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Microsoft to unplug Internet Explorer as it seeks edge in browser war
Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is pulling the plug on its once omnipresent browser, Internet Explorer, next year as it prepares to battle market leader Chrome with its slicker Edge browser.
Launched in 1995, Internet Explorer became the dominant browser for over a decade as it was bundled with Microsoft’s Windows operating system that came pre-installed in billions of computers.
The browser, however, started losing out to Google’s Chrome in the late 2000s and has become a subject of countless internet memes for its sluggishness in comparison to its rivals.
To compete better, Microsoft launched the Edge browser in 2015 that runs on the same technology as the Google browser.
As of April, Chrome has a 65% share of the global browser market, followed by Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) Safari, with an 18% share, according to web analytics firm Statcounter. Microsoft Edge has a 3% share, while Internet Explorer has a miniscule share of the market it once dominated.
The Windows software maker said on Wednesday the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 was in its faster and more secure Microsoft Edge.
“Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10,” the company said in a blog post.
The browser was at the heart of an antitrust case against Microsoft more than two decades ago, with a U.S. judge deciding that the software titan had broken the law after it combined Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system.
The most serious violations of the law were upheld on appeal, but the company continued to bundle its operating system and browser.
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Google Photos Locked Folder might not be as useful as we thought it would be
This story was originally published and last updated .
Google Photos might cost you money going forward, but Google is working hard on making it an enticing service nonetheless, with Google One editing perks and automatic creations that you can’t find on other platforms. Now the company has introduced another stand-out feature: a Locked Folder. As more details about it are emerging, we’ve also learned about a potential dealbreaker for some — the Locked Folder is purely local on your phone, with no cloud backups available.
Despite being on the market for years, Photos has never added one of the most trivial features many other, local-only galleries have long had, like OnePlus (which has had a safe folder since 2019) and Samsung (which has had one since 2017). In fact, even Google’s own Files app has had a Safe Folder for a while now. There are even apps that automatically hide any, erm, not-safe-for-work pictures on your phone for you.
In any case, Google has finally moved.
With Locked Folder in @googlephotos, you can add photos to a passcode protected space and they won’t show up as you scroll through Photos or other apps on your phone. Locked Folder is launching first on Google Pixel, and more Android devices throughout the year. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/yGNoQ8vLdq
— Google (@Google) May 18, 2021
In Google Photos, the locked folder is located in the Utilities section living in the Library bottom tab. It uses your screen lock option as a security measure, so you can pick between your biometric authentication (if set up) or your PIN/pattern. In any case, you need to set up some form of lockscreen protection in order to use the feature.
That tie-in with your phone’s security is also part of the reason why the Locked Folder is purely local. That’s right — as soon as you move images to it from your Photos library, they’re deleted from your Photos cloud storage and solely live in a protected environment on your phone (though it can take up to 30 minutes for them to disappear from all of your Photos-connected devices). That means that once you lose or break your phone, you lose access to these images permanently.
The locked folder is great for sensitive images of documents, account numbers, ID cards, your social security number, and, you know, certain other sensitive pictures (editor’s note: b00bs). Once you move images into the folder, they won’t show up in your timeline or any other place in Photos or your phone anymore. Viewing an image in the folder, you get to see two always available buttons: Delete and move. Choosing the latter option is necessary if you want to edit, share, or trash items.
You also won’t be able to search or create albums inside the folder, so if you have a lot of images in there, you might have to resort to scrolling through everything manually.
It’s great to see that Google has finally added this feature to Photos. It seems that now that Google soon has to compete with other paid products, it’s finally thinking about adding some of the basics it was lacking before.
The Locked Folder will first be available on Pixel phones and arrive on more Android phones throughout the year. Pixel phones will even allow you to save images right to the Locked Folder from the camera app. If your phone is fully managed by an organization or due to parental control settings, you won’t be able to use the Locked Folder at all.
Later during I/O, Google revealed that it’s adding even more nifty features to Photos. There’s the magic animated cinematic photos created from just two reference images, the new Little Patterns automatic creations, and a new smarter photo grid view for your timeline.
