might affect a large reparse point. You might get a stop error when you use NTFS to access it. This issue occurs after a canceled FSCTL Set operation changes the reparse tag.

You can get the full blog post here:

Windows 10 Insider Release Preview Build 19045.3030 includes improved search box experience

For those not aware, HWiNFO reports CPU usage in two ways, the Core Utility or the CPU Utility is what is reported by the Task Manager in Windows 8 or later. The CPU usage reported by the Task Manager is not the best as it can even show the maximum usage of a processor being greater than 100%. Meanwhile, the legacy CPU usage instead relies on "time-based utilization" and is generally a more accurate measure of the processor usage. The legacy reading is now fixed on Windows 11.

Aside from that, the release also fixes driver compatibility with Windows Kernel-mode Hardware-enforced Stack Protection, a Windows security feature. There are multiple fixes related to AMD processors, including one for Electrical Design Current (EDC) value on Raphael (Ryzen 7000).

The full changelog for HWiNFO v7.46 is given below:

HWiNFO32 & HWiNFO64 v7.46 changelog:

• Fixed monitoring of legacy CPU Usage on Windows 11.
• Fixed a possible crash during XTU check on AMD Genoa/Bergamo.
• Fixed reporting of EDC current value on AMD Raphael.
• Fixed driver compatibility with Windows Kernel-mode Hardware-enforced Stack Protection.
• Improved Intel Arc GPU support with new drivers.

You can download HWiNFO v7.46 from Neowin or from its official website.

HWiNFO fixes Windows 11 legacy CPU usage reading, kernel hardware stack driver issue

Highligted by Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, it looks like David Weston was not exaggerating, as tidbits of Rust code are already here inside Windows 11 Insider builds as the Win32k.sys kernel mode (KM) driver files have been ported to Rust. Win32k.sys is responsible for handling the graphical device interface (GDI) and window management on Windows.

At the presentation, Microsoft stated that there were no significant performance anomalies or regressions noted with Rust in its internal test scenarios. The Win32k's GDI port to Rust was able to pass all tests when booting on Windows. Weston explained the many reasons why Microsoft was keen on Rust inside Windows and one of those happened to be memory security.

Speaking of memory security, Microsoft released a new memory integrity/HVCI compatibility checker tool recently which you can find details about here.

Microsoft delivers on its promise, Rust has arrived in the Windows 11 kernel

Google's Mica implementation in Chrome Canary looks similar to what Edge once had. The browser features a translucent material with colours derived from your wallpaper, creating a subtle, aesthetically pleasing effect with a low impact on hardware resources. And since Mica and Mica Alt depend on your wallpaper, the result is always unique and personalized. Here are just three examples of how the material reacts to different backgrounds:

The proposed change on Chromium Gerritsuggested implementing two variants of the Mica material (regular and alternative), but Google decided to go for Mica Alt. It is more vibrant and colourful compared to the slightly muted standard Mica.

Testing Mica Alt in Chrome Canary does not require enabling flags or commands. Head to the official Chrome Canary website, download and install the browser, and the material will be enabled "out of the box." Just keep in mind that using Chrome Canary as your primary browser is not the best idea since it receives daily updates that often break things or introduce bugs.

Google Chrome Canary gets Mica material on Windows 11

In a blog post, the team said they had three main goals with this project:

• Cohesiveness: It is important to make sure these updates balance a new, refreshed look and feel with the familiarity of the Visual Studio our customers already know. By aligning with Fluent, Visual Studio will look and feel more seamless with the rest of the operating system and other Microsoft products.
• Accessibility: It is important that the updates follow our accessibility best practices and make the product easier to use. This manifests in several ways, including: adjusting target sizes to make them easier to use while maintaining information density, using colour more intentionally to decrease visual noise and draw attention to the active areas of the IDE, and using lighter weight controls to make it easier to distinguish different actions.
• Productivity: The UI updates work towards creating more consistent experiences, making it easier to navigate the product with confidence by reducing the amount of time it takes to get familiarized with the UI. Our updates also work to reduce cognitive load and mental fatigue, making Visual Studio a more comfortable work environment.

Left: Visual Studio 17.6 menu UI; Right: Proposed menu UI

The mockups that were showing in the blog post include more spacing on the Visual Studios menu, shown above. The toolbars will also get bigger with the UI refresh, and document tabs and tool window chromes will get some colour and, again, more spacing so users can find and access these features faster. The UI changes will be released soon, but the Visual Studio team is taking feedback about these changes from its many users at the Developer Community Ticket site.

Microsoft Visual Studio is getting a UI makeover for the first time in over 10 years

Edge Workspaces is the feature Microsoft announced several weeks ago. It allows inviting other users to your browsing session and sharing one set of tabs for collaborative work. You can view changes in real-time and see what other people do in the shared workspaces. Currently, Edge Workspaces is in the public preview, and you can learn how to participate using the official documentation.

As for the updated sidebar (spotted earlier in Canary builds), it works just like it sounds. You can remove Edge's sidebar from the main window and fix it on your desktop, creating a weird-looking double-taskbar experience. The sidebar will remain pinned upon switching to other apps or minimizing Edge, and you can use it to access your favorite websites, built-in tools, Bing, etc. To try the updated sidebar, update Edge Beta to version 113 and click a "popout" icon in the bottom-right corner.

Microsoft Edge 113 Beta is now available for download from the official Edge Insider website. Supported platforms include Windows 10 and 11, macOS, Linux, and Android. If you already use Edge Beta, update to the latest release by heading to edge://settings/help or the Menu > Help & Feedback > About Microsoft Edge.

Edge 114 arrives in the Beta Channel with Workspaces and an extra taskbar for your PC

Memory integrity is a feature of Virtualization-based Security (VBS) and essentially runs Kernel Mode Code Integrity (KMCI) in an isolated virtualized Windows Hypervisor part of the memory such that the kernel is kept safe from malicious code.

It is often cited as a reason why Windows 11 does not support AMD Ryzen 1000 (Zen1), Intel 7th Gen, and older chips. Newer Intel and AMD CPUs have special hardware-based acceleration feature for hypervisor which enables a more efficient code integrity handling. On Intel, it is known as Mode-based Execution Control (MBEC), while on AMD it is called Guest Mode Execute Trap (GMET). Even then, VBS can still lead to performance loss.

Here is the full description of the new Memory Integrity scan tool:

Memory integrity scan tool

Use the hvciscan.exe to check for compatibility issues with memory integrity, also known as hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI).

System Requirements

Supported Operating System

• Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022
• Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016 or higher

Install Instructions:

Download the hvciscan.exe for your system architecture (AMD64 or ARM64). From an elevated command window or PowerShell, run hvciscan.exe. Review the resulting output to identify any incompatibilities.

It is available for download from Microsoft's official Download Center website.

