Google

Google+ may have shut down its consumer side earlier this month, but the code base still lives on at Google. After diving into the social media wars and getting routed, Google+ will live out its retirement as "Google Currents"—it's the Google+ code base, but with an enterprise focus. The reborn Google+/Currents will now do battle with Facebook again, this time with the enterprise version of Facebook, called "Workplace," and also Microsoft's Yammer. Surely things will go differently this time.

With Windows enthusiasts awaiting the public release of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft reportedly made it available in an unlikely place. According to reports, some users of Windows 10 Insider build 18865 have found that Microsoft is testing the Edge Insider build withing the Windows Sandbox feature.

Google has confirmed a recent update to Chrome was to patch a zero-day issue in the popular browser, an exploit that was actively used in attacks, and has recommended all Chrome users on Mac, Windows, and Linux update their installations as soon as possible.

A patch for Chrome shipped on March 1 consisting of a fix for a security flaw, identified as CVE-2019-5786. The update, which only fixed the issue without making other changes to the browser, brought Chrome on all three operating systems up to version 72.0.3626121.

Microsoft will incorporate Google's Retpoline patch to prevent Spectre Variant 2 from slowing down its operating system.

Microsoft plans to include the Retpoline patch, a fix developed by Google, in an upcoming version of Windows 10 to prevent slowdown caused by Spectre Variant 2, ZDNet reports.

Google announced on Monday that it is shuttering its Google+ social network, following revelations in a Wall Street Journal report that the company did not disclose a recently discovered bug that had exposed data from up to 500,000 Google+ users users since 2015. In the same breath, the company introduced new tools to give users more control over the data they share with apps and services that connect to Google products.

Google has announced plans to further restrict Chrome extensions in a bid to crack down on the number of malicious extensions found in the Chrome Web Store.

We've seen a spate of malicious extensions this year; the extensions do things like steal credentials and participate in click fraud schemes. The malicious extensions take advantage of the considerable access to webpages that extensions have.

Google's major Wear OS revamp is out today, and soon it will arrive on most devices released in the past year and a half (although Ars has already spent a week with a pre-release version of the OS). In the face of relentless competition from the Apple Watch Series 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch, Google's most obvious change in the new Wear OS is a new UI for most of the main screens. There's not much in the way of new functionality or features, but everything is laid out better.

It's time for another big Android release—and another big review to go along with it. The latest update for the world's most popular operating system is Android 9 (not 9.0) Pie. While last year's Android 8.0 Oreo release focused on under-the-hood changes, Android 9 Pie ships a ton of user-facing features and UI changes, making it feel like the "tock" to Oreo's "tick."

Google has revised a help page that erroneously described how its "Location History" setting works, clarifying for users that it still tracks their location even if they turn the setting off.

On Monday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that several Google apps and websites store user location even if users have turned off Location History. Google has not changed its location-tracking practice in that regard.

Google Chrome has been supporting push notifications for years now but it always used its own notification system in Windows 10. The search engine giant is now rolling out a new update for Chrome which adds support for native Windows 10 notifications.

By integrating support for Windows 10 notifications in the Chrome browser, the company is also bringing the application to the Action Center. That means that any notifications displayed by Chrome will now show up in the Action Center, which will allow you to have better control over them.