boot13There are nine updates this month. They should be available from Windows Update by the time you read this. The updates fix security issues in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and server software. Two of the updates are flagged as critical. If you want all the technical details, see the security bulletin for this month’s updates.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Advance notification for April 2013 Patch Tuesday
It’s that time again. Microsoft has posted its usual notification about the next Patch Tuesday. This month’s patch day is on April 9. Anyone using Windows Autoupdate will start seeing the patches around 10am on that day.
There will be nine bulletins/updates this month, two of which are Critical, addressing Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, and server software. The technical details are available in the associated Security TechCenter post.
Opera 12.15 released
Version 12.15 of the Opera web browser was announced this morning. The new version contains fixes for several security issues. The complete list of changes can be seen in the version 12.15 release notes.
Windows 8.1 (aka Windows ‘Blue’)
Microsoft is moving toward a release system for Windows that more closely resembles Apple’s OS releases. The reason is fairly obvious: money. With major new operating system releases from Microsoft separated by several years, and every other release being largely ignored (think Windows Me and Vista), Microsoft just isn’t making enough money on Windows.
So, Microsoft has been working away on their next Windows release, code-named ‘Windows Blue’, and they plan to produce additional releases on a yearly basis. Pricing remains unclear, but apparently the upgrades will be “low-cost”. If Microsoft can make this work, they will have a steady inflow of cash from Windows sales.
In the past, incremental releases were provided in the form of service packs, which were always available for free. Microsoft insists that the new releases will do much more than the old service packs, but that remains to be seen. For now, the simplest way to think about this is that Microsoft is going to start charging for service packs.
The Verge has a series of posts about Windows Blue that are worth reading.
Firefox 20 released
On Tuesday, Mozilla released another new version of Firefox, version 20.
The new version includes several security fixes, as well as private browsing, changes to the download system, performance improvements, and several other bug fixes and enhancements.
As usual, the release notes and complete list of changes for this release are a jumbled mess of old and new information, making the job of figuring out what has actually changed needlessly difficult. Will they ever fix this?