Author: batteryforpc

Microsoft is making its Chromium-powered Edge browser available on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 for testing today. The release comes two months after Chromium Edge first debuted on Windows 10, and a month after it appeared on macOS. Microsoft is releasing the daily Canary builds initially, and plans to support the weekly Dev channel “soon.” You can download the installer over at Microsoft’s Edge Insider site.

“You will find the experience and feature set on previous versions of Windows to be largely the same as on Windows 10, including forthcoming support for Internet Explorer mode for our enterprise customers,” explains a Microsoft Edge team blog post. While most features will be the same, dark mode is missing and Microsoft says there is no support for AAD sign-in.

Microsoft is still testing its Chromium Edge browser across Windows 10, macOS, and now older versions of Windows, and it’s still not clear when the company will start to release it more broadly. Edge will be available for Windows 7, despite the fact Microsoft is planning to end support for the operating system next January.

Edge Chromium will include an IE mode for businesses, and a new Collections feature that’s designed for web users to be able to more easily collect text, images, and information from the internet into a note. We got a closer look at the new Microsoft Edge earlier this year.

As we asked back in February, “We’re ready for foldable phones, but are they ready for us?” The answer, so far, has been an enthusiastic, “not really.” The Galaxy Fold was pushed back after multiple review units crapped the proverbial bed. And just last week, Huawei noted that it was holding off on its own Mate X release, citing Samsung’s issues as a cautionary tale.

Samsung, at least, may finally be ready to unleash its foldable on the world, two months after its planned release. “Most of the display problems have been ironed out,” Samsung Display Vice President Kim Seong-cheol told a crowd at an event in Seoul this week, “and the Galaxy Fold is ready to hit the market.”

The company’s no doubt waiting for a more formal announcement to release specifics on timing. Samsung has been promising release news “in coming weeks” for several weeks now. Understandably, the company hasn’t been rushing to get the handset back out. As bad as the press was the first time around, Samsung doesn’t want a repeat here along the lines of the Note 7’s two recalls.

When announcing the initial delay, Samsung announced two points of failure: a screen protector that looked like the temporary ones other devices ship with and large holes between joints in the hinge that allowed detritus to sneak behind the display, causing issues when users applied pressure to the front.

Huawei was planning to announce a new MateBook laptop this week, but an executive confirmed that the company cancelled the launch because of US sanctions against the Chinese company. It’s not clear when—or whether—the laptop will be released.

The US has banned sales of technology to Huawei, which uses Intel chips and the Windows operating system in its MateBook PCs. Huawei “planned to unveil the new Windows laptop at the CES Asia 2019 trade show in Shanghai this week” but “indefinitely postponed” the launch because of the US export ban, The Information reported yesterday.

Huawei consumer division CEO Richard Yu subsequently confirmed the cancellation to CNBC. “We cannot supply the PC,” Yu said, calling it “unfortunate,” according to CNBC.

Huawei has also “paused production at its personal-computer business because of restrictions on buying US components,” the Wall Street Journal reported. We contacted Huawei today, but a company spokesperson had no further information to share.

Huawei on “Entity List”

The US last month put Huawei on its Entity List, which prevents it from buying parts and components from US companies without US government approval. The US argues that the Chinese government could use Huawei to spy on the US, but Huawei has denied those accusations and called on the US to provide evidence.

“When asked if the laptop could be launched at a later date, Yu said it ‘depends on how long the Entity List will be there,'” CNBC wrote. “He acknowledged that, if Huawei is on the blacklist for a long time, the laptop will not be able to be launched.”

Huawei is known more for smartphones and networking equipment but has courted PC users with laptops such as the MateBook 13 and MateBook X Pro.

China’s state-run media offers different version

The Global Times—which is part of China’s state-run media—published a story disputing some of the reporting about the laptop launch. “Huawei will release a new laptop product in July, with different models and configurations compared with previous series such as the MateBook and HonorBook, a source close to the matter confirmed to the Global Times,” the news organization said.

“The new laptop will be equipped with the Windows operating system, the source said, in contrast to rumors about Microsoft halting cooperation with Huawei,” the report added. The laptop will use an ARM processor instead of Intel, the report said.

The state-run media report doesn’t mention the fact that a Huawei executive confirmed the cancellation of this week’s laptop launch. The Global Times also said its source “refuted reports that Huawei had halted laptop production due to the export control imposed by the Trump administration amid the escalating trade war.” The Global Times wrote that “industry insiders” called Huawei’s plan to release the laptop “an inspiring move.”

Intel reportedly restricted its employees from having informal conversations with Huawei, but an Intel executive also spoke out against the Trump administration’s Huawei ban on Monday.

ARM—which licenses its intellectual property to other vendors—recently told its employees that the US export ban means it can no longer work with Huawei. Microsoft recently removed Huawei laptops from its website.

In other Huawei news today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Huawei has told Verizon it should pay licensing fees for more than 200 patents that cover “core network equipment, wireline infrastructure and Internet-of-things technology.”

Microsoft just released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build featuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. WSL 2 includes a real Linux kernel that lets you run more Linux software on Windows and with better performance than WSL 1.

This is part of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 18917, released on June 12, 2019. It’s part of the fast ring of updates. You can experiment with it today, although you’ll have to join the Windows Insider program and get unstable builds of Windows 10 on your PC.

Microsoft’s Windows Command Line blog offers more information about WSL 2, complete with an install guide, list of user experience changes, and more documentation. To install WSL 2 on the latest insider build, run the following command in a PowerShell window launched with Administrator permissions:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform

This new version of WSL 2 uses Hyper-V features to create a lightweight virtual machine with a minimal Linux kernel. It will still be available on Windows 10 Home, however, even though Hyper-V isn’t normally available on Windows 10 Home. Expect better compatibility with Linux software, including support for Docker, and “dramatic file system performance increases.”

The virtual machine will automatically launch at startup and use a bit of memory in the background, but Microsoft promises it “has a small memory footprint.” You can run the wsl –shutdown command if you ever want to shut down the background VM.

WSL 2 is part of the development builds for Windows 10 20H1, which is expected for release around April 2020. WSL may be part of Windows 10 19H2, expected for release around October 2019, but Microsoft isn’t testing 19H2 yet.

The latest Windows 10 Insider build includes some other useful features, too. You can now head to Settings > Update & Security > Delivery Optimization > Advanced Options to throttle Windows Update. For example, you can set Windows Update to only use 1 Mbps or a specific percentage of your available bandwidth while downloading updates in the background.

Microsoft’s Sunday E3 pressure was all about the games. In fact, while the company did offer some information about hardware and services, the information all arrived fast and furious at the end of the conference. While it’s probably unsurprising that the company had very little to offer in the way of information about its upcoming 8K console, Project Scarlett, most of us expected Project xCloud to get a lot more face time on stage.

The company powered through a whole lot of information about its upcoming streaming offering like it was going out of style (or, perhaps, like the lights were going out at its own theater). The speed and brevity of it all left a number of audience members confused on the specifics — and caused some to speculate that the service night not be as far along as Microsoft had hoped.

We caught up with a few Microsoft reps on our final day at the show to answer some questions. The company is unsurprisingly still mum on a number of key details around the offering. A couple of key things are worth clarifying, though. For starters console stream is not considered a part of Project xCloud. Rather, the ability to play games on one’s own Xbox One remotely is a separate feature that will be coming to users via a software update.

Asked what advantages console streaming has over the parallel xCloud offering, Microsoft’s answer was simple: it’s free. Fair enough. This serves a two-fold purpose. First, it helps differentiate Microsoft’s streaming offerings from Stadia and second, it provides another value proposition for the console itself. As to how performance is expected to differ between console streaming and XCloud, it wouldn’t comment.

As I wrote earlier today, the company does see the potential of a large scale move to the cloud, but anticipates that such a shift is a long ways off. After all, if it didn’t, it likely wouldn’t have announced a new console this week at E3.