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.

Source

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.

Source

Close to the end of last year in November, we got the first hints of that in a Server preview build in the form of a forcibly disabled feature. Much more recently though, just two months ago, more glaring evidence has been uncovered in the first Canary build that Microsoft put out, 25314. There were a bunch of new strings related to Taskbar and some of those suggested that the ability to ungroup apps and show labels was in Microsoft's mind.

Windows enthusiast and Twitter user Albacore has developed a new utility which brings some of these abilities to life. The app is called Shell Frosting and its maiden release was published earlier today. The tool allows users to play around with a few options which include:

• Always combine, hide labels
• Combine when taskbar is full
• Never combine

The UI is pretty simple to interact with as you can see in the images below on Build 23451. There is an option for multiple displays as well:

As mentioned above, this is the first release of the Shell Frosting utility and the dev has cautioned that it is quite unstable. However, if you want to try it out on a VM or something, you can head over to GitHub and download it.

Source: Albacore (Twitter)

Source

Firefox ESR and all development channels of the browser, as well as Firefox for Android are updated around the same time as well. This means that Firefox ESR 102.11, Firefox 113 for Android, and the development builds Firefox Beta 114, Firefox Dev 114 and Firefox Nightly 115 are now also available or will be soon.

Executive Summary

• Firefox 113 is a security update that addresses security issues in the web browser.
• A redesigned accessibility engine promises improved speed, responsiveness and stability.
• Various security enhancements, including GPU sandbox improvements on Windows.
• Support for AV1 animations

Firefox 113 download and update

Firefox 113 and Firefox 102.11 ESR are released on May 9, 2023. The web browser should pick up the update automatically and install it.

Firefox users may speed up the installation by running a manual check for updates. This is done by selecting Menu > Help > About Firefox.

The browser displays the installed version and runs a check for update. Any update found may be downloaded and installed.

Here are the official download locations:

• Firefox Stable download
• Firefox Beta download [US version]
• Nightly download
• Firefox ESR download [US version]
• Firefox for Android on Google Play

Firefox 113.0 new features and improvements

The feature that appears to have been postponed: Search Terms in the URL Bar

Mozilla is working on a change in Firefox that keeps the typed search term of the user in the address bar after the search engine's website has loaded. Mozilla claims that this is done to help users modify the search term. The URL of the search engine is not displayed in the address bar, if the feature is enabled.

The feature, which is also available in Safari, may be turned off in Firefox in the following way once it launches:

1. Load about:config in the web browser's address bar.
2. Search for browser.urlbar.showSearchTerms.featureGate.
3. Set the value of the preference to Off.
4. Restart Firefox.

Security improvements

Mozilla Firefox 113 includes several security improvements. The browser's automatic password generator includes special characters now, which improves the strength of passwords significantly.

Windows users benefit from GPU sandboxing improvements. The release notes provide little information, just that the GPU sandbox has been tightened "to enhance the security benefits its provides".

Mozilla's bug tracking site offers more information. According to the report, the GPU sandbox is now limiting access to sensitive parts of the filesystem.

Last but not least, Mozilla notes that private browsing windows "protect users even better by blocking third-party cookies and storage of content trackers".

Redesigned Accessibility Engine

Firefox's accessibility engine has been redesigned, and this improves speed, responsiveness and stability significantly concerning the following tasks or applications:

• 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.

Picture-in-Picture mode improvements

Firefox's Picture-in-Picture mode may be used to play video streams in a small overlay window. The window remains visible even if the user switches to another tab. One of the modes main application is to watch a video while doing other things in the browser.

The updated mode brings useful features, including rewind, video duration information, and an option to enable full-screen mode on popular video sites.

Other changes and fixes

• Firefox supports AV1 image format files that contain animations.
• Support for dragging and dropping files from Microsoft Outlook is now supported.
• Users on macOS devices may now access the Services menu directly from Firefox context menus.
• Windows users on touch-devices have the elastic overscroll effect enabled by default. It shows a bouncing animation when scrolling past the edge of a scroll container. Firefox users may turn this off by setting apz.overscroll.enabled on about:config to False.
• Firefox imports favicons from Safari or Chrome-based browsers when importing bookmarks now.
• Firefox is now available in the Tajik (tg) language.

