Mozilla fixes 14-year old Firefox bug, turbocharges Adblock Plus

Last year, Mozilla published a blog post in which it noted that popular ad-on Adblock Plus could, under certain circumstances, drastically increase memory usage in Firefox. The problem was related to how Firefox handled ABP’s style sheets and could, in certain edge cases, send memory usage rocketing up to 2GB. While not necessarily a problem for relatively high-end systems, plenty of midrange computers get grumpy if a process sucks down that much RAM — and applications that use that much memory also have a tendency to bog down in general. Firefox 41, released yesterday, solves this problem, with impressive results.

Office 2016 review: Microsoft makes mobile-first, cloud-first a reality

If you simply install Office 2016 on a single desktop, you could be excused for wondering what Microsoft has been doing for the last three years. Other than a bit of a facelift, and some admittedly welcome added features that we first reviewed in the Preview version (and won’t re-hash here), for the most part it looks and acts like Office 2013. The minute you start to share or work with others, though, the major changes in the way the Office system works begin to appear.

Cloud-first is more than just defaulting to OneDrive

Microsoft has started using OneDrive as the default storage location for an increasing number of its applications, but that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the integration of the cloud — and team-based workflows — in Office 2016. The new version features brand new team-only apps Planner and Delve, as well as Sway, an innovative new presentation creation and sharing application. Real-time collaboration has also been added to Word, OneNote, and PowerPoint. For organizations that have standardized on Office, there is plenty to like in its newest incarnation.

Office 365 Planner & Delve

Office 2016 introduces two entirely new applications to support teams. Delve has been out in preview form for a while. Available to organizations with Office 365 business subscriptions, it uses the power of Microsoft’s servers to allow users to get an automated view into what is likely to be important to them. It does this by using data from Office Graph — essentially a complete record of every document, meeting, or email-related action taken by every user — to build a tiled dashboard of people, projects, and documents that are related to what you’ve been working on, or that have been shared with you.

Planner is a brand new tool that allows teams to quickly set up projects and populate them with tasks and documents. Like Delve, it then uses Office Graph to create user-specific, interactive dashboards of project status. It isn’t designed to replace the heavy-lifting style of project management done by Microsoft Project. But for busy team members, it’s a quick way to keep track of their involvement in many different projects. While Delve provides a people-focused dashboard of all Office-related activity, Planner provides one based on projects and tasks.

In functionality, Planner is very similar to some other existing services, such as Trello, but because it has the advantage of being deeply integrated with Office Graph, it may become the favorite among those organizations committed to Office. On the flip side, for organizations that don’t have a corporate commitment to hosted or server-based Office installations, a separate service allows more flexibility.

Office Sway

For individual users, the most exciting new capability is probably Sway. Sway allows users to easily construct catchy multimedia presentations. Unlike PowerPoint, it doesn’t rely on a slide-by-slide metaphor, and also moves much of the responsibility for layout style to the application. Users can tweak the layout themselves, or use the Remix! Button to have Sway cycle through suggestions. Although part of Office 2016, the Sway application is available from the Windows 10 app store, and for the iPhone and iPad. It is also part of Office Online.

Sway presentations are easy-to-create, colorful, and look cool. It is so easy to make them appear catchy, that I think we’ll see a lot of users go overboard — the same way people went crazy with typefaces when desktop publishing was introduced. It can be very disconcerting to be looking at a Sway presentation and having fly-in effects and panning images while you’re trying to read.

Once shared, a Sway can be viewed by anyone with a browser, although Sway presentations are always hosted on Microsoft’s sway.com, and can’t be off-lined or exported to another format. That raises another issue — longevity. Microsoft doesn’t have the best track record for long-term commitment to its creative tools (remember Expression, Movie Maker, or Live Writer?). Until there is a way to guarantee the long-term survival of a Sway, I see it being most effective for quick sharing.

