InfoWorld has put together a very good Fact of Fiction about Windows 10. A couple good ones to point out: Fact: Windows 10 has a 10-year support cycle Like Windows Vista, Win7, and Win8 before it, Windows 10 has a 10-year support cycle. In fact, we’re getting a few extra months for free: According to the Windows Lifecycle fact sheet, mainstream support ends Oct. 13, 2020. Fiction: Microsoft pulled Windows Media Player from Windows 10 One word here seems to be tripping up folks. What Microsoft has pulled is Windows Media Center, which is a horse of a completely different…
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In light of this weekend’s Nvidia driver as well as today’s automatic updates causing Windows Explorer to crash, Microsoft has pushed out the “Show or hide updates” troubleshooter tool aka KB3073930. KB3073930 is a standalone (not available from Windows Update) patch for the Windows 10 Insider Preview. From the support document on Microsoft’s site: In Windows 10 Insider Preview, your device is always kept up to date with the latest features and fixes. Updates are installed automatically, with no need to select which updates are needed or not needed. In rare cases, a specific driver or update might temporarily cause issues with…
As if the Nvidia driver update issue (still unresolved on Microsoft’s part) weren’t bad enough another and much more serious forced automatic update issue came to light today. Following the Nvidia debacle, over the weekend Windows 10 pushed ‘KB3074681’ to Windows Insiders running Windows 10 Build 10240. This is presumed to be the same build as the final release consumers and businesses will receive on Wednesday. KB3074681 had no detailed information about what it contained but as it was classified as a ‘security’ patch it installed immediately and without warning to all versions of Windows 10 (Home, Pro and Enterprise)…
Earlier this month I talked about Dave Camp’s email: “Individual features rolling out to small audiences for focused and multi-variate testing”. Haven’t a clue on what exactly they mean by this, much less how it is going to be implemented…To me it sounds like they want to make select end user guinea pigs. I suspect there will be more about this in the future or it will be scrapped. I was correct in that there would be more in the future and the users would be guinea pigs as well. So Mozilla is introducing in Firefox 40 (ETA: August 11th) and opportunity for users on…
After posting Firefox Win64 Supports Only Flash I got to thinking I knew I had seen a comment recently in Bugzilla about ‘video changes’ in Firefox for Win64. Looking through the bugs I am following, I found Bug 1181014 which basically was proposal to allow users to download win64 builds from everywhere, not only on the /all/ pages. The /all page referred to here is the Systems & Languages link on the Firefox download/landing page. This link takes the user to page where they can see all the localization builds and supported operating systems of Firefox. The first time I saw…
In a very odd move Mozilla has made a change to the latest Firefox Nightly (Firefox 42) Win64 which only allows the Shockwave Flash NPAPI plugin. Note: the Prime Content Decryption and Open H264 are now standard all will always be supported. While Shockwave Flash is still supported Silverlight is not. Simple enough, just install the plugin and you’re ready to go. Users won’t be able to install Silverlight in the Win64 version of Firefox since it is not allowed. Microsoft’s Silverlight is used by Netflix and Amazon Video along with many other Video on Demand (VOD) sites (especially outside the US). This is a result…
Windows 10 hasn’t even been released to the general public yet and there is already a major problem. The cause of this problem was Windows 10 insisting that EVERY update is mandatory, including device drivers (which were optional in Windows 7 and Windows 8). In this case it users of dual monitors with certain Nvidia graphic cards. The flaw revolves around Nvidia graphics cards with users taking to Nvidia’s forums to report Windows Update is automatically installing new drivers which break multimonitor setups, SLI (dual card) configurations and can even stop PCs booting entirely which pushes Windows 10 into its emergency…
I reported last week that Windows 10 has changed the way you setup your Default Apps. The biggest change is this has to be done within Windows System Settings, not from within the application. If you attempt to have the application to tell Windows it wants to be the default application you will get this annoying and unhelpful message: For Firefox, Mozilla has implemented a change coming with Firefox 40 that will open the Default Apps setting in Windows 10 when the user tries to make Firefox the default browser within Firefox. This is needed because it appears when a user…
Also introduced in Thunderbird 38 (38.0.1) was the ability to use Maildir mailbox format. Like OAuth2, this too has not been very well documented. I have no idea what this does or why you would want to use it. Further, I have not tried it, especially after I found this information on the Mozilla Wiki with the warning about enabling said feature: Though, we aren’t sure of the side-effects of using maildir as the default store on a profile that was created on Berkeley mailbox(mbox) format; so we suggest you to create a fresh profile to work with maildir so as to avoid…
When Mozilla released Thunderbird 38 (38.0.1) on June 11th one of the new features was being able to use GMail within Thunderbird without having to go into your GMail account and enable the ‘less secure authentication’. Problem is, how to enable this feature in Thunderbird is poorly documented. After some searching, I found the answer in an unlikely place…the comments on the article from The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog announcing Thunderbird 38: In an existing GMail account, you can switch the “Authentication Method” from “Normal Password” to “Oauth2″ (in both the IMAP and SMTP setup separately). Connection security should be SSL/TLS. If…