Developer changes

• The colour(), lab(), lch(), oklab(), oklch(), and colour-mix() functional notations are now supported, along with the forced-colour-adjust property.
• The :nth-child of <selector> syntax allows you to target a group of children based upon the An+B rule that also matches a defined selector.
• CanvasRenderingContext2D.reset() and OffscreenCanvasRenderingContext2D.reset() are now supported.
• The Compression Streams API is now supported.
• The AV1 video codec is now enabled on Android. Hardware acceleration is used if supported by the device.
• When an extension registers multiple listeners for the same event, all the event listeners are called when the event page wakes up.
• Support is now provided for the declarativeNetRequest API.
• The gecko_android subkey has been added to the browser_specific_settings key. This subkey enables an extension to specify the range of Firefox for Android versions it is compatible with.

Enterprise changes

The Containers policy is now available in Firefox Stable, but not Firefox ESR.

OCSP preferences may be set using the Preferences policy.

Firefox 113 ships with security, accessibility and AV1 improvements

Garrett Duchesne, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, explains in his new Tech Community blog post that such audience types will not be necessary for much longer as Standard and Expanded measures will fall back to Ecosystem measurement if the data is not sufficient. The change will take place sometime in Q3 2023 as the data will remain active for a while since there is overlapping of these entries with previous results shared with driver publishers and vendors.

Duchesne writes:

New Measure Dimension Capabilities

Historically, our telemetry systems required creating separate ecosystem specific measures when leveraging this audience type. [..]

As part of recent work overhauling how our driver measures are built, this separation of a single evaluation criteria (ex. Driver Crashes and Hangs in Windows Components

[...]

For the next few months these entries will remain active in the measure dictionary as they are reflected in reports shared previously with driver publishers. These will eventually be phased out in Q3 2023.

In the official blog post, Microsoft lists several ecosystem measures, including many kernel-mode (KM) and user-mode (UM) drivers, that will be removed from the measure dictionary.

Microsoft to streamline Windows 11, Windows 10 graphics driver quality maintenance

Microsoft did retire gadgets in Windows 8, stating that they were security risks. A report by Windows Central suggests that Microsoft is working on bringing the prime Windows 7 gadgets functionality back in some way.

Windows 11 features a Widgets panel that users may activate to display news, weather information, stock market news, sports scores and now also third-party widgets. All widgets are limited to a place in the widgets panel currently, but this could change soon.

According to Windows Central, Microsoft considers adding an option to Windows 11's Widgets feature to pin widgets to the desktop. Users would be able to pin their favorite widgets to the desktop, so that they are displayed all the time on the desktop. Widgets pinned this way may be placed everywhere on the desktop according to the report.

Microsoft hopes, according to Windows Central, that the new option to pin widgets improves the engagement with widgets.

Microsoft has not confirmed the feature nor has it been introduced in any of the Insider builds that are available currently. The change could improve the visibility of Widgets, considering that information is then displayed on the desktop, which removes the need to activate the Widgets panel.

Gadgets were popular on Windows 7 especially. Gadgets would display hardware information, music player controls, photos, and other bits on the desktop directly.

It would be ironic if Microsoft would launch the feature in the near future and remove the entire Widgets interface again in Windows 12 or another upcoming version of Windows 11.

Closing Words

Widgets is a controversial feature in Windows 11. Some users like it, especially the weather information on the taskbar, others have no use for it. The icon can be removed easily from the Windows 11 taskbar.

The change has not been confirmed yet by Microsoft and needs to be considered a rumor for now. It would make sense though to improve the functionality of Widgets further and fits right into other Widgets changes that Microsoft is testing or has introduced already.

Now You: do you use Widgets? What is your take on the desktop pinning feature?

Is Microsoft restoring Windows 7 Gadgets feature in Windows 11?

