Windows 10

News of an enormous security bug affecting millions of processors can't have escaped your attention over the last 24 hours or so. While Intel goes into a panicked meltdown, desperately pointing out that there's another bug affecting other processors too, software fixes are starting to emerge.

macOS has already been patched, and fixes have started to roll out to numerous Linux distros as well. Now Microsoft has pushed out a rare, off-schedule emergency fix for Windows 10 users which should be automatically installed. Users of Windows 7 and Windows 8 will have to wait until next week for a patch.

While Windows 10 is gaining some serious ground in the PC market, the same cannot be said about Microsoft Edge. Looking at the usage share of the major browsers on Windows 10, it is pretty much in the same place as it was a year ago -- a distant second to Google Chrome.

While it may be easy to dismiss Edge, Microsoft has rolled out major improvements since it debuted in mid-2015. And it's touting the benefits every chance it gets. Two new ads released by Microsoft promote better battery life and increased security over its main rival.

Microsoft officially called time on the free Windows 10 upgrade offer in 2016, but allowed anyone using assistive technologies to continue to upgrade to the new OS without paying a penny.

This offer worked on an honor system -- you weren’t required to provide any proof that you used assistive technologies in order to make use of the deal -- allowing anyone to continue to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. Microsoft finally closed this loophole on December 31, 2017, except (whisper it) the site, and the deal, are still available.

Depending on which analyst firm you believe, Windows 10 is either a whisker away from overtaking Windows 7 as the most popular desktop operating system, or still quite a distance off.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows usage share from the gamers’ perspective, paints an entirely different picture however. It has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until recently, when Windows 7 roared into the top spot.

While NetMarketShare’s monthly usage share figures show there to still be a fairly significant gap between Windows 7 and Windows 10 (in the older OS’s favor), rival analyst firm StatCounter has long reported the battle for the top spot to be much, much tighter.

So close is the race in fact, that in October it looked as if Windows 10 would easily pass Windows 7 at some point in the following month. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen, although the gap did narrow. It seemed all but guaranteed that Windows 10 would claim pole position in December, but incredibly it didn’t.

NetMarketShare reports on the state of the desktop operating system market on the first day of each month, and it has long shown Windows 10 to be lagging well behind Windows 7. However, tweaks to how the analyst firm records these numbers means the gap has closed recently.

The latest figures, for the final month of 2017, show Windows 10 growing and Windows 7 declining, but the difference in usage share hasn’t altered by much.

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

Microsoft will end the last official option to upgrade a Windows machine to Windows 10 for free. The company ends the free upgrade option to users who use Assistive Technologies on December 31, 2017.

Microsoft releases two big feature updates a year for Windows 10. 2017 saw the arrival of the Creators Update in April, followed by the Fall Creators Update in October.

The Creators Update was a slow and at times problematic release. A quarter of Windows 10 users still didn’t have it by the time its successor rolled out. Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have learned some important lessons, and the Fall Creators Update is being installed at a much faster rate.

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

Google put an installer for its Chrome browser in the Windows 10 Store for a few hours before it was removed by Microsoft. Mihaita has the details on that.

It took Microsoft a month to get Windows 10 Insider Build 17063 ready for release, as some pesky bugs kept getting in the way. This is an important build for the software giant as it’s chock full of new features -- including Timeline and Sets -- as well as numerous improvements throughout.

However, despite all the time Microsoft put into getting the build ready for release, it seems some pretty nasty bugs slipped through the gaps, as Insiders are discovering.

It’s been a whopping four weeks since Microsoft flighted a new Windows 10 Insider build. Given the software giant normally rolls out new builds on a weekly basis, it’s been a long wait for Build 17063 to arrive, but a wait that’s definitely been worth it.

Microsoft said this was an important build, and one it wanted to get right. It’s easy to see why. There are new features, and big changes galore throughout.

Google is notorious for its abysmal support of Windows 10's app store. A quick search reveals that there are only two apps available from the company, both of which are called Google. One is for PCs and the other targets mobile devices. Neither is of any real value to Google users on Windows 10 though.

If you want Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube or Google Maps you will have to use the browser. However, there is a different story with Google Chrome. The browser just landed on Microsoft Store (Windows 10's app store), making it easier than ever to download it on a Windows 10 machine.

Microsoft has been bundling a password manager that features a dangerous flaw with some versions of Windows 10, a Google security researcher has revealed. Tavis Ormandy noticed that his copy of Windows 10 included Keeper, which he had previously found to be injecting privileged UI into pages.

The version that Microsoft was including with Windows 10 featured the same bug. What does this mean? In short, it allows any website to steal passwords from you.

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

As always, if I missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email.

It's quite interesting to see just how far Microsoft has come since Satya Nadella became CEO. The company has gotten out of its comfort zone and made its products more appealing to a wider range of customers, embracing rival platforms and the open-source community. Having Visual Studio on Macs and tons of apps on Android and iOS is something that would have been unheard of only a few years ago.

The same goes for offering a subsystem for Linux or OpenSSH support on Windows 10. That last bit may not excite everyone, but it is especially useful for those who want to log in remotely on Linux devices -- which would have normally required third-party tools like PuTTY. Microsoft is not stopping there though, as it's taking things to the next level by adding a native OpenSSH client and server to Windows 10.