Happy 2020!!  Today was our first snow of the year in the New York City metro area.  Besides the weather, there is much Microsoft news in 2020 already.

Last Tuesday, January 14, 2020, Microsoft officially ended all support for Windows 7.  Windows 7 had been on extended support, meaning that you could pay Microsoft if you had a Windows 7 support issue but there would be no more feature updates or patches.  Until Tuesday, Microsoft also provided what it deemed critical security patches for Windows 7.  With no further security patches, Windows 7 will be a less secure computing experience.

Now that Windows 7 is officially deprecated, customers are strongly advised to upgrade to Windows 10.  The general rule of thumb is that if your PC is less than 3 years old, perform an in-place Windows 10 upgrade.  If your PC is older than 3 years, you should buy a new PC which will include Windows 10.  Related to this announcement, Microsoft Office will no longer support Windows 7, and many other vendors (including Google, McAfee, Adobe) will be ending their Windows 7 support within 18 months.  Surprisingly 32.74% of the PCs in the world are still running Windows 7.

Microsoft has not had much success with its browsers (Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge) since Google released its Chrome browser.  Internet Explorer development and support ended years ago: Microsoft Edge was introduced with Windows 10 in July 2015.  Microsoft Edge was a completely new browser with a new rendering engine built from the ground up.  It never gained the popularity that Microsoft had hoped for (Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are the most popular browsers) so website designers never bothered to optimize and fix their code for Microsoft Edge.

The tech world was surprised when Microsoft announced last year that it would release a new version of Microsoft Edge based on Google’s Chromimum engine, the technology that underlies Google’s Chrome browser.  By changing the “plumbing” of Microsoft Edge to Google’s rendering engine, the new Microsoft Edge browser is faster and compatible with millions more websites.  Although the new Microsoft Edge uses the Chrome engine, it is not compatible with Google Chrome extensions, but it does integrate with Windows security and Microsoft Active Directory.  I have begun testing the new Microsoft Edge: thus far it is speedy and stable.  Oddly enough it supports Windows 7!  You can download the new Microsoft Edge (which also works on Macs, iOS and Android) directly from this webpage:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge