Microsoft Edge Isolation Features Detailed, Win 10 Passes 400m Devices

Microsoft is celebrating a fairly significant milestone for Windows 10, announcing today that the operating system is installed on more than 400 million active devices. That means Windows 10 has added 100 million active devices since the last time Microsoft announced install numbers, which was back at the beginning of May.

It seems that Windows 10 install numbers are slowing a bit, which isn't much of a surprise considering that the company has stopped offering Windows 10 for free to existing Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users. For the first year of Windows 10's life, Microsoft was running that free promotion, but pulled the plug on it at the end of July. Now anyone who wants to upgrade needs to drop some cold hard cash, which will have no doubt slowed growth.

Microsoft also announced that its built-in Windows 10 browser, Microsoft Edge, will soon be getting an excellent security feature in container-based isolation. Thus far, the technology has been codenamed Barcelona, and though we don't have a date for when it will arrive under its official name of "Windows Defender Application Guard," it should be available to testers of Windows 10's Redstone 2 build shortly.

That container-based isolation could be a big way to draw enterprise customers toward Microsoft Edge, as it essentially walls off malicious code from potentially infecting the rest of the computers on a network. Microsoft plans to begin letting its interested enterprise customers test out the feature at some point in early 2017, so assuming those tests work out well, we should see a wider roll out relatively soon after.

SOURCE: ZDNet