Via: WalkingCat (Twitter)

Microsoft releases HVCI/memory integrity compatibility check tool for Windows 11, Windows 10

The report comes via The Information which claims, citing sources close to the matter, that senior Microsoft executives are keen on a deal with Mozilla this year as the contract with Google is due for renewal by the end of the year.

It is fair to assume that Microsoft is probably looking to gain some traction and close some of the gap in terms of market share with Google as the latter continues to be an absolute behemoth. Latest Statcounter data suggests that Bing's share has mostly been static. The latest figures has Bing at 2.79% which is far behind Google's 92.63%. Meanwhile, Statista suggests Bing actually dropped off since October last year, when it had peaked at 9.92% share. The latest March percentage share puts Bing at 8.23. However there is some positive here though, as Bing has increased its share slightly compared to last month.

Perhaps Microsoft hopes to capitalize on the buzz around AI chatbots. The New Bing itself has seen increased engagement as a consequence of this. The search engine reached 100 million active users recently in March. As it does from time to time, Microsoft seemingly tried pushing some users onto Edge via a recent Patch Tuesday update, where it was opening Default Apps page up when it noticed users were on Google Chrome.

Source: The Information

Report: Microsoft Bing may indeed replace Google as Firefox's default search engine

Google's answer to ChatGPT is a major overhaul of Google Search that infuses AI chatbot technology with the traditional search engine experience.

The company provided a sneak peek of this "Search Generative Experience" at Google I/O today, and the experimental search mode places an AI-generated answer at the top of the screen, forcing the user to scroll down to see the usual "blue link" search results.

(Credit: Google)

As you can see, the new interface could put an end to old-school online search, much like Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing is already starting to do. Google says the approach will give users the best of the web by essentially combing through the internet, analyzing the applicable info, and summing it up in easy-to-read snippets.

The technology is smart enough to break down AI-generated results into categories. Users can also ask follow-up questions, which will cause Google search to expand into an AI-powered conversation mode.

(Credit: Google)

On the downside, the new search engine could decimate web traffic for third-party sites, such as news publishers, blogs, and product reviewers. Indeed, the company’s own demo at Google I/O(Opens in a new window) showed a user staying on the Google results page during most of the search process, although links to third-party sites were sprinkled in here and there.  

(Credit: Google )

The new search experience promises to help the company better compete against ChatGPT and Bing. But the big question is whether the same overhaul threatens Google’s ad business and the overall web ecosystem. The other problem is the risk of the AI-generated result producing inaccurate or misleading answers. It’s perhaps why the company is still testing the technology before embarking on a full rollout.

In a blog post(Opens in a new window), the company noted that it still plans on serving ads through dedicated slots on the experimental search mode. Google added: “We’ve trained these models to uphold Search’s high bar for quality, and we will continue to make improvements over time. They rely on our hallmark systems that we’ve fine-tuned for decades, and we’ve also applied additional guardrails, like limiting the types of queries where these capabilities will appear.”

The company has opened access to the new search experience for users in the US through a waitlist(Opens in a new window). Other markets will get access in the coming weeks.

Source

Also:  Google brings AI to search as it vies with Microsoft & Google Reveals Its AI-Powered Search Engine to Answer Your Questions

Earlier today, alongside the monthly Patch Tuesdays, Redmond announced that it will begin delivering its .NET Framework version 4.8.1 update on older versions of Windows 11 and Windows 10. This will happen via the Windows Update as well as via Microsoft Update Catalog, starting with the Release Preview Insider channel. On a blog post, the company has explained how it plans to release the framework across Windows 11 21H2, Windows 10 22H2, and more:

.NET Framework 4.8.1 will be available for the following versions of Windows and distribution channels:

• Windows Update: Windows 11 21H2, Windows 10 21H2 (LTSC), and Windows 10 22H2
• Microsoft Update Catalog: Windows 11 21H2, Windows 10 21H2 (LTSC), Windows 10 22H2 and Windows Server 2022 (Desktop, Azure Editions), Azure Stack 21H2 and Azure Stack 22H2.

Note: Customers using Windows Server Updates Services (WSUS) or any other update management tools will be able to import the .NET Framework 4.8.1 product from the Microsoft Update Catalog. Also note that .NET Framework 4.8.1 is already included by default in newer versions of Windows, starting with Windows 11 22H2.

You can find the official blog post here where you can find more details.

Microsoft to deliver .NET framework via Windows Update, Catalog, on older Windows 11 and 10

What is new in Microsoft Edge Dev 115.0.1843.0?

New features:

• You can now drag links anywhere in the Vertical Tabs area to open the link in a New Tab.
• Discover pane is now resizable.

macOS:

• Added Control + Option + Command + Down shortcut to open spellcheck correction card.

Enterprise:

• New policy: (Note: Updates to documentation and administrative templates may not have occurred yet)
• Added DiscoverPageContextEnabled policy.
• Added policy to configure recommended settings dialogs.

Reliability improvements:

• Fixed browser crash when selecting text in the InPrivate window.

macOS:

• Fixed browser crash when prompting proxy credentials.

Android:

• Fixed browser crash when tapping on the forward or back button twice quickly.

Other changes:

• Fixed unable to play videos on certain websites.
• Fixed AV1 media playback.
• Fixed Workspaces unable to reconnect when lost connection.
• Fixed edge://app-settings page displaying “This page has been blocked by Microsoft Edge” message.
• Fixed the missing Discover pane header.

Linux:

• Fixed spellcheck suggestions not working in certain scenarios.

macOS:

• Fixed the browser not getting focus when opening links from other apps.

WebView2:

• Fixed ScriptDialogOpening issues for beforeunload kind (#3355)
• Lunching External URI API has now been promoted from the experimental stage to public.

Enterprise:

• Fixed external unmanaged links not opening in InPrivate tabs on Android.
• Fixed keyboard shortcut for Discover still activates Discover while being disabled by policy.

You can download Microsoft Edge Dev 115 from the official website. The browser is available on Windows 10 and 11, Linux, macOS, and Android (via Google Play Store). Microsoft plans to release version 115 in the Stable Channel on the week of June 29, 2023.

Latest Edge Dev update improves vertical tabs, fixes AV1 media playback, and more

In this age of remote work, many people are working at not only different hours of the day but also in different locations. Today, Microsoft has announced it is rolling out a new feature for Outlook, specifically for its calendar, that has been designed specifically for those remote workers.

In a post on the Microsoft 365 blog, it states:

Microsoft 365 apps and services now provide you with the opportunity to let others know when and where you are working. When they do the same with you, you can accommodate attendees’ locations when scheduling meetings in Outlook, and facilitate spontaneous collaboration in Teams when checking if someone is available to chat in-person.

You can go to Outlook on the web and then click on Settings, followed by View all Outlook settings, and then Calendar. There should be a new option called Work hours and location. You can use this feature to show which days, times, and locations you will be available for others. You can also see where other Outlook users will be and at what time in Outlook's Scheduling Assistant.

