Martin Brinkmann

Five-hundred-and-ninety-four in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Unactivated Windows 11 systems could soon prevent users from changing certain Microsoft Edge settings. Edge could show a "PC not activated" notification in Settings to users.

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Five-hundred-and-ninety-three in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft reduced the size of Windows 10 updates to improve delivery performance. The same technique has been used on Windows 11 since the release of the operating system in 2021.

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Five-hundred-and-ninety-two in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft will advertise a selection of apps in the Windows 11 Start menu. The change landed in the latest optional update for Windows 11 and will roll out to all users as part of the May 2024 Patch Day.

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Windows 11's Start menu will soon advertise applications in the recommended section.

Microsoft released a new optional preview update for Windows 11 this week that introduces the feature. The changes it includes will roll out to all Windows 11 devices as part of the May 2024 cumulative security update.

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Five-hundred-and-ninety-one in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft claims that it has improved the performance of the Microsoft Store significantly. Product pages, for instance, load 40% faster now than before, according to Microsoft.

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Five-hundred-and-ninety in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

The Moment Update 5 for Windows 11 is finally here for most users. It is included in the April 2024 cumulative security update for the operating system.

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Spotify's new AI Playlist feature adds an AI component to the creation of playlists on the site. All it takes is to feed the AI some text and it does the rest.

Feed it "sing along songs while riding on a pony in Colorado", "songs while waiting for the microwave to go 'ping'", or "songs for boring bus rides in downtown LA", and you should get a list of matching music almost instantly.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-nine in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Windows 10 customers may extend support by up to three years after the operating system reaches end of support in October 2025. While Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for consumers, it announced that organizations will have to pay $61 in the first year for a regular extension. The price doubles each year, reaching an incredible $427 for the three year period.

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Microsoft is working on a redesign of the All Apps menu of the Windows 11 Start Menu. The current iteration of All Apps was introduced in Windows 10. Users could activate the section to get an alpha-numerical list of all installed applications.

Critics argue that the layout is not practicable. It has a lot of whitespace and only one entry per line. Users who prefer improved layouts may switch to Start Menu alternatives such as Start11 or StartAllBack.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-eight in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft released the March 2024 optional update for Windows 11 this week. It includes all the changes of the Moment Update 5, which adds more AI to Windows and also changes for European Economic Area users.

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The European Commission announced today that it has opened non-compliance investigations against Apple, Alphabet, and Meta. The three companies make up one half of six gatekeeper companies under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

So-called gatekeepers have a strong position in a market, which may give them an unfair advantage over competing platforms and services. Platforms such as Windows, Google Android, and iOS are gatekeepers, but so are YouTube, Google Search, Google Ads, Chrome, or Safari. The full list of gatekeepers is available here.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-seven in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft announced two new Surface devices for business yesterday. The new Surface Pro 10 for Business and the Surface Laptop 6 for Business are up to two times faster than their predecessors according to Microsoft. They are optimized for AI and come with the Copilot key.

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Google Chrome users may once again enforce dark mode support for web content in the web browser. The feature has been in the making for a long time. Sofia talked about it more than five years ago here on BetaNews.

While Google did add support for a dark Chrome interface in the past, it never rolled out the option to display darker versions of webpages.

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Microsoft announced the migration of the Microsoft Edge built-in PDF reader to Adobe PDF technology last year. The change would allow Edge users to view PDF documents using Adobe's engine.

Microsoft and Adobe promised back then that this would improve things by providing "a unique experience" with "higher fidelity for more accurate colors and graphics, improved performance" and even stronger security and better accessibility.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft is rolling out improved versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 to users in the European Economic Area. These give users more customization options, such as the ability to remove Microsoft Edge or Bing Web Search entirely from the operating system.

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