Here are a few of the stories I found interesting over the last few days, including a huge leak showing off the next version of Windows, Windows 11.
E3 2021
With The Xbox Series and Playstation 5 consoles launching last year, there wasn’t anything significant announced at the E3 gaming expo this year in terms of tech news. It was hoped that Nintendo would announce the rumored “Switch Pro” console, but that did not occur.
What I will highlight are a couple things from the Microsoft show. To this point there has not been a game exclusive to the Xbox Series consoles, with every game so far also releasing on Xbox One. The first Xbox Series exclusive game is coming soon, with Microsoft Flight Simulator coming to console. That game will not run on the Xbox One generation, and will be exclusive to the Xbox Series X and Series S on console. We will see more of this over time, with several of the games Microsoft announced in 2022 being listed only for Xbox Series consoles.
The other thing I want to highlight was something I haven’t seen get a lot of attention. When announcing the release date for Age of Empires IV, Microsoft announced that the game was coming to Xbox Cloud Gaming. This is notable because Age of Empires IV is a PC only game, and to this point there have not been PC games on Xbox Cloud Streaming, only console games. This announcement means that the company will launch the ability to stream PC games via Xbox Cloud Streaming at some point before October. That is very exciting to me.
Windows 10 End of Support Date Quietly Announced
Microsoft updated its support documentation for Windows 10 to show that Windows 10 Home and Pro would cease support on October 14, 2025. This is, to my knowledge, the first time that Microsoft has put an end date to Windows 10 support. Microsoft has released two versions of Windows 10 every year since 2015, and each of those versions had its own support timeline, usually 18 or 30 months. But this is the first time that Microsoft has listed an overall end date for support for Windows 10. Considering that the fall release of Windows 10 usually gets 30 months of support, this means there will not be many more versions of Windows 10 released. That brings us to the next bit of news.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro
Windows 11 Build Leaks
I don’t usually report on products or services that are not officially announced, but this dovetails with the Windows 10 news. Microsoft’s event on June 24 is about the “future of Windows” and it looks like the future of Windows is Windows 11. A pre-release build of the next version of Windows leaked this week, and it has now been shown off to the world by tech journalists.
Windows 11 appears to bring a redesigned interface, with a new start menu, task bar icons that are centered by default, and many new and updated user interface elements. This is far from a finished product, with many things in the build currently broken and/or missing, and some rumoured changes have yet to appear, but it does give us a glimpse at what the next version of Windows is going to look like.
It is unknown how old this leaked build is, and it is possible that what Microsoft shows off on June 24th is much further ahead, with even more UI changes and updates. We wait.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/251941/windows-11-first-impressions
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/251954/windows-11-a-few-more-screenshots
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/251968/windows-11-a-few-more-observations
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/251977/windows-11-clean-install
Google Workspace Exclusive Features Coming to Free Accounts
Google announced this week that it is making most of the features that were exclusive to its Google Workspace business product available to all users for free. This one caught many off guard, but after thinking about it some it makes sense. Instead of managing two different versions of products like Gmail and Google Docs, Google can consolidate everything into one version, which should lead to easier maintenance and support, as well as being able to deliver new features more easily.
Google Workspace is obviously not going away, as it remains a tool to manage organizations and users, but some of the features that were previously exclusive to the business product are now rolling out to all.
As part of the announcement Google did announce Google Workspace Individual, which allows single users the ability to access some of the business functionality that is still part of Google Workspace. The company says that Google Workspace Individual contains "premium capabilities, including smart booking services, professional video meetings, personalized email marketing and much more on the way."
https://blog.google/products/workspace/google-workspace-everyone
Google Abandons URL Shortening in Google Chrome
Another thing announced by Google is the end of a test in Google Chrome that partially hid URL’s from users. For example, if you navigated to https://www.thewunderbar.net/blog/2021/6/10/tech-news-roundup-for-june-10-2021 the URL bar would only show you at www.thewunderbar.net, not the entire URL to the page. Google did so as a way to simplify the URL bar, but the thought was also that it would improve security, as it would highlight the domaingoo a user was actually at, instead of malicious sites trying to hide/mask that via a long URL. However, Google says that hiding part of the URL on Chrome had no material impact on security, so it is ending the experiment.