Be aware that there are still some known bugs in this new feature, including an error that happens if you create a schedule with a time slot that ends at midnight. Here are some of the other known errors:

• If you change your time zone, it will not update the time zone of these new, modern working hours. A fix is in development.
• Outlook web calculates the cumulative availability across all attendees and resolves this to a single red or green colour to assist with easily finding a time that is free for all attendees (as seen in both the one-day vertical scheduling pane and the full-page horizontal scheduling assistant). Currently, the one-day scheduling pane is not checking modern working hours when resolving availability. A fix is in development.
• When opening and viewing a shared calendar directly from the calendar surface, work locations will not be shown. This is a large feature that is in progress but there is not yet an estimated timeline for release.
• It is not yet possible to create a schedule with alternating weeks, for those with 9/80 schedules. This is a feature that we will support, but not in the initial release.

Again, this new calendar feature is just rolling out now for Outlook on the web. However, it will be available for Outlook on Windows, iOS, Android, and Mac later this year. It will also be on Microsoft Teams desktop, web, and mobile starting in June.

Microsoft adds new ways to show where and when you will be working in Outlook calendar

Groupy 2 takes the original idea and supercharges it with new capabilities. With the latest version, you can create app groups, pin them to the taskbar, and launch them with a single click. Groupy 2 also combines applications on the taskbar, so apps inside a single window take less space and let you see the grouped programs at a glance.

Another new feature in Groupy 2 is Accents. It allows colouring your tabs for improved accessibility and association with specific tasks or applications.

With Groupy 2, you can customize the looks and behavior—select where the tabs appear, switch between the traditional and rounded variants, personalize taskbar grouping, customize backgrounds, and more. The app matches Windows 11's aesthetics (and works fine alongside native tabbed apps like File Explorer and Notepad), so your tabs will offer you native-like visuals for a seamless experience.

Groupy 2 is now available as a public beta on Stardock's official website. You can get the app with a one-time purchase for $6.99 (the price is lower during the beta period), and those owning Object Desktop from Stardock can download Groupy 2 for free. Finally, there is an extra discount if you have the original Groupy.

Disclaimer: Neowin's relationship with Stardock

Groupy 2 brings customizable tabs to all Windows 11 and 10 apps

The new feature will give users up to 15 minutes to edit a message after it has been sent. The limit has been placed to ensure messages are not changed long after they have been sent, the intent is to help fix minor errors. The feature is available in both individual and group chats to users.

Currently, the ability to edit messages is restricted to the beta version of the WhatsApp Web app but as per latest reports it should be rolling out to Android and iOS users soon. If you are one of those who have the Web beta app then you can follow the steps below to try out the new feature:

• Open an individual or group chat on WhatsApp and send a message
• Once sent, click on the down arrow at the top-right corner of the message and select 'Edit Message'. This will open a new window allowing you to make changes to the message

• Once you are satisfied with the changes click the check mark at the bottom-right corner of the dialog box to save changes.

This should update the message and you will now see an 'Edited' tag visible on the message to denote that the message has been changed.

Currently, there is no message history so once the message is edited, no one can see the original message. You can edit the message multiple times as long as it is within the 15-minute window. The feature is available for beta users on v2.2319.9 and above.

That's not all from WhatsApp as the company recently announced support for WearOS smartwatches and is now testing the new app. Furthermore, the company recently announced new Poll features, forwarding captions and more for the app, and is collaborating with Truecaller to combat telemarking calls. This, however, has not stopped the company from coming under a microscope as just recently users spotted WhatsApp accessing microphone on Android even when the app was not in use.

WhatsApp Web Beta app gains the ability to edit sent messages

Google stated:

Using a combination of AI techniques, including generative AI, it will help you make edits to specific parts of an image — like the subject, sky or background — so you have even more control over the final look and feel of your photo.

The blog also offered an example of how it will be used:

For example, if you’re trying to get the perfect photo from your time at a popular waterfall, you could remove the bag strap you forgot to take off. You could also make the sky brighter and less cloudy, so it matches how you remember that day. And for a finishing touch, relocate and change the scale of your subject so they’re perfectly lined up under the waterfall.

The feature will be added to specific Google Pixel phones sometime later this year. There's no word when this feature might be added for all Google Photos users.

Google Photos will add Magic Editor for high-end editing with simple AI-based tools

Highlights

• New! This update adds a new toggle control on the Settings > Windows Update page. When you turn it on, we will prioritize your device to get the latest non-security updates and enhancements when they are available for your device. For managed devices, the toggle is disabled by default. For more information, see Get Windows updates as soon as they're available for your device.

• This update addresses security issues for your Windows operating system.

Improvements

• This update affects the Kernel-mode Hardware-enforced Stack Protection security feature. The update adds more drivers to the database of drivers that are not compatible with it. A device uses this database when you enable this security feature in the Windows Security UI and it loads the drivers.
• This update addresses a race condition in Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). The Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) might stop responding. This occurs when the system processes multiple local account operations at the same time. The access violation error code is 0xc0000005.
• New! This update changes firewall settings. You can now configure application group rules.
• This update affects the Islamic Republic of Iran. The update supports the government’s daylight saving time change order from 2022.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process. It might stop responding. Because of this, the machine restarts. The error is 0xc0000005 (STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION).
• This update addresses an issue that affects Microsoft Edge IE mode. The Tab Window Manager stops responding.
• This update addresses an issue that affects protected content. When you minimize a window that has protected content, the content displays when it should not. This occurs when you are using Taskbar Thumbnail Live Preview.
• This update addresses an issue that affects mobile device management (MDM) customers. The issue stops you from printing. This occurs because of an exception.
• This update changes the app icons for certain mobile providers.
• This update addresses an issue that affects signed Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) policies. They are not applied to the Secure Kernel. This occurs when you enable Secure Boot.
• This update addresses an issue that displays Task View in the wrong area. This occurs when you close a full screen game by pressing Win+Tab.
• This update addresses an issue that occurs when you use a PIN to sign in to Windows Hello for Business. Signing in to Remote Desktop Services might fail. The error message is, "The request is not supported".
• This update addresses an issue that affects Administrator Account Lockout policies. GPResult and Resultant Set of Policy did not report them.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Unified Write Filter (UWF). When you turn it off by using a call to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), your device might stop responding.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the Resilient File System (ReFS). A stop error occurs that stops the OS from starting up correctly.
• This update addresses an issue that affects MySQL commands. The commands fail on Windows Xenon containers.
• This update addresses an issue that affects SMB Direct. Endpoints might not be available on systems that use multi-byte character sets.
• This update addresses an issue that affects apps that use DirectX on older Intel graphics drivers. You might receive an error from apphelp.dll.
• This update addresses an issue that affects the legacy Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) and the new Windows LAPS feature. They fail to manage the configured local account password. This occurs when you install the legacy LAPS .msi file after you have installed the April 11, 2023, Windows update on machines that have a legacy LAPS policy.