Real-time collaboration in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote

Not to be outdone by the rising tide of cloud-based document editors like Google Docs, Microsoft has added some very slick real-time collaboration capabilities to Word, and similar versions to PowerPoint and OneNote. On the editing front, not only can two users edit the same cloud-hosted document, but if it is on Microsoft’s servers (OneDrive or Office 365, for example) then they can each see exactly where other users are in the document.

Microsoft adds to this capability by making it easy to open a Skype call (or chat or meeting) with any of the document’s authors from right within Word.

Office mobile apps

While not news — as they’ve been around for a while already — Microsoft’s mobile apps for Office have been the most rapidly evolving part of the Office. These touch-friendly versions of Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint run on iOS, Android, and of course Windows 10. For Windows 10 users on tablets or phones, the mobile versions of the applications make it much easier to work without a keyboard or mouse. Microsoft also has some additional cool tools for mobile users, including my favorite mobile document scanning applications: Office Lens.

Office 365 (2016) pricing: Subscriptions get more attractive

Microsoft has clearly realized — like Adobe before it — that getting people to pay nearly any amount per month, forever, is better than relying on the whims of upgraders. So it is offering both a discounted Personal Plan ($7/month for 1 machine and 1 phone), and a more value-oriented Home Plan ($10/month for 5 computers and 5 phones). Both plans include 1TB of OneDrive storage and 60 Skype calling minutes per month — meaning you get Office essentially for free compared to a similarly-sized cloud plan from Google, for example. (You can compare plans in more detail at the Microsoft Office 3650 Home subscription page). Both plans include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access.

Those preferring to stick with the traditional purchase licensing model can get Office 2016 (one-time purchase without upgrades) Home and Business for $230. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The Student and Teacher version is $150, but doesn’t include Outlook. Purchased versions don’t include the Skype minutes, and only feature 15GB of free storage.

Mobile-first, cloud-first: Does Microsoft have it right?

Whether you use Ballmer’s phrase “devices and services” or Nadella’s “mobile-first, cloud-first,” it represents the largest software pivot for Microsoft since its 1990s embrace of the web. It implies expanding its platform presence from just Windows to online and mobile, and its moving its revenue model from product licensing to cloud-based service subscriptions. Office 2016 represents Microsoft’s most aggressive effort to date to make these major changes. Its services are available across most platforms, and its revenue is increasingly platform neutral — since it gets subscription revenue independent of which platform you use to access the services.

Google has been selling a very similar vision with its Google Apps for Work offering, but Microsoft is bringing the world’s most mature suite of productivity applications to the party. The good news for organizations, especially those that are long-time Office customers, is that they no longer have to choose between the power of Office and the flexibility of the cloud. With Office 2016 combined with Office 365, Microsoft is giving them the opportunity to have both.

Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all business operations related to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.

Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

How to download and install Windows 10 Technical Preview

Be preparedAs promised, Microsoft has been issuing new Windows 10 Technical Preview builds on a regular basis, ahead of the official release later this year. Want to try it out? There are 64-bit and 32-bit versions available for US  and UK English, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese, among other languages. Follow these instructions to download and install the Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Why is it called Windows 10 not Windows 9?

When Microsoft announced its newest operating system, the surprise was not that it was coming, but that Windows would be skipping 9 and headed straight to 10. When asked about Windows 10’s name, Microsoft didn’t give a clear answer. So why, exactly, is Windows 10 getting the nod instead of 9?

There are 60,000 people testing Windows 10 for phones

Not long ago, Microsoft released Windows 10 for phones to participants of the Windows Insider program, but the hardware selection was limited. In fact, all of the former flagship phones like the Lumia Icon, 1020 and 1520 were left out of the initial batch of devices.

According to an internal source who has had a good track record in the past, there are roughly 60,000 devices currently testing Windows 10 for phones. That figure includes Microsoft employees too, which means that the testing base, as of right now for the OS, is quite small.