Mozilla's biggest export is Firefox, and with Windows 8 having been in circulation for a few months now, the next stage of preparations for a version of the popular browser tailored to Microsoft's latest OS release have begun. Last week, the Metro/Modern-ized browser reached Mozilla's nightly build channel, and today, it has reached Mozilla-central. Although Firefox desktop product manager Asa Dotzler confessed there is still "plenty of work" to be done, it has now reached a point where it is stable enough for regular testing.
BlueStacks has built its solid reputation on providing software which enables Android apps to run on a variety of different platforms besides Google's. With the Windows beta version released last year to some 5 million+ downloads and the OS X beta arriving just six weeks ago, the BlueStacks team has now compiled a version adapted to the relatively-new Windows 8 platform, as well as optimization for the Microsoft Surface Pro. Details after the break.
The release of Windows 8, has, quite inevitably been followed by the release of Office 2013 and Office 360, but this time around, the Redmond company has been hard at work on several other apps as it tries to establish its new-look operating system across its vast user base. The Windows Store needs as many decent new apps as it can get, and today, another in-house offering arrives in the form of My Server.
The news is perhaps about as predictable as when Call of Duty: Black Ops II swept past Halo 4 to take its usual position is market leader, but Windows 8 has - just three months after its initial release - surpassed Apple's OS X Mountain Lion in terms of market share. The Redmond company has seen a positive, if not overwhelming public response to its new operating system, and with many opting to upgrade online as opposed to purchasing a more expensive physical copy, the entire Windows process looks to be headed towards Apple's download-only direction.
With the Surface Pro almost upon us, Microsoft has naturally offered consumers a subtle nudge as to why the tablet + ultrabook is the right device for them. Since consumers and commentators have doubted the Surface RT's credentials as a true PC (for obvious reasons), the Redmond company has felt inclined to remind the market of the Surface Pro's PC prowess. While the RT has come under fire for not running legacy apps, lacking power, and generally failing in many of the key areas one would expect a PC to deliver, the Surface Pro is a different animal. And boy, do Steve Ballmer and Co. want to emphasize that point.
If you have been hoping to pick up a Microsoft Surface Pro this month as your late Christmas present, you may be disappointed, since the shipping date has been pushed back slightly, to February 9th, in both the United States and Canada, along with several accessories to please anybody’s ‘wants’ and ‘needs’.
When the retail version of Windows 8 was released back in October last year, it brought a lot of improvements over all the earlier versions, despite the fact that a lot of people didn’t seem very happy with it. The new Modern UI, along with its ability to launch apps much faster, the improved copy/move dialog box, the new task manager with a plethora of new options, and the Charms bar, for instance, are just some examples to name, among many others. However, not all features (or lack thereof) could really be considered as improvements. I can understand the grudge that some people hold against Microsoft for taking away the Start menu to be a matter of personal preference, but some changes were downright limiting, the top of which turns out to be the operating system’s native inability to play DVD & Blu-ray discs.
There used to be a time when people considered a 20GB hard drive to be more than what they’d ever be able to fill up. Nowadays, depending on the type of usage that you have, a 250GB ones seems so little and insufficient. Then, the storage media in themselves have evolved a lot, both in terms of technology and form factor. Pen drives with up to 250 gigs of storage are not uncommon, high-capacity SD cards are mainstream, and lately, even SSD drives have come down to a level where almost everyone can afford them in their machines, taking advantage of the much-faster read/write speeds to the fullest.
There is a lot of fuss being made in the tablet industry at the moment, centering around the pros and cons of the most well-known tablets on the market and which piece of hardware will reign supreme in the race to be king of the slates. Contenders include the Apple iPad, the Microsoft Surface, the ASUS Nexus 7 and the Nexus 10 manufactured by Samsung. They are all extremely capable options, but look past their feature sets and you will ultimately find that they all have a similar set of issues that affect our user experience. If you happen to have opted for the Microsoft Surface RT tablet, then the discoveries of one individual could go some way to eradicating any touch-screen responsiveness issues you may have been facing.
A couple of days back, we reported on the news that a dev by the name of "clrokr" had discovered a jailbreak, which allowed the Windows RT operating system to run unsigned, ARM-based desktop apps. No more than a few hours later, the Redmond company responded to assure owners of RT tablets that there was no imminent security threat, and that a patch would be available within a couple of days. To add an interesting twist to proceedings, though, another developer has chimed in with a tool making the jailbreaking process one of automated ease, and as is nearly always the case with Windows Phone / Android modding breakthroughs, this one arrives courtesy of XDA-Developers.