Google's support page for Nearby Share (via 9to5Google) was quietly updated to state the feature is available around the world. There are four countries where it is not available: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. That's because Google cannot legally do business in those countries due to US trade restrictions.

The feature is still labeled as a Beta, and it also still won't work with Windows PCs with ARM processors. However, it will still work with Windows 10 and 11 PCs with 64-bit processors, and with Android devices that have Android 6.0 or above. In order to share files between two devices, they must support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They should also connect to the same network. and the devices should be within 16 feet of each other.

If you use the same Google Account on your smartphone and your Windows PC, you can seamlessly transfer files from each device without approval with Nearby Share. You can download Nearby Share Beta for Windows from the official website.

Google's Nearby Share Android to Windows file feature is now available worldwide

What is new in Windows Subsystem for Android Preview version 2304?

• Package verification for Android apps: WSA can now scan Android packages using Windows' default anti-virus solution before installing the selected app, ensuring a safe and malware-free experience.
• RAM Reallocation: You can give WSA more memory for a snappier experience and better performance. The subsystem allows selecting a specific amount of RAM or entering a custom value.

  

   

• Android AppLink Support: Windows 11 will launch one of the installed Android applications when the user clicks a supported link in another program.
• General stability and performance improvements.
• Linux kernel version 5.15.94.

Windows Subsystem for Android Preview version 2304 is now available to those participating in the preview program. Note that it is separate from the Windows Insider program thing—a guide describing how to sign up for WSA Preview updates is available in the official documentation. Alternatively, you can download the necessary msixbundle from store.rd-adguard.net using product ID 9P3395VX91NR and version 2304.40000.3.0 (via Deskmodder).

Windows Subsystem for Android gets big update with RAM reallocation, antivirus support, more

Below the advertisement there is a section that will show the current storage status for a user’s OneDrive account, and then a security tips section for users to secure their account. This isn’t the only version of the Home tab that has been seen, with another version having the storage information listed first and the Microsoft 365 prompt to Sign In listed below.

The final update that has been seen during this investigation into the Settings tab on this Insider build is a small prompt on the Accounts tab, which shows information about products that are installed to the users system that have reached end of support, such as Office 2013 which is shown in the image below.

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has been incorporating adverts into its operating system, with Start Menu ads being seen in the Start Menu of Windows 11 since November 2022. Microsoft is keen to drive more subscriptions to the 365 platform through these adverts and its apparently intrusive approach to advertising, such as the full screen upgrade ads presented to users in February.

Albacore has confirmed in a tweet the build information below, which is the recent Dev channel build 23451:

The beta version is available for all supported platforms. All available downloads, for Windows, Linux and macOS, are available on the official Sourceforge repository site.

Windows users may get a SmartScreen warning when they run the setup file on their devices. These warnings are thrown when files are new among other things.

The interface has not changed at all.

The main improvement of 7-Zip 23.00 Beta affects the program's handling of executable files. The new release includes support for the ARM64 filter when compressing ARM64 executable files to 7z or xz archives.

The new filter may improve the compression ratio of ARM64 executable files when using 7-zip. The compression software parses executable files that users have selected for compression now to determine the best filter for them. The ARM64 filter is selected for ARM64 executable files, the traditional BCJ and BCJ2 filters for x86 executable files.

The section size of the BCJ2 filter has been raised from 64 MiB to 240 MiB (that is mebibyte, not Men in Black). The change may improve the compression ratio of executable files that are larger than 64 MiB according to the release notes.

7-Zip 23.00 Beta includes a number of additional changes and fixes. Support for UDF has improved and cpio supports hard links now. The creation of multivolume archives has been improved for macOS and Linux devices.

Both Linux and macOS limit the number of open files that a single program can have. To avoid issues with "big number of volumes", 7-Zip may now limit the number of simultaneously open files on these platforms during open, extraction and creation operations.

The release notes list two code changes. The first improves drag and drop operations that involve the right mouse button. The second improves the speed in which the 7-Zip menu is displayed in Explorer under specific use cases.

Interested users may check out the full release notes here. The first stable version of 7-Zip 23.00 is expected later this year. The developer has not revealed a release date for that version yet.

The last major version of 7-Zip was released in 2022.

Source

Twitter user Albacore, known for deep diving into Windows Insider Builds, has discovered that Microsoft is working on pushing ads on the Home Settings page of the system.

When users open the Settings app, Home is the start page. The upcoming Home page may display an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top. It offers a free trial for Microsoft 365. Below that, Microsoft may display storage information and tips on finishing securing the account.

A second iteration of the Home page has the Microsoft 365 ad displayed at the bottom of the screen, and the Storage component above it.

The Accounts page may display product support notification in the future. The following screenshot shows a notice informing the user that Office 2013 support has ended.

The Home ads are not the only areas of Windows 11 that may get advertisement for Microsoft 365 in the future. Microsoft has been testing Start Menu ads recently. These are displayed in the session menu when users click on their profile icon in Start.

Microsoft has tested several iterations of these, including one that displays an error icon on the profile icon if a local Windows account is used. There has also been an experiment with File Explorer ads in 2022.

Microsoft is pushing Microsoft Accounts on Windows 11 and, as the next step, a Microsoft 365 subscription. While using a Microsoft Account has benefits to a user, some users prefer to use local accounts. There are good reasons for using a local account, including that Microsoft does not know nearly as much about the user.

It is clear that Microsoft is pushing its subscription-based service to increase revenue. It almost seems as if these upsells could become one of Microsoft's major strategies going forward.

Most of these changes have appeared in Insider builds only up until now. It remains to be seen if and how they land in Stable versions, and whether users will have options to turn these off.

Now You: what do you think about this trend? (via Deskmodder)

Another area in Windows 11 may show ads in the future

In a somewhat similar situation, developer of another third-party application, Defender Remover, has confirmed that their app was indeed causing issues with Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Good thing, though, is that the issue has been resolved in the latest version, 12.4.1. They write:

- update: this uwp issue is caused by unregistering classes of windows smart screen, so that is needed for uwp functionality (sometimes). The class which i'm talking about is SmartScreen Settings Checker. The next version of Defender Remover will not unregister SmartScreen anymore.

- fixed in 12.4.1

You can view the full changelog below:

• fixed issues with uwp apps specified in #38 .
• fixed some tracing removal of defender specified in #4 (in Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 Dev Channel, only)
• improvements in performance

In case you want to learn more or download the app, you can do so from Neowin or from its GitHub page.

Dev confirms Defender Remover was indeed breaking UWP apps on Windows 11

The full changelog is given below:

Feature update

• Improvements to enhanced security mode. Enhanced security mode provides an extra layer of protection when browsing the web and visiting unfamiliar sites. In this release updates include consolidating the security level settings to Balanced and Strict mode.

• Switch from Microsoft Autoupdate to EdgeUpdater for macOS. Microsoft Edge for macOS will start using a new updater named EdgeUpdater. This change only affects Microsoft Edge on macOS. If you use update preferences for Microsoft Autoupdate to prevent browser updates, you will need to transition to the new EdgeUpdater UpdateDefault policy before Microsoft Edge 113 to prevent future automatic updates.

• New policy for PDF View Settings. The RestorePdfView policy lets Admins control PDF View Recovery in Microsoft Edge. When enabled or if the policy isn't configured, Microsoft Edge will recover the last state of PDF view and land users on the section where they ended reading in the last session.

• Updated Microsoft Root Store policy. The MicrosoftRootStoreEnabled policy will now be supported in Microsoft Edge version 113 and 114. It will be removed in Microsoft Edge version 115.

Policy updates

New policies

• RestorePdfView - Restore PDF view
• EnforceLocalAnchorConstraintsEnabled - Determines whether the built-in certificate verifier will enforce constraints encoded into trust anchors loaded from the platform trust store
• ReadAloudEnabled - Enable Read Aloud feature in Microsoft Edge
• ShowDownloadsToolbarButton - Show Downloads button on the toolbar
• TabServicesEnabled - Tab Services enabled

You may find more details about these policies on Microsoft's official website here.

Latest Microsoft Edge brings security improvements, updated PDF policies to all

Luckily, there is a simple way to dodge the ads if you are one of the Gmail users suffering from in-line ads. Currently, Google is serving these ads to users who have turned on tabs which lets Gmail segregate incoming emails into different categories like Promotion and Social and Forums. You can turn off categories by following the steps below:

• Open your Gmail account and click on the Settings button on the top-right corner
• Click on 'See all settings' on the top of the sidebar
• Click on the 'Label' tab on the top-left
• Scroll to the Categories section
• Click hide for Social, Updates, Forums, and Promotions under the Show in message list section

This will turn off tabs for your Gmail account and will remove the in-line ads. You can still access the different categories from the left panel if needed. It is currently not clear if Google is just testing the waters with these ads or if the company plans to role it out to all the free Gmail users.

This is not the first time an email service has decided to serve ads without any prior notice. Last year, Microsoft confirmed that it will start serving more ads to Outlook users who are not paying for Microsoft 365 subscription.

Here's how you can get rid of annoying Gmail Inbox ads

Here is what is new in UUP Media Creator 3.1.5.0:

• Fixes #129 #150 - Issues preventing the usage on Linux and MacOS, both of those should now be working again
• Addresses an issue where making media using the LZMS compression would result in a broken image
• Allows downloading Server drops (AzureHci) using UUPDownload
• Document how to download canarychannel builds in the readme.md file
• Add CanaryChannel support for the get-builds parameter
• [NEW] UUPMediaConverter now requires the installation of libfuse2 on Linux machines
• Bumped a few dependencies
• Updated forked Dism/Wim library wrappers

Unlike other utilities for downloading ISO files like Rufus, MCT, or OCT, UUP Media Creator is slightly more complicated as it is entirely command-line based. If you want to learn how to use UUP Media Creator, check out the Usage section on the project's GitHub repository. Alternatively, download a UWP front-end from the Microsoft Store. The app gives UUPMC a user-friendly and straightforward UI that makes downloading files much easier. However, it has yet to receive support for version 3.1.5.0, which means you cannot use it for downloading Canary files.

UUP Media Creator is an open-source project, and you can track its development on GitHub and in the developer's Telegram channel and Twitter account. It is maintained by the same mastermind responsible for letting us run Windows 11, 10X, and 10 on the Surface Duo, Lumia smartphones (remember those?), and more.

UUP Media Converter app now lets you download Canary Channel ISO files

According to Windows Central, Microsoft plans to let Windows 11 users place widgets on the desktop to create a Windows 7-like experience with its famous gadgets. It is a highly-anticipated feature many users want to get in the current OS or what is about to substitute it later next year (check out this Windows "12" concept and a similar to it variant).

Unfortunately, there is no information on when the feature will arrive. However, the upcoming Build 2023 conference will have a session dedicated to Windows Widgets, so it is reasonable to expect Microsoft to share more details there.

Microsoft is testing other widget-related changes, such as a redesigned widget board with dedicated spaces for widgets and news, an iOS-like widget picker, and animated and theme-aware icons. All those changes are already available in Windows 11 preview builds.

Microsoft reportedly plans to add one of the most requested features to Windows 11's Widgets

Microsoft has not mentioned File Explorer improvements in the official release notes for build 23451. They are one of those neat hidden features users discover after digging into the updates as soon as they become available. As reported by @PhantomOfEarth on Twitter, the new WinAppSDK-based File Explorer features a much snappier tab-managing experience. Here is how to enable it using the ViveTool app.

Caution: Unannounced features are often raw, unstable, or borderline unusable. Back up important data before enabling them. Remember that using stable Windows 11 builds is the best way to ensure your system remains as bug-free as possible.

How to enable the updated File Explorer in Windows 11 build 23451?

1. Download ViveTool from GitHub and unpack the files in a convenient and easy-to-find folder.
2. Press Win + X and select Terminal (Admin).
3. Switch Windows Terminal to the Command Prompt profile with the Ctrl + Shift + 2 shortcut or by clicking the arrow-down button at the top of the window.