Known issues

Applies to

• IT Admins -> Symptom
  • Using provisioning packages on Windows 11, version 22H2 (also called Windows 11 2022 Update) might not work as expected. Windows might only be partially configured, and the Out Of Box Experience might not finish or might restart unexpectedly. Provisioning packages are .PPKG files which are used to help configure new devices for use on business or school networks. Provisioning packages which are applied during initial setup are most likely to be impacted by this issue. For more information on provisioning packages, please see Provisioning packages for Windows.
  • Note Provisioning Windows devices using Windows Autopilot is not affected by this issue.
  • Windows devices used by consumers in their home or small offices are not likely to be affected by this issue.

• IT Admins -> Workaround 

  • If you can provision the Windows device before upgrading to Windows 11, version 22H2, this will prevent the issue.
  • We are presently investigating and will provide an update in an upcoming release.

• All users - > Symptom 

  • After installing this update, some apps might have intermittent issues with speech recognition, expressive input, and handwriting when using Chinese or Japanese languages. Affected apps might sometimes fail to recognize certain words or might be unable to receive any input from speech recognition or affected input types. This issue is more likely to occur when apps are using offline speech recognition.

  • Note for app developers This issue only affects speech recognition using Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) in Windows.Media.SpeechRecognition. Other implementations of speech recognition are not affected.
• All users - > Workaround 

  To mitigate this issue, you will need to do the following once every time you restart your device:

  • Close the app which is having issues with speech recognition or other affected input types.
  • Open Task Manager by selecting the Start button and type "task manager" and select it.
  • Select the "Processes" tab on the left and then select the "Name" column so that the list of processes is sorted by their names.
  • Find ctfrmon.exe and select it.
  • Select the "End Task" button.
  • Confirm a new instance of ctfmon.exe is started automatically
  • You should now be able to open the affected app and use speech recognition and other input types.

  • We are working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release.

To get this update, just run Windows Update and apply the latest updates. If you want to install this on an offline machine then you can download it from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Windows 11 May Patch Tuesday update KB5026372 arrives

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22621.1755 and Build 22624.1755 (KB5026438) to the Beta Channel.

• Build 22624.1755 = New features rolling out.
• Build 22621.1755 = New features off by default.

This new Windows 11 Beta comes less than a week after the last Beta release for Insiders. As such, this new build has some bug fixes and some known issues but does not have any new features. Here is the changelog:

Fixes in Build 22624.1755

[Settings]

• Settings should no longer crash when attempting to uninstall an app while using grid view.

[Input]

• Fixed an issue where the Pinyin IME’s insert text button wasn’t displaying correctly in some cases.

Fixes for BOTH Build 22621.1755 & Build 22624.1755

• This update addresses a race condition in Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS). The Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) might stop responding. This occurs when the system processes multiple local account operations at the same time. The access violation error code is 0xc0000005.

Known issues

[Search on the Taskbar]

• If you have the Bing button in the search box on the taskbar and you restart your computer, you may see the daily rotating search highlight for some time before getting the Bing button back.

[Widgets]

• When you launch the widgets board for the first time, you may see momentarily placeholders of the widgets/feed cards of the old 2-column layout even if your device supports 3-columns.

You can check out the full blog post here.

Microsoft launches surprise Windows 11 Insider Beta build (KB5026438) with some bug fixes

The major highlight of the release as usual is security updates for Windows 10.

Highlights

This update addresses security issues for your Windows operating system.

And as is generally the case, the Redmond company has also listed the known issues in the update, which is always handy. Here are the symptoms and their respective workarounds:

Some of the older Windows 10 versions have also received updates today which have been listed below with their respective release notes (KB) linked as well as links to download them at Microsoft's Update Catalog:

It is noteworthy here that Windows 10 20H2 and Windows 10 1909 reached the end of servicing. The Windows Server 2016 changelog is the same as Windows 10 version 1607.

Windows 10 May 2023 Patch Tuesday (KB5026361) out — here's what's new and what's broke

Microsoft released Windows 10 version 20H2 on October 20, 2020. As an "H2-update," the OS received 18 months of active support for consumer-focused editions. In May 2022, Microsoft stopped pushing cumulative updates for the Home, Pro, Pro Education, and Pro for Workstation SKUs, leaving only Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise with an extra year of support. These three editions are now dead too.

The final nail in 20H2's coffin means Microsoft has only two Windows 10 releases to maintain: 21H2 and 22H2. Still, the former will not stay with us for long—its end of support is scheduled for the next month, namely June 13, 2023. Like version 20H2, Enterprise and Education editions will continue receiving updates for one more year.

Windows 10 version 20H2 was the last update to deliver visible changes and new features to the aging operating system. Users received theme-aware tiles for the Start menu, redesigned notifications, slight tweaks for the taskbar, optimizations for touch-based devices, etc. Also, 20H2 replaced the original Edge (based on EdgeHTML) with the new Chromium-based one. Check out our dedicated 20H2 release coverage if you want to take a trip down memory lane.

Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 version 20H2 Enterprise, Education, and IoT

Google promised to create a better, faster web for media companies with a new standard called AMP. In the end, it ruined the trust publishers had in the internet giant.

< Watch the video here. >

In 2015, Google hatched a plan to save the mobile web by effectively taking it over. And for a while, the media industry had practically no choice but to play along.

It began on a cheery October morning in New York City; the company had gathered the press together at a buzzy breakfast spot named Sadelle’s in SoHo. As the assembled reporters ate their bagels and lox, Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras, explained that the open web was in crisis. Sites were too slow, too hard to use, too filled with ads. As a result, he warned, people were flocking to the better experiences offered by social platforms and app stores. If this trend continued, it would be the end of the web as we know it.

But Google had a plan to fight back: Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, a new format for designing mobile-first webpages. AMP would ensure that the mobile web could be as fast, as usable, instantly loading, and every bit as popular as mobile apps. “We are here to make sure that the web evolves, and our entire focus is on that effort,” Gingras said. “We are here to make the web great again.”

“Make the web great again” was a popular phrase across Google at the time, echoing the burgeoning presidential campaign of an upstart Republican named Donald Trump. There was a lot of technical work behind the slogan: Google was building its own Chrome browser into a viable web-first operating system for laptops; trying to replace native apps with Progressive Web Apps; pushing to make the more secure HTTPS standard across the web; and promoting new top-level domains that would aim to make .blog and .pizza as important as .com. Much of this was boring or went over the heads of media execs. The point was that Google was promising to wrest distribution power away from Apple and Facebook and back into the hands of publishers.

