Windows Free

Little by little, Microsoft's operating system becomes free. Android's dominance forced Microsoft to make Windows Phone free. Chromebooks' popularity forced Microsoft to remove the Windows license for low-cost computers.

Windows is now a burden for hardware manufacturers: its license is a significant part of the computer's price and Windows 8 doesn't drive sales. Desktop operating systems are becoming less important, computers use less power and offload processing to the cloud.



A desktop operating system built around a browser and a mobile operating system built around openness made Google the obvious choice for Microsoft's OEMs. Two timely solutions that allowed companies like Samsung, Asus, HTC to come up with products people wanted to buy. Hardware companies usually don't write great software, so Google wrote some of the software and freed them from Windows. And now the popularity of the Windows-free products powered by Google made Windows free.

YouTube's Experiment for Related Searches

YouTube tests a new search interface that includes results for related searches. For example, when searching for [ibm ad], YouTube shows a few results for my query, then 3 lists of search results for [ibm smarter planet], [ibm ad india], [intel ad] and some other results for my query. YouTube uses the same carousel view that's also used for channels and homepage.

You can click the arrows to see more results:

Here's a video that shows an example:

How to enable this experimental feature? If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:



1. open youtube.com in a new tab



2. load your browser's developer console:



* Chrome or Opera 15+ - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac



* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac



* Internet Explorer 8+ - press F12 and select the "Console" tab



* Safari 6+ - if you haven't enabled the Develop menu, open Preferences from the Safari menu, go to the Advanced tab and check "Show Develop menu in menu bar". Close Preferences and then press Command-Option-C to show the console.



* Opera 12 - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console".



3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:



document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=d03DP7Ew5z0; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();



4. press Enter and close the console.



To disable the experiment, use the same instructions, but replace the code from step 3 with this one:



document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();



{ via Rubén }

HTTPS-Only YouTube

I'm not sure if this is really new, but I remember that YouTube only redirected logged-in users to the HTTPS site. Now YouTube redirects everyone to the HTTPS site. I visited YouTube's homepage, a random YouTube channel and a video in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and YouTube quickly redirected to the corresponding SSL URL.

The mobile YouTube site still uses HTTP by default, but you can manually change the URL to https://m.youtube.com.