TimeSplitters Studio Free Radicals Reforms to Make a New Entry at Last
“To finally be able to confirm that the studio has been formed and that we have a plan for the next TimeSplitters game is incredible,” said Ellis. who is serving as the studio development director. “While we cannot tell you anything more at the moment, we look forward to sharing information in the future.”Sadly, we may have to wait quite a while to see what Free Radicals is cooking up; development is not expected to begin on the new TimeSplitters for a few months, with the team expecting to spend some time building out its studio in Nottingham first.
TimeSplitters was a first-person shooter series masterminded by Doak, Ellis, Karl Kilton and Graeme Norgate after the four left Rare years before. TimeSplitters was first released in 2000 as a launch game for the PlayStation 2, and echoed elements from previous Rare shooters such as GoldenEye 007. It took place across multiple different time periods with 18 separate characters battling against the titular foe, creatures who can travel through time and wreck history using special crystals.
It got a sequel in TimeSplitters 2 in 2002, and a further entry in 2005 called TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. After Free Radicals struggled to find a publisher for a fourth game, the rights languished at Crytek for years before Deep Silver parent Koch Media bought them up in 2018.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Microsoft plans to pull the plug on Internet Explorer
Microsoft said it plans to largely retire its Internet Explorer browser, adding to the digital scrap heap a product once at the center of one of the tech industry’s biggest battles.
The software giant on Wednesday said its Internet Explorer 11 desktop application, the current version, will no longer be supported starting June 15 of next year for certain versions of the company’s Windows software. Microsoft’s browser push now is centered on Edge, which it launched in 2015, and shares underlying technology with Chrome.
Internet Explorer has faded gradually from prominence as rival browsers such as Chrome from Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit and Safari from Apple Inc. have won audiences. Internet Explorer had less than 2% of the global browser market for desktop computers in April, according to web analytics firm Statcounter. Chrome had more than 65% of that market, ahead of Safari’s roughly 10%. Microsoft Edge had 8%, according to the data.
UNEARTHED INTERNAL MICROSOFT COMPLAINTS CLAIM WOMEN WERE ‘ABUSED AND DEGRAGED’
Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
---|---|---|---|---|
MSFT | MICROSOFT CORP. | 243.12 | +0.60 | +0.25% |
GOOG | ALPHABET, INC. | 2,308.71 | +5.28 | +0.23% |
AAPL | APPLE, INC. | 124.69 | -0.16 | -0.13% |
Internet Explorer joins other big names from the early days of the internet era to transition from digital reality to corporate history after being overtaken by others. AOL Instant Messenger was retired in 2017 after users flocked to platforms such as Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp. Two years later, Tumblr, the microblogging site turned social-media network, was sold for a pittance after being overtaken by Facebook and others. BlackBerry Ltd. the company that popularized mobile email and whose devices became a must have for many in business, stopped selling its own devices after Apple’s success with the iPhone and other smartphones caught on. It still provides security software for phones and other devices.
More than two decades ago, Internet Explorer was riding high—perhaps too high to some. It featured prominently in the browser battle of roughly 20 years ago and in the U.S. government’s antitrust battle against Microsoft. A federal judge ruled that Microsoft maintained its monopoly in operating-systems software by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the web-browser market by unlawfully tying its Internet Explorer browser to its Windows operating-system software. The practice caused the use of Netscape Navigator, once a dominant browser, “to drop substantially” from 1995 to 1998, the judge wrote. Microsoft in 2001 reached a settlement with the Justice Department over its allegations, without admitting wrongdoing.
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Microsoft’s decision to sunset the browser is also a reflection of how people have changed their habits around accessing the internet, with the rise of tablets and smartphones supplanting, for many, the use of personal computers as their principal way to connect. Apple’s introduction of the App Store on the iPhone, for instance, provided a different way for people to access Internet applications. Some of the practices around those tools are now under antitrust scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Internet Explorer experienced neglect not only from a broad spectrum of consumers. The software didn’t earn a reference in Microsoft’s most recent annual report.
For those who just can’t let go, Microsoft is offering an “IE mode” with its Edge browser, allowing users to access websites and applications that haven’t transitioned away from Internet Explorer.