After a decade of newspapers disappearing, magazine circulations shrinking, and websites’ business dwindling, the media industry had become resigned to its own powerlessness. Even the most cynical publishers had grown used to playing whatever games platforms like Google and Facebook demanded in a quest for traffic. And as Facebook chaotically pivoted to video, that left Google as the overwhelming driver of traffic to websites all over the web. What choice did anyone have?

“If Google said, ‘you must have your homepage colored bright pink on Tuesdays to be the result in Google,’ everybody would do it, because that’s what they need to do to survive,” says Terence Eden, a web standards expert and a former member of the Google AMP Advisory Committee. One media executive who worked on AMP projects but who, like other sources in this story, requested anonymity to speak about Google, framed the tradeoff even more simply: “you want access to this audience, you need to play by these rules.”

Adopting Google’s strange new version of the web resulted in an irresistible flood of traffic for publishers at first: using AMP increased search traffic to one major national magazine’s site by 20 percent, according to the executive who oversaw the implementation.

But AMP came with huge tradeoffs, most notably around how all those webpages were monetized. AMP made it harder to use ad tech that didn’t come from Google, fraying the relationship between Google and the media so badly that AMP became a key component in an antitrust lawsuit filed just five years after its launch in 2020 by 17 state attorneys general, accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly on the advertising industry. The states argue that Google designed AMP in part to thwart publishers from using alternative ad tools — tools that would have generated more money for publishers and less for Google. Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”

Here in 2023, AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI services pose a much more direct threat to its search business than Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News ever did. But the media industry is still dependent on Google’s fire hose of traffic, and as the company searches for its next move, the story of how it ruthlessly used AMP in an attempt to control the very structure and business of the web makes clear exactly how far it will go to preserve its business — and how powerless the web may be to stop it.

AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.

The small-screen shake-up

Earlier in 2015, months before AMP launched, one of Google’s key metrics was on the verge of a dramatic flip: the volume of searches coming from mobile phones was just about to outnumber the ones coming from desktop and laptop computers. This shift had been a long time coming, and Google saw it as an existential threat. The company had become a nearly $75 billion annual business almost entirely on ads — which made up about 90 percent of its revenue — and the most important ones by far were the ones atop search results in desktop browsers. By some internal measures, a typical mobile search at the time brought in about one-sixth as much ad revenue as on desktop. The increasingly mobile-focused future could mean a disastrous revenue drop for Google.

In public, Google framed AMP as something like a civic mission, an attempt to keep the web open and accessible to everyone instead of moving to closed gardens like Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News, which offered superior mobile reading experiences. “To some degree, on mobile, [the web] has not fully satisfied users’ expectations,” Gingras said at the launch event. “We are hoping to change that.”

But the fight to fix the mobile web wasn’t just an altruistic move in the name of teamwork and openness and kumbaya. Internally, some viewed it as a battle for Google’s own survival. As smartphones became the default browsing experience for billions of users around the world, the mobile web was becoming the only web that really mattered. Google’s competitors were exerting far more control over how users lived their lives on their phones: readers were getting their news from native apps and from proprietary formats created by Facebook and Apple. Google worried that if enough users switched to these faster, simpler, more controlled experiences, it risked being left out altogether.

As Big Tech companies took over the ad industry, it did so largely at the expense of publishers. Newspapers used to be the way to advertise your new hair salon, or you might buy local TV ads to hawk the latest appliances for sale in your store. By 2015, most advertisers just went through Facebook and Google, which offered a more targeted and more efficient way to reach buyers.

Google, obviously aware that it was taking revenue from publishers, occasionally tried to make nice. Sometimes that meant creating new products, like the awkwardly named Google Play Newsstand, to give media companies another place to distribute and sell content. Sometimes — often, actually — it meant just giving publishers a bunch of money whenever a government would get mad, like the €60 million “Digital Publishing Innovation Fund” Google set up in France after a group of European publishers sued and settled with the search giant.

This “we care about publishers!” dance is a staple of Silicon Valley. Apple briefly promised to save the news business with the iPad, convincing publishers around the world to build bespoke tablet magazines before mostly abandoning that project. Facebook remains in a perpetually whipsawing relationship with the media, too: it will promote stories in the News Feed only to later demote them in favor of “Meaningful Social Interactions,” then promise publishers endless video eyeballs before mostly giving up on Facebook Watch.

The platforms need content to keep users entertained and engaged; publishers need distribution for their content to be seen. At best, it’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship. At worst, and all too often, the platforms simply cajole publishers into doing whatever the platforms need to increase engagement that quarter.

For publishers over the last decade, chasing platform policies and supporting new products has become the only means of survival. “That’s the sort of tradeoff publishers are used to,” says one media executive who was involved with AMP in its early days. “Do it this way and you’ll get an audience.” But while publishers had long been wary of the tendency of Big Tech companies to suck up ad dollars and user data, they had seen Google as something closer to a partner. “You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”

Phones potentially made all of this harder. For Google, search was harder to monetize on smaller screens with correspondingly fewer ad slots, and it was also, in some ways, an inferior product. That was largely for reasons out of Google’s control: many of the mobile websites Google sent users to were slow, covered in autoplaying video and unclosable ads, and generally considered a worse experience than the apps that publishers and media organizations had been focused on for the last several years. Google executives talked often internally about being ashamed of sending people to some websites.

But the big reason for consternation within Google was a company just a few miles down the road. If mobile was going to win, then so was Facebook. This was pre-metaverse Facebook, of course, when the company was a booming social networking giant, a thriving ad business, and a mobile success story: Facebook reported in April 2015 that it had 1.25 billion mobile active users on its products every month and that nearly three-quarters of its advertising revenue was coming from mobile.

Facebook was, to most users, a mobile app, not a website. Google can’t crawl a mobile app. And it got worse: most content on Facebook was shared among friends and followers and, as such, was completely opaque to Google, even on the web. For most of its existence, Google could take for granted that the vast majority of the internet’s content would be open and searchable. As Facebook grew, and social media in general began to replace blogs and forums, it felt like Google’s view of the internet was shrinking.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg made no secret of Facebook’s ambitions to take on Google, to take on everybody, really: the CEO’s aim was to turn Facebook into a platform the size of the internet. But he wanted to win at search, too, first by better indexing Facebook content and then by ultimately doing the same to the web. “There’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide,” he told investors in the spring of 2015.

The simplest thing to do would be to beat Facebook at its own game. But Google had already tried that — a few times. Seeing the rise of social networking, and the threat that friend-sourced content posed to Google’s search-based business model, the company poured resources into the Google Plus social network. But it never caught on and, by 2015, was effectively on its last legs. There was simply no way to out-Facebook Facebook.

