boot13Microsoft and Adobe have announced updates that are scheduled to drop next Tuesday, December 9. Microsoft is expected to issue nine seven bulletins and associated patches, affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and Exchange. The updates from Adobe will address security issues in Reader/Acrobat.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Firefox 34/34.0.5 stealth release
Firefox 34.0 was released on December 1. The new version includes some security fixes, improves the search bar, and makes switching between profiles a bit easier.
As usual, there was no announcement for this version, despite Mozilla staffers telling me that major releases always get proper announcements on the Mozilla blog.
Further confusing things is a release notes page for version 34.0.5, linked from the main release notes page, that looks almost identical to the page for 34.0. Worse still, Firefox itself won’t update to 34.0.5, and the Firefox download page assures me that I’m running the latest version (that version being 34.0).
Is it just me, or is Mozilla getting worse at this stuff?
Update 2014Dec05: Apparently version 34.0.5 is somehow seen as optional. For whatever reason, the automatic updater and the download page see 34.0 and 34.0.5 as equivalent. The only way to upgrade from 34.0 to 34.0.5 is to download 34.0.5 from the ‘Download a fresh copy‘ page and install it on top of version 34.0.
Update 2014Dec08: Since the only difference between 34.0 and 34.0.5 is the default search provider, and that change only affects users in the US, it seems reasonable to assume that the Firefox download page (as well as Firefox’s self-updater) will only suggest 34.0.5 if you are in the US. My own tests were inconclusive.
Microsoft will finally reconcile version identifiers with Windows 10
If you’re a regular user and not a developer, you may not have noticed that internal Windows version identifiers have been stuck at 6.x since Vista.
Vista was a disaster, with one of the biggest problems being software compatibility. Programs that worked fine on Windows XP no longer worked on Vista. One reason that happened was that Microsoft bumped the internal version of Windows from 5 (XP) to 6 for Vista. This caused a lot of software to get confused and stop working.
This made Microsoft much more reluctant to make major changes to the internal version number for subsequent releases of Windows. The internal version identifier for Windows 7 is 6.1. For Windows 8, it’s 6.2, and for Windows 8.1, it’s 6.3.
Microsoft also got to work on finding better ways to get around software compatibility issues, and developed the Application Compatibility tools, which include a simple method for tricking software into thinking it’s running on a different version of Windows.
With Windows 10, Microsoft apparently plans to get back to internal version numbers that make sense, and they’re also using this opportunity to finally make the internal version match the external version. Windows 10 will be identified internally as version 10.