Resident Evil Village PC mod makes Lady Dimitrescu’s hat enormous
It’s been nearly two weeks since the release of Resident Evil Village, and fans still can’t get enough of the treacherously beautiful Lady Dimitrescu. While some fans still thirst over the seductive vampire mommy, a new mod puts a comedic twist on the character: Every time you look at Lady Dimitrescu, her fabulous wide-brimmed black hat enlarges. The result is a comedic encounter where her hat takes over entire castle rooms.
The mod, created by Kallialee, grows Lady D’s hat to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Turn around and look at her, and the hat just keeps getting bigger. At one point in the video, the hat’s brim shades an entire courtyard.
User Geestargames posted a video of the mod in action, where you can see for yourself just how big the hat gets.
Resident Evil Village just launched May 7 and already it has nurtured a lively modding community. Fans were so excited for the game that a load of mods — including one that has Ethan Winters running from hordes of the children’s show mascot, Barney — came out before launch day. Now that the game is out, Lady D modders have all the more opportunity to experiment with the horror gem. And Resident Evil Village.
11 things we know about the new smartwatch OS from Google and Samsung
Yesterday brought the momentous news that Google and Samsung will merge together their Wear OS and Tizen-based smartwatch platforms into a single operating system. The new software is currently being referred to as Wear, but that name could change as we get closer to the first devices that will ship with it.
The unified platform is intended to give Android smartwatches a huge boost and much simpler strategy. It will also allow developers to create apps and widgets for a single OS instead of splitting their efforts between Wear OS and Tizen. A lot of this is spelled out in more detail in the below video, but let’s also focus on the big highlights.
It’s going to be faster than Wear OS
Speed and responsiveness were one of the major talking points when Google and Samsung made this announcement during the I/O 2021 keynote. The companies are claiming that apps open up to 30 percent faster than they currently do on Wear OS. Google also promises “smooth user interface animations and motion,” which hasn’t always been a strength of Wear OS.
Battery life will be a step up, too
Samsung’s smartwatches were already routinely outlasting Wear OS products, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. The company is lending Google some hardware expertise to ensure better stamina. “Samsung implemented our best technology to provide optimized performances, and advanced sensor batching and low power display technology to ensure an efficient and long-lasting battery,” Samsung’s Janghyun Yoon wrote after Tuesday’s news. Google’s Bjorn Kilburn said customers can expect “handy optimizations like the ability to run the heart rate sensor continuously during the day, track your sleep overnight and still have battery for the next day.”
The next Samsung Galaxy Watch will run Wear
Samsung has confirmed that its next smartwatch — and all others in the pipeline — will run the unified Wear platform. But the company made sure to note that it will bring over some of its popular hardware elements, like the rotating bezel mechanism.
A standalone Google Maps app will do turn-by-turn directions
In a report from Wired, we learned that there are plans for a Google Maps app on Wear that features “a new user interface that will also work even if your phone is not with you.” That hints at cellular data support on the new unified platform.
Spotify and YouTube Music apps will support offline downloads
Spotify already allows owners of Samsung smartwatches to download songs for offline listening, and now that same convenience will be extended to Wear. That’s one thing Spotify for the Apple Watch still doesn’t do.
Google also confirmed that YouTube Music will be available on Wear. Like Spotify, it’ll include full support for offline listening.
Fitbit activity tracking will be built into the platform
Having completed its acquisition of Fitbit at the start of this year, Google will now integrate some of the brand’s health and activity tracking features into Wear. Future premium Fitbit wearables will also run the unified platform.
Device makers will be able to customize the look and feel
Google tried to emphasize on Tuesday that this platform isn’t just intended for itself and Samsung. “All device makers will be able to add a customized user experience on top of the platform,” Kilburn said. That’s going to prove important if Google wants to keep companies like Garmin on board with the new platform. And we can’t forget about the many traditional watchmakers — Fossil, Citizen, TAG Heuer, and others — that have gotten behind Wear OS in recent years in the absence of a flagship smartwatch from Google.
