ICYMI: April 8, 2016

Hello! Welcome to your Flash-free future.

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The biggest story of yesterday: Microsoft Edge is easing out of Flash in the Edge browser. Users will have to click on things like Flash-based advertisements and animations if they want them to work. However, if a website is primarily for games, music or video, the Flash component will play.

This is not the first browser to block Flash: Mozilla blacklisted the plug-in and forced Firefox users to manually approve it/update it back in July 2015 (until a secure Flash update dropped), and Google did likewise for Chrome in September 2015. Flash's terrible security record was the despair of the industry. The fact that the resource-intensive proprietary tech hung on for another six years after Apple declared war on it (for mobile users) speaks to the technology's ubiquity on the World Wide Web.

However, HTML 5 has taken over for Flash in terms of browser-based animation, and it has the benefit of being an open standard. Edge is merely following in the steps of other browsers.

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The most useful news:

Get to know the Windows Photo App with this list of 10 things it can do.

Here's how to stream PlayStation 4 games to your PC or Mac with Remote Play.

Turn off recent items and frequent places in your Windows 10 jump list.

Add your Gmail account to your iOS Notes app and access your notes from it.

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And here's what we've been publishing:

Hands-On with Windows 10 Build 14316 — Windows 10 Build 14316, which was released earlier this week to Windows Insiders testing Fast Ring builds, is the most feature rich build we have had in some time as testers.

Microsoft Edge Pauses to Stop Flash in its Tracks — With this update, when using Microsoft Edge, the browser will auto-pause content that is not key to the website such as advertisements and animations that are based on Flash. Users will be able to view this paused content by explicitly clicking on the item to start it.

Q. How can I roll back my Windows 10 upgrade without cancelling anything? — If you roll Win10 back to Win7 (or Win8) on the same hardware, the old license will still work. I’ve done it on several different machines without incident. The original OS passes the activation checks normally.

A New Surface Book: the Unboxing — These unboxing images of the Surface Book accompany the My First Week with Surface Book article. 

My First Week with Surface Book — Although Surface Book has been on the market since last fall, it was only in February of this year that issues relating to power and sleep were finally resolved with the February 2016 system firmware and driver updates. I can vouch that those updates do indeed work for Surface Book but getting them fully installed took a weird turn last week which I will explain later.

Amazon Drastically Reduces Kindle Reader Prices for Prime Members — If you’ve ever wanted a Kindle Reader, would love to have an additional one, or would simply love to justify the cost of giving one as a present, now is your chance.