“Microsoft Monday” takes a look back at the past week of news related to Microsoft. This week, “Microsoft Monday” includes details about Windows 10 Anniversary Update problems, the acquisition of Genee, a new program where you will be paid to use Microsoft Edge, the availability of a OneNote Importer tool for Mac users that are switching from Evernote, a new Surface Pro 4 commercial and more!
Windows 10 Anniversary Update Is Reinstalling Apps That Were Removed
Windows 10 updates have been consistently causing problems in terms of handling software applications. For example: When the Windows 10 November Update rolled out, some applications were removed from user computers without authorization. Now the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is reinstalling bundled apps that were uninstalled previously, according to BetaNews.
This may not be a major inconvenience because the app removal process is fairly simple. But this issue can be upsetting for users that have been actively reducing clutter from their PCs. You can uninstall an app by right-clicking on it from the Start menu and hitting “uninstall.”
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has been causing:
Windows 10 Anniversary Update Is Breaking Millions Of Web Cameras
Over the weekend, Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly reported via Thurrott that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is breaking millions of web cameras. This bug has affected a wide variety of web cameras. And many Skype users pointed out that their web cameras are freezing up during use as well.
In a Microsoft support forum, there were representatives from many companies that discussed the implications of the web camera bug: “After spending days finding a solution we also stuck with the Anniversary update. Thousands of our customers can’t use our product now to process their payments by e-banking! We and especially our customers – which are your customers too – are really reliant on MJPEG!!” said a user in the forum.
The Anniversary Update essentially caused the support for webcams connected through USB — which uses the MJPEG or H.264 encode streams — to stop working. In the support forum, Microsoft admitted to the problem and said a fix is being worked on.
So what caused this problem? Here is what Mike M of the Windows Camera Team said in the forum:
“One of the main reasons that Windows is decoding MJPEG for your applications is because of performance. With the Anniversary Update to Windows 10, it is now possible for multiple applications to access the camera in ways that weren’t possible before. It was important for us to enable concurrent camera access, so Windows Hello, Microsoft Hololens and other products and features could reliably assume that the camera would be available at any given time, regardless of what other applications may be accessing it. One of the reasons this led to the MJPEG decoding is because we wanted to prevent multiple applications from decoding the same stream at the same time, which would be a duplicated effort and thus an unnecessary performance hit. This can be even more noticeable or perhaps trigger error cases on in-market devices with a hardware decoder which may be limited on how many decodes can take place simultaneously. We wanted to prevent applications from unknowingly degrading the user experience due to a platform change.”
The fix for the problem is expected to arrive in September. Fortunately Rafael Rivera found a workaround until then:

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