Apps should be faster and easier to develop with new APIs
Wear’s apps will use the latest Android development techniques like Jetpack and Kotlin to help reach the best possible performance. Google is also promising to make life easier for app makers with new APIs that cover Tiles, health services, watchfaces, complications, and more. And an activity indicator will show when certain functions are running in the background.
Some Wear OS smartwatches might get upgraded to Wear
There aren’t any firm promises yet, but Google at least didn’t outright say existing products won’t be updated to the new OS. The company told 9to5Google, “we will have more updates to share on timelines once the new version launches later this year.”
Samsung will not update Galaxy Watch models to Wear
Samsung will not be updating its Galaxy Watch line to Wear, but says it has no intention of leaving its current customers in the dust once it starts releasing Wear hardware. “For customers who already own the Tizen OS based Galaxy smartwatches, we are continuing to provide at least three years of software support after the product launch,” the company said Tuesday. However, it seems plausible there will be more than a few features and new Wear tricks that will never make their way to older Galaxy smartwatches.
Samsung will bring over its watchface designer tool
Some people out there really care about having a good watchface selection on a pricey smartwatch. Google and Samsung are promising a wide mix of styles, and Samsung told Wired its design tool — and many of the company’s own signature watchfaces — will be available on Wear.
The unknowns
Google and Samsung shared a decent chunk of information on day one, but we’re still left without answers to a few important questions. We should learn more details over the summer as we head into fall hardware season.
- When will the first Wear smartwatch be available?
- Is the underlying operating system closer to Wear OS or closer to Tizen? (Considering that developers will be using Android tools to build apps, it seems like the former.)
- Will there be required helper apps like some of Samsung’s watches have needed?
- Is Wear going to continue offering some semblance of iOS support?
- What’s going to happen to Samsung Pay and Bixby? Are they both goners on the wrist?
Google plans to build a practical quantum computer by 2029 at new center
Google has begun building a new and larger quantum computing research center that will employ hundreds of people to design and build a broadly useful quantum computer by 2029. It’s the latest sign that the competition to turn these radical new machines into practical tools is growing more intense as established players like IBM and Honeywell vie with quantum computing startups.
The new Google Quantum AI campus is in Santa Barbara, California, where Google’s first quantum computing lab already employs dozens of researchers and engineers, Google said at its annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday. A few initial researchers already are working there.
One top job at Google’s new quantum computing center is making the fundamental data processing elements, called qubits, more reliable, said Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research and Health, who helped build some of Google’s most important technologies like search, advertising and AI. Qubits are easily perturbed by outside forces that derail calculations, but error correction technology will let quantum computers work longer so they become more useful.
“We are hoping the timeline will be that in the next year or two we’ll be able to have a demonstration of an error-correcting qubit,” Dean told CNET in a briefing before the conference.
Quantum computing is a promising field that can bring great power to bear on complex problems, like developing new drugs or materials, that bog down classical machines. Quantum computers, however, rely on the weird physical laws that govern ultrasmall particles and that open up entirely new processing algorithms. Although several tech giants and startups are pursuing quantum computers, their efforts for now remain expensive research projects that haven’t proven their potential.
“We hope to one day create an error-corrected quantum computer,” said Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, during the Google I/O keynote speech.
Error correction combines many real-world qubits into a single working virtual qubit, called a logical qubit. With Google’s approach, it’ll take about 1,000 physical qubits to make a single logical qubit that can keep track of its data. Then Google expects to need 1,000 logical qubits to get real computing work done. A million physical qubits is a long way from Google’s current quantum computers, which have just dozens.
One priority for the new center is bringing more quantum computer manufacturing work under Google’s control, which, when combined with an increase in the number of quantum computers, should accelerate progress.
Google is spotlighting its quantum computing work at Google I/O, a conference geared chiefly for programmers who need to work with the search giant’s Android phone software, Chrome web browser and other projects. The conference provides Google a chance to show off globe-scale infrastructure, burnish its reputation for innovation and generally geek out. Google is also using the show to tout new AI technology that brings computers a bit closer to human intelligence and to provide details of its custom hardware for accelerating AI.