Around the same time, Facebook also launched Instant Articles, a Facebook-specific tool that turned web articles into native posts on the platform. The pitch for Instant Articles was simple: they would speed up the News Feed, making it quicker to read stories so users didn’t have to suffer through the mobile web’s interminable load times and hideous pages. Instant Articles made some publishers nervous since it effectively loaded their content directly onto Facebook’s platform and gave the company complete control over their audiences. Some opted out entirely. But many others saw too big a potential audience to ignore and developed tools to syndicate their stories as Instant Articles.

A few months later, Apple launched Apple News, its own proprietary article format and app for displaying publisher content. At its own developer conference that spring, Apple’s then-VP of product management, Susan Prescott, made a case that sounded eerily like Facebook’s. “The articles can come from anywhere,” she said, “but the best ones are built in our new Apple News format.” Software chief Craig Federighi followed up with a backhanded swipe at Google News and Facebook. “Unlike just about any other news aggregation service we’re aware of on the planet, News is designed from the ground up with your privacy in mind.”

The media industry, collectively, bought the hype around what came to be known as “distributed publishing.” “Is the media becoming a wire service?” asked Ezra Klein at Vox in a piece that kicked off a million AMP and Instant Articles projects. “My guess is that within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named,” he wrote. “The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously.”

To some at Google, all of this looked a lot like a few proprietary platforms conspiring to kill the open web. Which might kill Google. Search — and its behemoth ad business — only worked if the web was full of open, indexable pages that its search crawlers could see and direct users to. Instant Articles and Apple News also gave those platforms control over the advertising on their pages, which threatened AdWords, another of Google’s largest revenue streams.

Over the course of 2015, as Google debated internally how best to respond, the company also hosted a clubby “unconference” called Newsgeist. Google held these periodically in partnership with the Knight Foundation as a way to work with and hear from the news industry. Jeff Jarvis, a CUNY professor and media critic, had been agitating at Newsgeist events for years for Google to build what he called “the embeddable newspaper,” a way for news articles to be displayed around the internet in much the same way a YouTube video can be embedded practically anywhere. Gingras also liked the idea; he was a big believer in what he called “portable content.”

In May 2015, at the first Newsgeist Europe in Helsinki, Finland, Instant Articles was a topic of much conversation. Jarvis, in particular, saw Instant Articles as a useful technical prototype with all the wrong attributes: it was closed off, only worked on one platform, and accrued no value back to publishers. Jarvis spent time at the conference arguing for someone — presumably Google — to build a better alternative.

Ultimately, what the company built was AMP. Done right, it could bring the same speed, simplicity, and design to the entire internet — without closing it off. To lead the effort, Google designated two people who had come from Google Plus: David Besbris, who had led the company’s wayward social networking effort, and Malte Ubl, who helped to build the social network’s technical infrastructure.

At least, that’s how Google described it publicly. According to interviews with former employees, publishing executives, and experts associated with the early days of AMP, while it was waxing poetic about the value and future of the open web, Google was privately urging publishers into handing over near-total control of how their articles worked and looked and monetized. And it was wielding the web’s most powerful real estate — the top of search results — to get its way.

“[Google] came to us and said, the internet is broken, ads aren’t loading, blah blah, blah. We want to provide a better user experience to users by coming up with this clean standard,” says one magazine product executive. “My reaction was that the main problem is ads, so why don’t you fix the ads? They said they can’t fix the ads. It’s too hard.”

Faster, faster, faster

Before it was called AMP, Google’s nascent web standard was known as PCU — Portable Content Unit. The team of Googlers building the new format had only one goal, or at least only one that mattered: make webpages faster. There were lots of other goals, like giving publishers monetization and branding options, but all of that was secondary to load times. If the page appeared instantly after a user tapped the link in search results, AMP would feel as instant and native as an app. Nothing else mattered as much as speed.

Google had tried in the past to incentivize publishers to make their own webpages faster. Load times had long been a factor in how the search engine ranked sites on desktop, for instance, and load times were presented front and center in Google Analytics. Google even built a tool called “Instant Pages” that tried to guess which sites users would click on and pre-render those pages so they’d appear more quickly.

And yet, the mobile web still, in a word, sucked. “Publishers, frankly, then — and to a great degree still now — considered mobile web traffic to be essentially junk traffic,” says Aron Pilhofer, a longtime media executive and now a journalism professor at Temple University. Many mobile websites were completely separate entities from their desktop pages, prefaced with “mobile.” or “m.” in their URLs. Publishers compensated for small screens with more ads per page, and the whole industry was in the midst of an unfortunate obsession with autoplaying video. Phone browsers were bad; the webpages were even worse.

Google didn’t have great tools for understanding mobile pages at the time, so it couldn’t easily issue the same “we just like fast pages” edict. It could take the effort to develop those metrics and then urge publishers to update their sites to meet Google’s bar for speed, but there simply wasn’t time. Internally, Google felt it needed a solution immediately. Competition was here. AMP was a blunt object, but it was designed to get results quickly. AMP’s purpose, Google’s Gingras said at the 2015 launch event, “is about making sure the World Wide Web is not the World Wide Wait.”

AMP was, in many ways, a step backward for the web. Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton noted at the time that Google’s sample AMP-powered webpages “look a lot like the web of, say, 2002, shrunk down to a phone screen.”

But it was fast. And to Google, that was all that mattered.

The growth hack to end all growth hacks

For AMP to work, Google knew it needed to get broad adoption. But simply asking publishers to support a new standard wouldn’t be easy. Publishers were already neglecting their mobile websites, which was the whole problem, and they weren’t likely to sign up to work on them just for Google’s benefit.

The team tried a few things to get more AMP content, like auto-converting stories from the Google Play Newsstand and elsewhere. WordPress began working on a plug-in that made creating AMP pages as easy as checking a box every time you published a post. One way some people in and outside of Google thought of AMP was similar to RSS — another syndication format, another box to click next to the one that tweets the story and posts the top image on Instagram. But Google worried that this approach would give all AMP pages a same-y, boring look and reader experience. What Google really needed was for publishers to not just support AMP but also embrace it.

The team quickly landed on a much more powerful growth hack: Google’s search results. It would be easy for Google to factor AMP into the way it ranks search results, to effectively tell publishers that AMP-powered pages would be higher on the list, and anything else would be pushed down the page. (It had previously done something similar with HTTPS, another push toward a new web standard.) Publishers, most of them existentially reliant on the fire hose of Google traffic, would have no choice but to give in and use AMP.

Such an aggressive move would be a bad look for Google, though, not to mention a potentially anti-competitive one, especially given that the company has always maintained it cares about a webpage’s “relevance” above all else. But there was a middle ground, or maybe a loophole: a relatively new product in Google search known as the Top Stories carousel, which showed a handful of horizontally scrolling news stories at the top of some search results pages. They weren’t part of the search results, the “10 blue links” Google is known for and so scrutinized over. They were something separate, so the rules could be different.

