The newly released Windows 10 features the Solitaire Collection, which includes several variants of the classic card game. However, unlike the version of the game you played at your grandma’s house in the ‘90s, Windows 10 Solitaire comes packed with advertisements. To get rid of the ads and earn some in-game currency (yes, this centuries-old game is borrowing from Candy Crush), users can pay 1.49permonthor9.99 per year.
When your OS is free, it’s not the product. You’re the product. At least, this is how Microsoft seems to think. Note how Mac OS X is free but it doesn’t try to sell ads to you. That’s giving utmost priority to the user experience.
Averaging data from all websites tested, Safari won first place with 6hours 21min of total usage, Firefox second with 5hours 29min of usage, and Chrome last with 5hours 8min of usage.
Basically, if you simply switch to using Safari instead of Chrome, on average you could get an extra 1 hour of usage from your battery life. It’s actually a pretty good browser, and now has a fair amount of extensions available.
Sometimes it’s not about having the latest and greatest features, but what goes on behind the scenes that matters.
Wow. Devtools performed a second reload of the page to get an overall performance analysis. This time it downloaded 12MB – a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript!
Just to put this in some rough perspective: Assuming I had a 1GB / month data plan, I could visit sites like The Verge about 3 times per day before I hit my cap. If I’m lucky, some or most of this will get cached between requests so it won’t be quite that bad. In fact, another report tells me that a primed cache yields 8MB transferred – so maybe 4 visits per day.
It is a big concern and something I have become conscious of after my data usage spiked last month, despite me being overseas and not using my data plan for a week. Websites need to be more responsible with how they push content and advertising to us.
The web is stuffed full of call-to-actions, social media buttons, advertising, making the whole experience of surfing the web unbearable. I hate websites with ads that cover the content, making you unable to browse the site and leading you to inadvertently tap on the ad.
Windows 10 will use your bandwidth to push updates to others
For the most part the updates are pretty fast although it seems that with Windows 10, it looks like Microsoft is finding ways to make pushing out updates even faster, and apparently one of the ways they’re looking at is to use some of your bandwidth. As you can see in the screenshot above, this is an option that you can choose to enable or disable.
You probably won’t mind sharing your bandwidth to help other users to download Windows 10 faster. But the option should not be enabled by default without informing users, especially when some users might have a data cap on their internet subscription.
Sign into Windows with your Microsoft account and the operating system immediately syncs settings and data to the company’s servers. That includes your browser history, favorites and the websites you currently have open as well as saved app, website and mobile hotspot passwords and Wi-Fi network names and passwords.
[..]
Cortana is a sexy spy in the machine
To enable Cortana to provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions, Microsoft collects and uses various types of data, such as your device location, data from your calendar, the apps you use, data from your emails and text messages, who you call, your contacts and how often you interact with them on your device.
Cortana also learns about you by collecting data about how you use your device and other Microsoft services, such as your music, alarm settings, whether the lock screen is on, what you view and purchase, your browse and Bing search history, and more.”
[..]
Advertisers will know exactly who you are
Windows 10 generates a unique advertising ID for each user on each device. That can be used by developers and ad networks to profile you.
[..]
Your encryption key is backed up to OneDrive
Not necessarily a bad thing but something you should be aware of. When device encryption is turned on, Windows 10 automatically encrypts the drive its installed on and generates a BitLocker recovery key. That’s backed up to your OneDrive account.
[..]
Microsoft can disclose your data when it feels like it
This is the part you should be most concerned about: Microsoft’s new privacy policy assigns is very loose when it comes to when it will or won’t access and disclose your personal data:
We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services.
Something to consider if you’re considering switching to Windows 10. Something to be aware of if you’re already on Windows 10.
The streaming service today announced that it was rolling out a redesign to its video player controls, replacing the old Flash versions with new Javascipt and HTML5 options. This isn’t the end for Flash on Twitch just yet — for now the site’s videos still use the software — but the streaming service says this is a step toward releasing its “much-anticipated” full HTML5 player.