WHAT WAS IN WINDOWS 10's OCTOBER 2020 UPDATE

 Cyprus Mail 26 October 2020 - by Kyriacos Nicolaou

Microsoft this week announced that its October 2020 update for the Windows 10 operating system started to be available to customers at no extra cost.

Microsoft acknowledged the increasing importance of the PC in people’s daily lives, citing the rise of remote learning, hybrid working environments, teachers creating virtual classrooms and online educational libraries for the introduction of some of the new or revised features in its latest Windows 10 update.

It said that the above changes are most likely to create permanent user needs rather than temporary requirements and so it has responded accordingly. The first change has to do with Microsoft’s native browser Edge, where a new feature called Collections has been added.

Collections allows users to save ideas while browsing the web, for example when shopping or when researching a topic. Microsoft has integrated price comparison into this feature, so if you add a purchasable item in a collection Edge will let you know if a better price for that same item exists elsewhere online.

Further, Microsoft has enabled the Alt + Tab shortcut on Edge, allowing users to flip through both open apps but also open Edge tabs as well. Users can also see all the open tabs from the same website, for example if you have five Amazon tabs open, by hovering over the website icon pinned on your taskbar.

Windows 10’s Start menu has been redesigned, utilising a more static and partly translucent background behind the tiles, allowing the menu to look better in either the light or dark Windows theme.

Users in the commercial and educational sectors have also been catered to with a number of small but useful updates, including improvements to device management, enhanced sign-in security using your device’s biometric features like fingerprint and face sensors, and a bolstered app protection through the built-in Windows Defender Application Guard.

The Windows Defender Application Guard now implements a hardware isolation strategy to bolster security and can keep business data protected by placing newly-opened websites and Office files in a virtually-created environment, separating the two and preventing infections.

This virtualisation and data separation approach is also applicable to the aforementioned biometric sign-in data, meaning that your unique input data, be it your fingerprint or retina scan, are also safeguarded from malicious activity.

Finally, returning to the updates implemented to the Edge browser but in the context of a business environment, IT administrators can now create custom tab pages using Microsoft 365, the company’s subscription-based collection of tools, apps and services.