Google said from the beginning that AMP would not be a factor in regular “10 blue link” search results. (Several publishing executives say they’re still not sure if that was true: “when Google said AMP doesn’t matter, no one believes them,” one says. The company denies that it has ever been a factor in search result rankings.) But only AMP pages would be included in the carousel, with a lightning bolt in the corner to signify that tapping that card would offer the instant loading experience users were getting from Instant Articles and Apple News.

That carousel took up most of the precious space on a phone screen, which made Top Stories some of the most important real estate on the mobile web. And so, the growth hack worked. When AMP launched in early 2016, a who’s who of publishers had signed up to support the new format: The Guardian, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the BBC, The New York Times, and Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, all quickly began developing for AMP. Others would join in the months that followed.

But many of those publishers weren’t necessarily signing up because they believed in AMP’s vision or loved the tech. Far from it. Google’s relentless focus on page speed, and on shipping as quickly as possible to thwart Facebook and Apple, meant the first versions of AMP couldn’t do very much. It didn’t support comments or paywalls, and the restrictions on JavaScript meant publishers couldn’t bring in third-party analytics or advertising. Interactive elements, even simple things like tables and charts, mostly didn’t work.

AMP, it turned out, wasn’t even that fast. Multiple publishers ran internal tests and found they were able to make pages that loaded more quickly than AMP pages, so long as they were able to rein in the ad load and extra trackers. It was much harder to build slow pages on AMP — in part because AMP couldn’t do very much — but there were lots of other ways to build good pages.

And even if AMP pages did seem to load faster from search results, “it felt faster because Google cheated,” says Barry Adams, a longtime SEO consultant. When publishers built AMP-powered pages, they submitted them to Google’s AMP Validator, which made sure the page worked right — and cleared it for access to the carousel. As it was checking the code, Google would grab a copy of the entire page and store it on Google’s own servers. Then, when someone clicked on the article in search results, rather than loading the webpage itself, Google would load its stored version. Any page pre-rendered like that would load faster, AMP or otherwise.

The AMP cache made it harder for publishers to quickly update their content — and made it nearly impossible for them to understand how people were using their sites. On cached pages, even the URL began with “google.com,” rather than the publisher’s own domain. It was as if Google had subsumed the entire publishing industry inside its office park in Mountain View.

Google kept promising publishers that this restrictive, Google-controlled version of AMP was just version one, that there was much more to come. But the carousel, that all-important new space in search results, required AMP from the beginning. “The problem was that when Google launched it, they also said, ‘You have to use AMP. We built a standard, it’s shit, it’s terrible, it’s not ready, it does only like a quarter of what you need it to do, but we need you to use it anyway because otherwise we’re just not going to show your articles in mobile search results anymore,’” Adams says. “And that is what ruffled everybody’s feathers.”

“The audience people hated it because it was against audience strategy,” says one former media executive who worked with AMP. “The data people hated it because it was against advertising and privacy strategy. The engineers hated it because it’s a horrendous format to work with… The analysts hated it because we got really bad behavioral data out of it. Everyone’s like, ‘Okay, so there’s no upside to this — apart from the traffic.’”

On top of that, the traffic was worth less because it had fewer and more limited ads. “Every publisher experienced this — the AMP audience is less valuable. It’s millions of pennies and not having any dollars,” one executive says. “An AMP article earned 60 percent of what a [standard] article earned… It’s low enough to be noticeable. You were just playing the game of ‘if I didn’t have all this traffic, would I make more money?’”

“Google did not have an answer for the revenue gap — there was a lot of hand-waving, a lot of saying they would work with us,” says another executive. “Google on AMP was like Google on every product — lots of fanfare in the beginning, lots of grand plans, and then none of those plans ever saw the light of day.”

But the pageviews, in many cases, were enough to outweigh the costs. It’s almost impossible to overstate how important Google traffic is to most publishers. The analytics company Chartbeat estimated this year that search accounts for 19.3 percent of total traffic to websites, a number that doesn’t even include products like Google News and the news feed in the Google app, both of which also account for a huge portion of many publishers’ traffic. Google, as a whole, can account for up to 40 percent of traffic for even the largest sites. Disappearing from Google is life-and-death stuff.

Bigger media companies, those that could employ product and engineering staff of their own, could sometimes hack around AMP’s limitations — or, at the very least, deal with them without affecting the rest of the company’s business. Some big publishers came to see AMP as nothing more than some additional work required for a distributor. But even many smaller publishers, without the staff to manage the technical shortcomings or the resources to maintain yet another version of their website, still felt they had no choice but to support AMP.

As long as anyone played the game, everybody had to. “Google’s strategy is always to create prisoner’s dilemmas that it controls — to create a system such that if only one person defects, then they win,” a former media executive says. As long as anyone was willing to use AMP and get into that carousel, everyone else had to do the same or risk being left out.

Many within Google continued to see AMP as a net good, a way to make the web better and to keep it from collapsing into a few walled gardens. But to most publishers, AMP was, at best, just another app to send stuff to. “We didn’t see it as any different from building on Android or building on iOS,” one former media executive says. “It was this way to deliver the best mobile experience.” Supporting AMP was like supporting Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, or even maintaining RSS feeds. It was just more work for more platforms.

That’s why the Top Stories carousel felt like a shakedown to so many publishers. Google claimed it was merely an incentive to do the obviously right thing and a nice boost in the user experience. But publishers sensed an unspoken message: comply with this new format or risk your precious search traffic. And your entire business.

Good governance

Despite all the issues with AMP’s tech and misgivings about Google’s intentions, the new format was a success from the very beginning. By December 2016, less than a year after its official launch, an Adobe study found that AMP pages already accounted for 7 percent of mobile traffic to “top publishers” in the US and grew 405 percent in just the final eight months of the year. Microsoft was planning to use AMP in the Bing app for iOS and Android. Twitter was looking into using it as well.

From the beginning, Google had proclaimed loudly that AMP was not a Google product. It was to be an open-source platform, all its source code available on GitHub for anyone to fork and edit and use to their own ends. AMP’s success was the web’s success, not Google’s.

In reality, Google exerted near-total authority over AMP. According to the 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Google, the company adopted a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” policy, and even when it transferred the AMP project to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, it remained very much in charge. “When it suited them, it was open-source,” says Jeremy Keith, a web developer and a former member of AMP’s advisory council. “But whenever there were any questions about direction and control… it was Google’s.”

Several sources told me stories of heated arguments about the future of the web that ended in Google employees awkwardly reading lawyer-approved statements about things being open and opt in — and Google then getting its way. After a debate about the cache, and the data it gave Google, “they started bringing a whole bunch of people no one had ever heard of to committee meetings to say how wonderful the cache was,” one media exec remembers. And whenever there was debate about new features or the roadmap, Google always won.