    

   
4. Navigate to the folder containing the ViveTool files with the CD command. For example, if you have placed ViveTool in C:\Vive, type CD C:\Vive.
5. Type vivetool /enable /id:39661369 and press Enter. You can revert changes by replacing /enable with /disable in the command.
6. Restart your computer.

Other Explorer-related changes in Windows 11 build 23451 include a brand-new details pane for quick access to file activity, collaboration, related content, etc. You can find more details in the release notes.

Windows 11 build 23451 significantly improves tabs in File Explorer

Since then, the app received a few updates and with one of the previous releases, it made its debut on the Microsoft Store. However, there were some Store policy violation issues which were resolved with a later version. Alongside that, some features were also removed which were causing conflicts with other apps and features on Windows 11.

Despite that, it looks like its Microsoft Store life was short-lived. BloatyNosy's developer has confirmed that Microsoft seemingly has banned the app from the Store. On its GitHub page, the developer described the ordeal with some harsh words:

Update on May 5, 2023

BloatyNosy is no longer available in the Microsoft Store and was banned by Microsoft overnight.
Numerous update attempts have been rejected, each time with a new excuse, and now it is stated officially that the app does not have a valid certificate, even though it was inside for months before. (Previously, all Microsoft Store apps - native UWPs for example and also Win32s - were hosted and signed by the Microsoft Store and received a Microsoft signature.) The store continues to be a tragedy. It's a shame for my precious time.

If you wanted to download this third-party utility in case you aren't happy with the "bloatware" on your OS, the app can still be downloaded from GitHub. Do keep in mind though that this is an unofficial tool.

Windows 11 debloater app gets banned from Microsoft Store, dev calls it "a tragedy"

With over 300 million people using Microsoft Teams for online meetings and chats, it stands to reason that there will be more of a need for customization for each of those users. Today, the Microsoft Design team announced it has created a new and large collection of virtual backgrounds for Teams that have started rolling out worldwide.

In a Medium post, the Microsoft Design team says this is the largest update for the Teams virtual background feature since it was added in 2020. It stated:

Featuring all-new images, the reimagined visual library for Teams has been thoughtfully designed to represent the people that use them and how they work best. Looking at the popularity of certain images, we noticed that customers are equally enthusiastic about being depicted in fun and imaginative scenes as they are being portrayed in realistic spaces like a coworking space, office, or home. By mapping out a series of user needs and meeting types, the Teams crew applied a fresh lens to craft and organize the new backgrounds into six categories.

The Microsoft Design team put a ton of thought into these new backgrounds, including using research from Microsoft and its LinkedIn and GitHub subsidiaries. It stated:

Crafted with your position in mind, the new backgrounds avoid obstructing key elements and awkward framing. You are the hero of the scene, for example, smaller archways are intentionally off-centered to ensure you’re not blocking the most engaging part of the image. The new Teams backgrounds have been built to not only be a delightful tool for self-expression but an effortless way to enhance your digital presence.

Of course, Teams users are still free to upload and use their own images for virtual backgrounds. Microsoft recently added over 20 Snapchat-based lenses for Teams users to customize their looks in online meetings.

Microsoft Teams is rolling out new and detailed virtual backgrounds

Those not interested in the offered website can remove it from recommendations by right-clicking it. And if you want to turn off Start menu recommendations altogether, go to Settings > Personalization > Start and toggle off the "Show recommendations" option. Sadly, this will not remove the Recommended section to give you more space for your pins, but you can do that with a third-party app we recently recommended in our "Top 10 apps to fix Windows 11's inconveniences" article.

Microsoft is gradually rolling out the updated website recommendations to insiders running the latest Windows 11 Dev build. Therefore, you may not have access to the feature after upgrading to build 23451. But if you do, share your feedback with Microsoft to help the company decide if it should ship this questionable feature to all users.

Microsoft brings back a controversial Start menu change it removed earlier from Windows 11