Microsoft

After the rumors, confirmation came from Microsoft that it plans to move its Edge browser from the EdgeHTML engine to Chromium. Reaction from users has been largely positive, but it's not the same story across the technology industry as a whole.

While Google is understandably happy about the change, the CEO of Mozilla, Chris Beard, says it is bad for competition and will help to make Google even more powerful.

Microsoft says PC players will be able to access a version of its all-you-can-download Xbox Game Pass subscription service some time in the future.

The news comes from CEO Satya Nadella, who mentioned the move offhandedly in response to a question about cloud gaming in a recent earnings call. Nadella said "increasing the strength of the community" around the Xbox brand is important to the company's bottom line and that "obviously, bringing Game Pass to even the PC is going to be a big element of that."

On Microsoft's earnings call for the first quarter of its 2019 financial year, CEO Satya Nadella said that "more than half of the commercial device installed base is on Windows 10."

It's fair to say that the Windows 10 October 2018 Update has not been Microsoft's most successful update. Reports of data loss quickly emerged, forcing Microsoft to suspend distribution of the update. It has since been fixed and is currently undergoing renewed testing pending a re-release.

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.

Paul Allen, an entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, has died.

Allen died Monday at the age of 65, his website Vulcan confirmed Monday. A cause of death wasn't immediately available.

Allen, a survivor of Hodgkin's disease, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009. Earlier this month, Allen announced on his website that the disease had returned but that he was going to fight it aggressively and was optimistic.

A new service from Microsoft called Project Xcloud is on the way, and it will stream Xbox games, not just to consoles and PCs, but to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Microsoft shared new information about its plans in a blog post and a talking-heads YouTube video. The company made a vague announcement about the new service at its E3 press conference earlier this year, but this is the first time the industry giant has provided details about how it works and when it might become available.

As Microsoft gears up to unleash the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Rich Turner, guardian of the command line at Redmond, took a moment to remind us of simpler, MS-DOS-based times.

After original author Tim Paterson found the source for MS-DOS 1.25 (along with a six-inch stack of assembly print-outs), Microsoft handed the code for 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum back in 2014.

In July, Microsoft announced plans to end support for the "classic" Skype client in September. But those plans were put on hold after the Skype community complained that the new, modern client was missing some beloved features from the classic client.

With plans now in place to reinstate those missing features, Microsoft has resurrected plans to deprecate the old Skype client. Skype version 7, the classic client, will no longer be supported after November 1 on desktop devices and November 15 on mobile devices.

The perpetually licensed version of the desktop Office apps, branded Office 2019, was released today. It's available as a one-time purchase for volume-licensed commercial customers. A consumer release will come in the next few weeks.

Office 2019 is supported on Windows 10—exclusively; no Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 support is available—and the three most-recent versions of macOS (that is, today's release of 10.14, 10.13, and 10.12).