Over time, AMP began to support more ad networks — or, rather, more ad networks began to do the work required to support AMP’s locked-down structure. But many still felt the best experience was reserved for Google’s own ad tech. That fact has become the most contentious part of AMP’s history — and the reason it wound up in multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google. The suits allege, among other things, that Google used AMP as a way to curtail a practice called “header bidding,” which allows publishers to show their inventory to multiple ad exchanges at once in order to get the best price in real time. “Specifically,” the 2020 lawsuit says, “Google made AMP unable to execute JavaScript in the header, which frustrated publishers’ use of header bidding.” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in a statement that “AG Paxton’s claims about AMP and header bidding are just false.” Most of the AMP-related provisions in that 2020 lawsuit were thrown out by a district court in 2022, which found that the case “does not plausible [sic] allege AMP to be an anticompetitive strategy.”

As AMP caught on, Google’s vision for the product became even more ambitious. The company started to suggest that, rather than maintain a website and a separate set of AMP pages, maybe some publishers should build their entire site within AMP. On launch day in October 2015, the AMP project website proudly proclaimed that it was “an architectural framework built for speed.” By the end of 2017, AMP was promising to enable “the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.” It was no longer just articles, and it was no longer just mobile. It was the whole web, rewritten Google’s way and forever compatible with its search engine.

“I 100 percent believe that Google would have loved to have said AMP is the future of HTML,” Eden says. “I have no doubt that the long-term play was to say, ‘We’re Google. This is a new language for the web. If you don’t like it, you’re not on the front page of Google anymore.’”

Ultimately, though, Google’s grandest ambitions didn’t come to pass. Neither did its smallest ambitions, really. As publishers continued to thrash against AMP’s constraints, and as overall scrutiny against Google ramped up, the company began to pull back.

The non-standard

In 2021, Google announced it would start featuring all pages in the Top Stories carousel, not just AMP-powered ones. Last May, Google let some local news providers for covid-related stories bypass this requirement. As soon as publishers didn’t have to use AMP anymore, they mostly stopped. The Washington Post abandoned it the same year, and a litany of others (including Vox Media) spent 2022 looking for ways off the platform. Even now, though, some of those publishers say they’re nervous about traffic disappearing. Google remains such a black box that it can be hard to trust the company, even as it continues to say it doesn’t factor AMP into results.

The true irony of AMP is that even as publishers are jumping off the platform, many also acknowledge that, actually, AMP is pretty good now. It supports comments and more interactive elements; it’s still fast and simple. Now that it’s run by the OpenJS Foundation and separated from the search results incentive, it appears to be on track to become a genuinely useful project. It’s not likely to replace HTML anytime soon, but it could help usher in the idea of portable and embeddable content that Jarvis and Gingras imagined all those years ago. Developers can even use AMP to make web-based projects that feel like Instagram Stories or the TikTok feed. “AMP potentially could have been — in some ways, I still think possibly could be — a really interesting way of syndicating content that takes that middle person out of the mix,” Pilhofer says.

Everyone I spoke to also thinks Core Web Vitals is a good and valuable idea, too. Speed matters more than ever; how you hit the mark doesn’t matter as much.

One source I spoke to wondered aloud if the internet might be a different place if the first versions of AMP had actually been good. Would publishers have thrown even more resources into supporting the format, giving Google even more control over how the web works — and, as the antitrust lawsuits allege, how it makes money? It certainly seems possible.

But one thing proved undeniable: for Google, there was simply no coming back from the first days of AMP, when publishers felt like the company was making grand pronouncements about saving the web while also force-feeding them bad products that served Google’s ends and no one else’s. Even Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, constrained and problematic as they were, felt optional. AMP didn’t.

“It maybe had good intentions about making the mobile web better,” Adams says, “but went about it in probably one of the worst ways you could have imagined. It was a PR nightmare.”

One of the smartest and most profitable things Google ever did was align itself with the growth of the web. It offered useful free services, used projects like Fiber and Android to help get more people online, and made the sprawling internet a little easier for people to navigate. As the web grew, so did Google, both to great heights. But when the web was threatened by the rise of closed platforms, Google mortgaged many of its ideas about openness in order to make sure the profits kept coming. “And as a long-term effect, it probably woke a lot of news publishers up to the fact that Google is maybe not a benign entity,” Adams says. “And we need to take their dominance a bit more seriously as a news story in its own right.”

In response to this story, Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said the company “will continue to collaborate with the industry to build technology that provides helpful experiences for users, delivers value to publishers and creators and helps contribute to a healthy ecosystem and the open web.”

Google is still the web’s biggest and most influential company. But across the publishing industry, it’s no longer seen as a partner. AMP ultimately neither saved nor killed the open web. But it did kill Google’s good name — one not-that-fast webpage at a time.

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What is new in Firefox 113?

Here is the official changelog for Firefox 113:

• Say hello to enhanced Picture-in-Picture! Rewind, check video duration, and effortlessly switch to full-screen mode on the web's most popular video websites.
• Firefox's address bar is already a great place to search for what you're looking for. Now you'll always be able to see your web search terms and refine them while viewing your search's results - no additional scrolling needed! Also, a new result menu has been added making it easier to remove history results and dismiss sponsored Firefox Suggest entries.
• Private windows now protect users even better by blocking third-party cookies and storage of content trackers.
•  Passwords automatically generated by Firefox now include special characters, giving users more secure passwords by default.
•  Firefox 113 introduces a redesigned accessibility engine which significantly improves the speed, responsiveness, and stability of Firefox when used with:
  • Screen readers, as well as certain other accessibility software;
  • East Asian input methods;
  • Enterprise single sign-on software; and
  • Other applications which use accessibility frameworks to access information.
• Importing bookmarks from Safari or a Chrome-based browser? The favicons for those bookmarks will now also be imported by default to make them easier to identify.
•  Firefox 113 now supports AV1 Image Format files containing animations (AVIS), improving support for AVIF images across the web.
• The Windows GPU sandbox first shipped in the Firefox 110 release has been tightened to enhance the security benefits it provides.
•  A 13-year-old feature request was fulfilled and Firefox now supports files being drag-and-dropped directly from Microsoft Outlook. A special thanks to volunteer contributor Marco Spiess for helping to get this across the finish line!
•  Users on macOS can now access the Services sub-menu directly from Firefox context menus.

• On Windows, the elastic overscroll effect has been enabled by default. When two-finger scrolling on the touchpad or scrolling on the touchscreen, you will now see a bouncing animation when scrolling past the edge of a scroll container.
•  Firefox is now available in the Tajik (tg) language.

Besides visible changes and new features, Firefox 113 contains security fixes, enterprise-specific improvements, and enhancements for web developers.

Firefox 113 is available for download from nsane.down FP or from the official website. If you already run Mozilla's browser, which is currently the only non-Chromium mainstream option, get Firefox 113 by heading to the Menu > Help > About Firefox.

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