If you own a Surface Pro 8 or a third-gen Surface Book 3, there is new firmware available for download from Windows Update. February 2022 updates are now live with minor improvements and security patches.
Author: Taras Buria
Taras is here to cover stories about Microsoft and everything around, although sometimes he prefers Apple.
Microsoft Edge 98 is now available in the Stable channel
Following Google and its Chrome 98 update, Microsoft updated the Edge browser to the same version 98. The latest version does not contain many new features, but there are some noticeable improvements.
Google wants to make the tab mute button easier to discover
Google is working on bringing a tab mute button to its browser, similar to how Microsoft Edge allows its users to disable the sound on a web page by clicking a speaker button on the tab strip. Currently, the mute button is available behind an experimental flag in the Canary channel, which is off by default. Google wants to improve feature discoverability in Chrome by adding a special banner. It will let users know that they can mute a tab with a single click.
Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store is now region-specific
Microsoft Edge supports installing extensions from the Chrome Web Store, which means the browser no longer suffers from the lack of popular extensions. Still, the software giant continues investing in its own add-ons store for the Edge browser. The latest update for the Edge Add-ons Store brings discoverability improvements and region-specific collections.
PowerToys 0.55.1 fixes a bug with settings not being saved
A couple of days ago, Microsoft released PowerToys version 0.55 with three new utilities. The latest version brought two new modules for File Explorer add-ons and a crosshair for the cursor. Now there is a new version available for download. Release 0.55.1 fixes several annoying bugs, such as the app not saving settings.
Unpin Teams from taskbar in Windows 11 to save RAM
Every fresh Windows 11 installation comes with a few new icons pinned to the taskbar by default: Task View, Windows Search, Windows Widgets, and Microsoft Teams. As it turned out, Windows Widgets and Microsoft Teams consume noticeable amounts of RAM, even if you do not use them. A solution? Just unpin them.
Edge is getting persistent banners with sports results
Next time you launch the Edge browser, you may find a somewhat unexpected banner with sports results at the bottom of every page. That is not malware or adware. That is Microsoft infecting Edge with yet another needless feature made to promote Bing and its services.
Microsoft may force Edge users to watch YouTube videos embedded in Bing
Microsoft Edge gets major feature updates every four weeks. These updates usually bring helpful features and quality improvements, but they often annoy users by resetting settings and changing search engines. Moreover, users recently accused Microsoft of messing with third-party browsers after a Windows update changed the default search engine in Chrome from Google to Bing.
PowerToys 0.55 brings three new tools and various fixes
Microsoft released another PowerToys update with three new tools and many improvements. Version 0.55 also contains various under-the-hood optimizations in preparations to make PowerToys ARM64-ready. Here is what is new in PowerToys 0.55.
Chrome on Android will show a warning before closing all tabs
To make life easier for those who never close tabs in their browsers, Google introduced a "Close all tabs" button in Chrome on Android and iOS. It sits in a context menu you can invoke by pressing a button with three dots in the upper-right corner of the screen.