As one of Google’s top engineers, Dean is a major force in the computing industry, a rare example of a programmer to be profiled in The New Yorker magazine. He’s been instrumental in building key technologies like MapReduce, which helped propel Google to the top of the search engine business, and TensorFlow, which powers its extensive use of artificial intelligence technology. He’s now facing cultural and political challenges, too, most notably the very public departure of AI researcher Timnit Gebru.
Google’s TPU AI accelerators
At I/O, Dean also revealed new details of Google’s AI acceleration hardware, custom processors it calls tensor processing units. Dean described how the company hooks 4,096 of its fourth-generation TPUs into a single pod that’s 10 more powerful than earlier pods with TPU v3 chips.
“A single pod is an incredibly large amount of computational power,” Dean said. “We have many of them deployed now in many different data centers, and by the end of the year we expect to have dozens of them deployed.” Google uses the TPU pods chiefly for training AI, the computationally intense process that generates the AI models that later show up in our phones, smart speakers and other devices.
Previous AI pod designs had a dedicated collection of TPUs, but with TPU v4, Google connects them with fast fiber-optic lines so different modules can be yoked together into a group. That means modules that are down for maintenance can easily be sidestepped, Dean said.
Google’s TPU v4 pods are for its own use now, but they’ll be available to the company’s cloud computing customers later this year, Pichai said.
The approach has been profoundly important to Google’s success. While some computer users focused on expensive, ultra-reliable computing equipment, Google has employed cheaper equipment since its earliest days. However, it designed its infrastructure so that it could continue working even when individual elements failed.
Google is also trying to improve its AI software with a technique called multitask unified model, or MUM. Today, separate AI systems are trained to recognize text, speech, photos and videos. Google wants a broader AI that spans all those inputs. Such a system would, for example, recognize a leopard regardless of whether it saw a photo or heard someone speak the word, Dean said.
Google tackles fake news in Search update. Here’s how it works
Google is making it easier for people to evaluate information and check the sources for results that show up on its massive search platform, the company said during the Google I/O developer’s conference keynote on Tuesday.
When you search for something on Google, a new feature called About this Result will appear under a given website in your results list. This will show you how the site describes itself, what other sites say about it, and its Wikipedia page, so you can make a more informed decision about which sites to trust. About this Result will begin rolling out over time.
An update to Google Lens, the AR-powered camera recognition feature that helps you identify plants and animals or translate text on a printed page, will add new capabilities to help you quickly search, copy or listen to text you’ve just translated. The update will launch globally this month on Android devices, and later this summer on iOS.
Google is also experimenting with a new AI development in Search called MUM, which can transfer knowledge across languages and modalities such as text, images and videos. Google says it will combine a deep understanding of your query intent and the world’s information to solve even the most complex searches. Google says it will be 1,000 times more powerful than BERT, the neural network-based technique for natural language processing pretraining that helps Google better understand language.
Here’s YouTube Music, revamped Google Wear OS apps
At I/O 2021, Google announced that its wearable platform would do a better job of highlighting first-party services, among other tentpoles. This includes YouTube Music, Google Maps, Pay, and Assistant, with a brief preview of those Wear OS apps provided today.
The biggest announcement is a YouTube Music app for Wear OS that lets you download songs and playlists for offline listening. This capability has been absent from the platform for the past few months following the deprecation of Google Play Music. Today, you only have a basic media notification and control of what’s playing on your phone
The “Downloads” view simply shows your Offline Mixtape and Your Likes at the very top, similar to the mobile clients. YouTube Music will automatically sync your favorite and recent tunes, with this capability just “for subscribers” that pay for Premium.
Next is Google Pay for Wear OS becoming available in 26 additional countries for a sizable expansion from the existing 11(Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, UK, and US). You’ll also be able to pay for transit in more than 200 major metros with your wearable.
Meanwhile, Google Maps will let you navigate without your phone. Google today did not share what the new Assistant experience will be beyond noting that all these have been “revamped with our new design principles and expanded capabilities.”
Google also shared that Fitbit will be available on Wear watches, down to the Today view that shows all your stats and goal celebrations.
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